Alison Knowles first published the score for The Identical Lunch in the last issue of The Outsider, a primarily Beat literary magazine published in small batches by Gypsy Lou and Jon Edgar Webb of the Loujon Press in New Orleans. Knowles’s text is joined by the work of colleagues Allan Kaprow, Dick Higgins, Jackson Mac Low, and Emmett Williams, but the more numerous texts by Beat writers in the issue strike an instructive counterpoint to Knowles’s quasi-objective and seemingly systematic reporting. While the Beat writers similarly dwell on everyday life in artist enclaves and working-class neighborhoods, they do so in a lyrical and markedly subjective way. See “Journal of the Identical Lunch,” The Outsider 2, no. 4/5 (Winter 1968/69): 182–84.
© Alison Knowles.
