william s burroughs: c/d

I also saw 'naked lunch' the movie recently: thought it was really great and you can't go wrong with ornette soloing in the background.

the several books which follow naked lunch were written using "cut-up" techniques: i.e. cutting up pieces of text and drawing them randomly out of a hat to create interesting combinations. other parts were made by "fold-in", folding different pages of text in half and placing them adjacent to form new sentences.

his 80s trilogy (which is far and away his best work) adopts a measured, elegaic tone which is completely distinct from naked lunch. he also relies much more heavily on style appropriation, echoing pulp sci-fi, dimestore westerns, gangster serials, carnival hucksters, traveling salesmen, etc. compare to naked lunch which is pretty much written in one voice (henry miller's)

finally if you're interested in this sort of thing, the development of his political thinking is interesting to trace through the novels.

wild boys has some of his hands-down best satirical writing on postcolonialism.

i thought the trilogy was: soft machine, nova express, ticket that exploded. since they're all cut-up novels. i'd recommend these if you enjoy his spoken word material since lots of it is from these three ("towers open fire", "break through in grey room", etc). reading them as novels is a useless errand, they're more like book-length collections of two or three page long prose poems with recurring characters and a very vague narrative arc. i'd read them one piece at a time (preferably aloud).

cities of the red night + place of dead roads ARE his best stuff, he's got that right.

How is WSB's reputation holding up these days? I increasingly hear people saying that his writing sucks and he's only considered important because of his public persona/biography...I feel like 20 years ago his stock was much higher?

at this point, underrated imo.

he seems well outside of any literary establishment legitimacy and yeah his "underground" cred or whatever seems to have evaporated. to me, his consistent themes - power/control, addiction, non-linearity - seem even more relevant than ever but what do I know

i like his cut up novels because they're incomprehensible. cities of the red night is littered with occult references so you figure the effect had to be intentional. i could give a fuck about his underground cred or any of that drug shit, though, but it makes sense if his "cool cred" is on the wane since glorifying that sorta thing seems like it belongs to a different generation.

i like his cut up novels because they're incomprehensible.

I guess I’m not that keen on incomprehensibility. I tried and failed to embrace the weirdness of "The Ticket That Exploded" a couple of months ago. I wasn’t getting much out of it rather than a general sense of WTF. I didn’t get too far with it until I gave up. The spaceship powered by alien buttsex was pretty funny though.

find it a bit hard to pin a single reputation on him nowadays (for the usual boring reasons – lots more voices audible in the literary argument post-internet), but I haven't come across much against him really. tbh I've got the impression that he's held up well, reputation-wise, in some literary crowds – I think of him as still strong with the beckett/ballard/bataille taste cluster.

otoh my version of the internet might be a bit echo-chamber on that. What sort of ppl are calling him a terrible writer?

There's a kind of American underground that had sainted him (I associate it with Serpent's Tail in the UK, and this anthology) – I feel like that's sunk from my sight (again, from a UK perspective) over recent years. If that's a broader thing, maybe it's related?

It is a complicated reputation tho' – an incredible writer but the records, experimental techniques, ideas, persona are part of what he means or why he's exciting (but the pledge, why I'll go with him, is his prose style).

but the pledge, why I'll go with him, is his prose style

a thousand times yes

i never see anyone talking about him in the shit i read, which is all up on teh art and on weirdo unreadable modernist poetics and the burning desire to be both canonical and radical. maybe he comes off as too much of a nihilist for that sort of headspace?

i did come across his name more often when i was a college student, sort of as someone adjacent to both the beats and to american experimentalist traditions inclusive of stein and cage, but i don't know whether it's just that i was in lol college or that those energies have coalesced around different places now. (cage going strong for sure, i see stein talked about less often now, and i seem to catch mention of robert duncan more now than any proper beats.)

but based on my college reading experiences it literally never occurs to me, 'o i need to read/understand burroughs', and i am afflicted with a sickness that makes me think that about almost everything i have ever read, so that seems significant.

What sort of ppl are calling him a terrible writer?

All the 'middlebrows' who have given their two pennies worth while mulling over the biog.

At the other end of the spectrum Gary Indiana used his review of the biog to attack the MFA writers who haven't 'lived' like Burroughs did.

Probably a separate thread but yes, he is of a band of writers that take on a persona takes over the writing. Mishima is another case in point, at times you can't see the achievement on the page (or the things they talked about on the page) because you can easily take your eyes off it.

i have never read burroughs but i recently read a very old academic book about "cybernetic fiction" that made The Ticket That Exploded sound really interesting so i added it to my amazon wish list where it will probably sit forever.