William S Burroughs - Search/Destroy

I am going to get around to his later novels that's for sure.

I have some stuff on algha marghen. he had a lovely voice.

I think there's some readings on ESP disk that i have never seen.

i wz going to say "and there the resemblance ends" but i have decided to devote my life to proving that henry james and william burroughs are aesthetically interchangeable

he said (he was seated next to burroughs) that he was appalled and that he couldn't finish the book. burroughs gave him such a look of contempt...dead funny.

Junky - Search and search again. The best intro to his work and a pretty vital account of 50's America.

Queer - The continuation of Junkie. A painfully organic love story, with some vivid descriptions of Mexico City. The interesting thing about this one is it describes events around the death of his wife but never even mentions her name. A man trying to write his way out of emotional pain, basically.

Naked Lunch - I don't think it's his best but it's damn funny and a hell of a ride. Freelandt, Benway, the talking asshole, Annexia, the whole deal. If you can try and find a piece called "Word" too (it's in the collection "Interzone"), it was supposed to be the final chapter but was left out by accident, only found again in the 80's hidden away in someones papers at Chicago university. Somehow thats very Naked Lunch.

Exterminator! - So/so, a bit short but contains some good little routines and if i remember rightly some poetry that's amongst the best cut up stuff.

The Soft Machine - Approach with caution. Not the most out there but baffling on first reading and low on laughs.

The Ticket That Exploded - Approach in a biochemical suit with a pitchfork. Difficult and fragmented. Very possibly totally up its own arse. I do however like the bit where he gets loads of pop lyrics containing the word "love" and mashes them up until they become ludicrous.

The Yage Letters - Cracking account of Bill adrift in South America. The letters are between him and Ginsberg.

Nova Express - Naked Lunch, Ticket and Soft Machine are according to Burroughs "a trilogy". However, this is more like the last two than Lunch is, and it's a lot better than both of them. Probably the easiest entry point to the proper cut up stuff.

The Job - Very interesting collection of interviews. A lot of the best Bill stuff to read is the interviews, where his frequently whacky and always fascinating ideas aren't buried under a pile of cut up text.

The Wild Boys - High on sodomy, low on plot. Seems a bit derivative compared to a lot of his other stuff.

Cities of the Red Night - His best. A beautiful meditation on immortality and death. It follows 2 stories, a Sam Spade and a pirate one, in which the same incidental characters and themes appear. Gradually the whole thing becomes a massive conspiracy / identity swap / end of the world hoo-ha. A lot more focused than anything else and a lot more fun.

The Place of Dead Roads - Sequel to Cities, its mainly about "closure" (hate that fucking word) and death. A wild west gunman is killed in a shootout and then wanders through a dreamworld trying to find his own killer. Good, but too bogged down with description of guns.

The Western Lands - Last in the Cities trilogy. Very emotional and desperate, it's basically Burroughs "trying to write his way out of death". Various characters from his other work wave final goodbyes as the book meanders from scene to scene as unsure and as scared as the old man probably was at that time. Pretty ease to read, but don't expect much out of it unless you've read quite a bit of his other stuff.

The Burroughs File - JESUS! a collection of all his short works from the 70's (Cobblestone Gardens, Streets of Chance etc). Unreadable, wierd, utterly crazed. Best read as a document of a guy who'd completely lost it and actually believed everyone else was an agent from another planet. Yup, Bill lost it totally in the 70's.

The Letters of William Burroughs - A really, really good document of Burroughs transformation from the man who wrote Junkie and Queer to the man who the man who wrote Naked Lunch. Funny and touching, it's largely Burroughs in Tangier on and off smack and pining for Ginberg. A lot better read than most of his fiction.

Interzone - A collection of writings between Junkie and NL. Again a good demonstration of how and why he changed style so much.

AUDIO
Get the album he did with Hiphoprisy. It's a bit of a gem. The Cobain collaboration is okay per se. Dead City Radio is a decent collection too but less together than the Hiphoprisy one.

how bohemian.

In actual fact Joan is Burroughs second wife, his first was a Jewish woman he married to help her flee Nazi Germany. The two split up very quickly and pretty much lost touch.

Burroughs has never explicitly written about Joan, in fact the autobiographical book written about the period in which she was shot does not mention her at all. I think Junky mentions her once in passing, something about her bailing Bill out of jail. Queer is almost like an attempt to re-write that part of his life with that dreadful incident missing.

Joan had problems with benzedrine and speed and probably got more fucked up than anyone during the NY period of the beats, save for Lucien Carr.

Ginsberg described them as a very loving couple, always debating, argueing. He frequently commented on their "similar intellect". Joan gave birth to Burroughs' son Billy whose only two books you can buy packaged together and are a pretty good read.

