A few notes on one of my college literary heroes,
William S. Burroughs, who died yesterday,
partly to correct the predictably sappy NPR
piece this a.m.
The only book of his really worth reading is
Naked Lunch. The ones that came after are
somewhat repetitive, not as funny, and even
more disconnected internally. Like Kerouac
(another one-book author in my opinion) his
life is more interesting than most of his
books. Enthusiasts of NL may go on to read
the other books to pick up some very good
bits of writing amidst a mass of incoherence.
NL and WSB were not about drugs or being
a drug addict, but about the more general
topic of control of the self by external forces
(including but not nearly limited to drugs).
Thus much of NL is about totalitarianism,
oppression, and rebellion. The politics are
revolutionary-anarchist -- e.g., "Fifty million
juvenile delinquents hit the streets with
bicycle chains and baseball bats . . . "
The phrase "heavy metal" does come from
WSB's writing but 'heavy-metal' music bears
no resemblance to anything he wrote, said,
or did.
Contrary to NPR, the "cut-up" method of
Burroughs and his friend Brion Gysin (the
latter a mentor of sorts to the Talking Heads)
was not to write pages and scramble them,
but to cut up pages and scramble the pieces.
This is not, however, what was sent to the
publisher. Burroughs would work over the
results. He used the scrambling to get new
ideas. NPR's description is self-evidently
wrong. I defy anybody to 'unscramble' the
pages of any WSB book and get anything
more coherent. Obviously if you wanted
to create new juxtapositions, you wouldn't
scramble pages, but passages, even phrases.
Though dwelling on drug use, all of the
writing is an utter turn-off from drugs, and
thus on that account therapeutic fare for
our youth, if you're willing to set aside all
the frightfully obscene, highly entertaining
sexual material.
If you read NL, read the preface and afterword
too. Norman Mailer's testimony at the obscenity
trial described NL as a "profoundly religious work"
about "the destruction of the soul."
The NL movie was a commendable effort but
sentimentalized the book and its author. As I
believe the director said, paraphrasing, to make
an accurate movie would have cost $50 million
and it would have been banned in every country
in the world. Now that I think of it, "Drugstore
Cowboy" (in which WSB appears) captures the
spirit of the writing somewhat better in its own
way. So do The Sheltering Sky and Barfly (by
and about Paul Bowles and another beat whose
name I'm blanking on).
I could go on, and probably will. To think I could
have spent the past thirty years at this instead of
economics. Shut up.
"Only the dead are neutral."
-- WSB
MBS (e.g., WSB unscrambled)
Interzone