Other stuff I forgot to mention -

Theres an Arena documentary on Burroughs which is damn good and very funny, if you find the sight of a frail old man showing you around his gun collection funny.

There are various crit books out there of differing merit. The Barry Miles biog is fantastic and a tremendous introduction. The Eric Mottram crit book is great but very involved and very much about the cut up stuff.

Absolutely DESTROY the Victor Bockris book of interviews with Burroughs. Bockris comes over as the second most self righteous twat on the face of the earth, second only to the horror that is Terry Southern. I still want to dig up Southerns corpse and kick the shit out of it for the bilge that comes out of his mouth in that book.

The CBGB's set that adopted Burroughs in the late seventies were a bunch of cunts who thought it'd be hip and cool to re-addict a 60+ year old man to heroin, just so they could say they jacked up with Burroughs. He should've stayed abroad. Cities of the Red Night took nearly a decade to complete as a result. There's a horrific scene with Southern in the Bockris book where Mr. I-Wrote-Easy-Rider brings round a big carrier bag full of prescription drugs to see if Bill can tell him which ones will get him loaded. Ghastly. However the accounts of Lou Reed hanging around with nothing to say and acting like a tit are very funny if you hate Lou Reed as much as I do.

as I recall he also mentions that she hides the junk once and then he slaps her and feels bad abt it. he reflects on it: 'I wish i could stop' or something like that. beautiful scene.

''The CBGB's set that adopted Burroughs in the late seventies were a bunch of cunts who thought it'd be hip and cool to re-addict a 60+ year old man to heroin, just so they could say they jacked up with Burroughs.''

let me second that.

thanks for the recommendation lynskey. but I'll prob have to read it all.

Oh and the paintings. In the 80's Burroughs did some "shotgun art" which I think has got some merit. Basically he'd get a load of wood, scrawl a huge picture of a demon on it with paint and then shoot it with a shotgun. Some of its kinda purdy.

"I'll prob have to read it all".
One of the things with Burroughs is the more you read the more you get out of it. There are numerous injokes and a lot of repeating scenes. "Bicarbonate of soda", "a broad general view of things", "towers open fire", theres loads of them.

Burroughs always referred to himself as a "writer" not a novelist, and a lot of material overlaps from book to book. The novel form is treated with contempt especially around the cut up period where the material becomes very incestuous. Naked Lunch comes with an instruction about how you can dip in at any point and read the chapters in any order. This applies to the majority of his work, dipping in for a page or two at a random point is probably the best way to read it.

Likewise at the end, when he heads off to South America and euphemistically mentions breaking up with the wife.

"When young men wage war against an evil empire of jealous mutants, the population of this modern inferno is afflicted with the epidemic of a radioactive virus."

Maybe the mistake was that I read the Eric Mottram book first and was badly let down when I finally read Naked Lunch and Nova Express.

He gave good interviews, but the books....

i'm trying to read this on the bus right now and i'm glad that i'm not alone in finding it hard-going. i read 'the naked lunch' at university, and i think i got it. i think i get this a bit less, but some of it is literally impossible to parse. one problem i think is typographic uniformity, in the modern editions at least. if the cut-up technique was for real, could that have been better reflected on the page? anyway, i will persevere.

Maybe I should try this. I've just given up on Naked Lunch because I was finding it way too hard going. Maybe I should ditch my bookmark and just randomly open it. Would I enjoy it more?

Naked Lunch is readable, don't be scared if you've not read any Burroughs before - it's pre-cut-up. It tails off into pure imagery at points but the effect is poetic rather than jarring like in Ticket or Soft Machine.

A new edition of Naked Lunch has just been published by Harper as one of their Perennial Modern Classics, I got it the other day. It's been "restored" (spelling and tenses sorted out, order of chapters moved to their original postion and other such editorial work - the original went from green light to press in a matter of weeks and as the manuscript was such a mess it had a few spelling and tense errors - certain small passages got repeated later on and such) The chapter orders are the biggest change - they were in fact mostly random in the original edition as it was printed in France and the printers didn't understand the instructions for the chapter orders, when it came back Burroughs moved one to the end and that was about it.

There's also a few "out-takes", all the appendices it's ever had and biog stuff. Definitely the best edition to get if you're looking to buy it (it's got a white sleeve with a sort of Scarfe-esque illustration on it).

If you're looking to just dip in - try the sections marked Benway, Ordinary Men and Women and Manhattan Serenade first (Manhattan Serenade isn't titled in most editions - look for the section starting "and now a word about the parties of Interzone"). They're the best satire-writ-large bits. Ordinary Men and Women contains the The Man who Taught his Asshole to Talk routine, Benway's just a riot and Manhattan Serenade gives you an outline of the different sides all the Agents work for.

Ticket is quite simply a hard, hard book that just isn't the sum of its parts. It gets called a "dense, difficult text" a lot and you can read into that what you will. To try and explain it a bit - the whole thing is concerned with how people are controlled by their language and attempts to break free from that and "storm the reality studio".

As such it runs into two main problems - how do you, in the medium of text, show people in that struggle? That's what the cut-up is attempting to do, but viewed from the perspective of language and narrative it becomes "dense and difficult" to read. The other problem is that the technology used for a lot of the metaphor has aged and evolved way beyond how it is treated in the text - it was written in the era of the very first home tape recorders, when home audio recording was new (Burroughs' collaborator on the book, Ian Sommerville, was one of the first people to own one). So a lot of the stuff about tape-recorders, the universe as a pre-recorded tape - seem a little cute and naive now. Have a look at this "experimental film" from the same period, which is the same ideas and experiments done with film and look how cute it looks now.

http://www.coastaltown.nildram.co.uk/porl/spare_me_256.rm.ram

Ticket was re-written twice and Burrough said he wasn't happy with it even then, admitting that he took the ideas too far. I think the kindest word you can ascribe to it is "brave".

http://www.theparisreview.com/viewinterview.php/prmMID/4424

Surely a typo? Rather one of their Perineum Modern Cl(ass)ics

Corso: What say you about political conflicts?

Burroughs: Political conflicts are merely surfaced manifestations. If conflicts arise you may certain powers intend to keep this conflict under operation since they hope to profit from the situation. To concern yourself with surface political conflicts is to make the mistake of the bull in the ring, you are charging the cloth. That is what politics is for, to teach you the cloth. Just as the bullfighter teaches the bull, teaches him to follow, obey the cloth.

Corso: Who manipulates the cloth?

Burroughs: Death

Ginsberg: What is death?

Burroughs: A gimmick. It's the time birth death gimmick. Can't go on much longer, too many people are wising up.

Corso: Do you feel there has been a definite change in man's makeup? A new consciousness?

Burroughs: Yes, I can give you a precise answer to that. I feel that the change the mutation in consciousness will occur spontaneously once certain pressures now in operation are removed. I feel that the principal instrument of monopoly and control that prevents expansion of consciousness is the word lines controlling thought feeling and apparent sensory impressions of the human host.

Ginsberg: And if removed, what step?

Burroughs: The forward step must be made in silence. we detach ourselves from word forms-this can be accomplished by substituting for words, letters, concepts, verbal concepts, other modes of expression; for example, color. We can translate word and letter into color (Rimbaud stated that in his color vowels, words quote "words" can be read in silent color.) In other words man must get away from verbal forms to attain the consciousness, that which is there to be perceived at hand.

Corso: How does one take that "forward step," can you say?

Burroughs: Well, this is my subject and is what I am concerned with. Forward steps are made by giving up old armor because words are built into you---in the soft typewriter of the womb you do not realize the word-armor you carry; for example, when you read this page your eyes move irresistibly from left to right following the words that you have been accustomed to. Now try breaking up part of the page like this:

Are there or just we can translate
many solutions for example color word color
in the soft typewriter into
political conflicts to attain consciousness
monopoly and control

Corso: Reading that it seems you end up where you began, with politics and it's nomenclature: conflict, attain, solution, monopoly, control--so what kind of help is that?

Burroughs: Precisely what I was saying---if you talk you always end up with politics, it gets nowhere, I mean man it's strictly from the soft typewriter.

Corso: What kind of advice you got for politicians?

Burroughs: Tell the truth once and for all and shut up forever.

interviews better than writing except seeming t' reach deep imagism (n/h) there is a horrendous lack of superstructure in the worst of his stuff. when he hits with description it's beyond science fiction, hemmingway lick n azz

lol herotica

6;-O9

    Are there         or just we          can translate 

 many solutions               for example color    word color 

         in the soft typewriter                               into

         political conflicts         to attain consciousness 

                              monopoly and control

interviews better than writing except seeming t' reach deep imagism (n/h) there is a horrendous lack of superstructure in the worst of his stuff. when he hits with description it's beyond science fiction, hemmingway lick n azz

It's funny how close both Burroughs and Burroughs commentary come to resembling spam emails.

It's not Burroughs fault at all, but I'm always really irritated by other artists who name-check Burroughs as part of a hip pantheon for instant credibility:

"My influences? Oh - William Burroughs, the Velvet Underground..."

w/e. whoelse hits deeper i mean even if the faggotry is uncharted th motherfucker couldn't see himself. Who hits harder? Should I be learning arabic or spanish

seriously he turns bukowski into a wack bully, and Yeats into a hitormiss as well. Not to fuck w blake mythmongering that i don't understand which has a surtain surficial dullity

Fischer left unpublished a ton of sponteneous spokenword which tramples the entire literary world in a helerious funway jewtrid worldbank new dealers jabbing west bombintheframefallout child work hope they don't repress it 2hard like nixon tapes

It's just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand.

I beat people up ;[

http://salonmedia.vo.llnwd.net/o1/mp3s/pound.mp3

the clash reference

He was better at documenting his own life than writing fiction. Junky, Queer, the diaries and the collected letters are all great. The cut-up stuff more interesting as an idea than in practice. I read he was diagnosed as schizophrenic, which explains all the whacko conspiracy paranoia, I guess.

i'm in a dancing mood

k, this is kind of lazy, but...

could anyone say when the concepts "word virus" and "reality studio" first appeared in the WSB corpus?

ish?

kind of feel that "word virus" is in "naked lunch" but idk it's been a while

"Storm the Reality Studio" is from Nova Express

I'm not totally sure when Word Virus first appeared. It was probably in one of his letters before it was published in a book.
I haven't read that book of letters in a while but I remember it being really good.
Has everyone seen this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUJF6ke1SoE

I used to love Burroughs and still do in theory and personality-wise but really can't be bothered with his books these days, but I guess I enjoyed them at the time. I'm culling my library right now before I move and all of them bar Naked Lunch, Ticket that Exploded, and Junky just hit the sell pile.

thanks for the tips yall

akm i feel that but kinda think regarding them as sacrosanct books you have to read cover-to-cover is Doing Burroughs Wrong. it's how i did it first time, but im gonna read nova express some other way.

yeah otm, no need to stick with the script. it's all cut-up anyway

Anybody know if there's (in print or OOP) a one-volume edition of the Cities/Western Lands trilogy?

never seen one. they're each worth getting separately

Red Night Trilogy is to Burroughs what Sexus/Plexus/Nexus is to Miller

There's never been an omnibus edition of that trilogy. His best fiction imo.

just launched :

http://www.burroughs100.com/index.html

can't remember if i moaned about this elsewhere but the last HarpicCollins editions of Burroughs were horrible - lovely covers but riddled with typos as far as i could tell, which ain't especially helpful with Burroughs of all writers

There's a new Burroughs biography by Barry Miles, over 700 pages long. Has anyone here read Mile's previous book on Burroughs, El Hombre Invisible?

i disagree with lynskey upthread. wild boys isn't derivative, it's a neat distillation. it's true though, there's a lot of sodomy in it.

it is about a band of "wild boys", so might be of interest if you liked the theme of pirate / outlaw cultures in cities of the red night and place of dead roads. it's also interesting because it's a snapshot of transitional period between his cut-up novels and his later work.

Haven't read the earlier Miles book, but just re-read his book autobiographical 'In the Seventies' which has a chapter on Burroughs when he lived in St James, London in the early 70s. Burroughs also makes an appearance in later chapters, including a great description of a dinner party at the Bunker.

It's a really enjoyable book. I particularly liked his eye for humour and absurdity.The chapter on Harry Smith at the Chelsea Hotel was also a highlight for me.

My fave writing about Burroughs is in Paris Interzone by James Campbell, which includes stuff about the Beat Hotel and the Olympia Press edition of Naked Lunch, but is more generally abt post-war Parisian exiles and outsiders.

Fun article by a previous WSB biographer:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ted-morgan/william-s-burroughs-biography_b_1644139.html

There is an exhibition of Burroughs' photos. I suppose it is reasonable to pair it w/Warhol but they also include Lynch.

i did read miles' earlier burroughs book long ago, and don't remember it seeming all that substantial -- i'm guessing the new one is better.

yeah i always got that impression and never picked it up. i ask because his mccartney book was mentioned negatively on the hey jude thread (by you i just noticed).

ted morgan's burroughs book is excellent.

150 pages in, the miles bio is very entertaining. gossipy and anecdotal for sure but well-sourced and -documented afaict.

Centennial of birth tom'w btw

Excellent!

essay w/ info on assorted docufilms

http://www.fandor.com/keyframe/william-burroughs-at-100

so has anyone seen any of these films screening in NYC?

http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/series/42471

my current political mood:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5LHom219cU

Pay. It. All. Back.

A film version of Queer on the way, but I can find no actual trailer - starring Daniel Craig? WTF?

“The fact that Daniel Craig lent himself to a couple of very explicit erotic sequences is a sign of great courage in an era in which these behaviors are still rejected by a significant part of the audience..."

Down to see what it's about.. I remember that book being somewhat narrative and coherent compared to other of his novels

He was in that film about Francis Bacon with Derek Jacobi, so it's not that much of a wtf I think?