the WILLIAM SEWARD BURROUGHS thread

Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
version said:
I dunno who coined it, but he often gets the credit. It comes up a bunch of times in The Soft Machine.
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I think it's to do with a Lester Bangs article about Black Sabbath where he quotes from from Hassan's Last Words, I knew I'd seen that "sell the ground from unborn feet forever" line somewhere before.
 
V

version

Well-known member
poetix said:
There's a preface to Junky written by an associate of Burroughs's - might even have been Ginsberg, I'm not sure - which says something along the lines of "his emotional self-discipline makes even the liberties he takes seem justifiable". In other words, some people are grown-up enough or together enough or self-aware enough or whatever it is to get away with being amoral, because somehow even the worst misdeeds don't compromise their fundamental spiritual integrity.
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It's interesting because I simultaneously agree with this and with there being something juvenile about his fixation on spies, weapons, diseases and the like. He's somehow able to occupy both the elderly gentleman and the teenage boy.
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Despite the blitzkrieg nature of their sound, Black Sabbath are moralists. Like Bob Dylan, like William Burroughs, like most artists trying to deal with a serious present situation in an honest way. They are not on the same level of profundity, perhaps; they are certainly much less articulate, subject to the ephemerality of rock, but they are a band with a conscience who have looked around them and taken it upon themselves to reflect the chaos in a way that they see as positive. By now they’ve taken some tentative steps toward offering alternatives.

In his book The Making of a Counter Culture, Theodore Roszak suggested that given the current paucity of social leaders worth investing even a passing hope in, the coalition made up of the young and the free-form wing of the Left should turn to the ancient notion of the shaman, the holy madman whose prescriptions derived not from logic or think-tanks or even words sometimes, but an extraordinarily acute perception of the flux of the universe. Well, we’ve reaped Roszak’s script in spades by now, there’s a shaman slouching on every corner and tinhorn messiahs are a dime a dozen. Some are "political" and some are "mystical" and some are building their kingdoms on a "cosmic" stew of both, and each seems to have his little cadre of glaze-orbed acid casualties proselytizing for him.

Then there are also the cultural shamans, Dylan being the supreme artifact. Burroughs too, of course, and his "Hassan i Sabbah" is nothing more than a particularly malevolent form of shaman, while the "Nova Police" are the benevolent regulation agency out to save the universe from addiction and control. Burroughs has been one of the foremost moralists in American literature; his work amounts to a demonology for our times, portraying the forces currently threatening our planet’s survival as evil gods operating from without.
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
I suppose at first it's counter-intuitive to think of Burroughs as a moralist, cos he obviously didn't live his life that way, but it rings true about his work being a "demonology for our times". He was arguably more moral than the people who tried to ban his books, and the same probably goes for Joyce.
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
You can also see how far ahead Burroughs was of the 60s counterculture by his influence on rock music (Bowie, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, NY punk, Industrial etc) only really taking hold in the 70s, long after the hippy peace and love thing had passed and grim reality set in again.
 
V

version

Well-known member
Benny B said:
I suppose at first it's counter-intuitive to think of Burroughs as a moralist,
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I sometimes feel labeling a writer a moralist is the critic looking to square a positive response to someone dealing in the immoral.

I tried running with the argument Ellroy's a moralist on here a while back talking to Web, but I'm not entirely convinced. His fixations make sense given his biography, but I also think some writers have a morbid curiosity and enjoy the gutter and that doesn't have to be shaped into something virtuous. It just is what it is.

That being said, I can see the argument for Burroughs as a moralist.
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
version said:
I sometimes feel labeling a writer a moralist is the critic looking to square a positive response to someone dealing in the immoral.

I tried running with the argument Ellroy's a moralist on here a while back talking to Web, but I'm not entirely convinced. His fixations make sense given his biography, but I also think some writers have a morbid curiosity and enjoy the gutter and that doesn't have to be shaped into something virtuous. It just is what it is.

That being said, I can see the argument for Burroughs as a moralist.
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Yeah it's impossible to unpick and separate all this stuff, the life from the work etc, especially someone like Burroughs who had all these different characters and personas, but I think his moralism as a writer lies in his honesty, if that makes any sense, which is virtuous in itself.

He obviously did have a morbid curiosity with the gutter but I've never got the feeling he was 'enjoying' it or glorifying it. He makes you laugh, but that's not the same thing.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Benny B said:
Despite the blitzkrieg nature of their sound, Black Sabbath are moralists. Like Bob Dylan, like William Burroughs, like most artists trying to deal with a serious present situation in an honest way. They are not on the same level of profundity, perhaps; they are certainly much less articulate, subject to the ephemerality of rock, but they are a band with a conscience who have looked around them and taken it upon themselves to reflect the chaos in a way that they see as positive. By now they’ve taken some tentative steps toward offering alternatives.

In his book The Making of a Counter Culture, Theodore Roszak suggested that given the current paucity of social leaders worth investing even a passing hope in, the coalition made up of the young and the free-form wing of the Left should turn to the ancient notion of the shaman, the holy madman whose prescriptions derived not from logic or think-tanks or even words sometimes, but an extraordinarily acute perception of the flux of the universe. Well, we’ve reaped Roszak’s script in spades by now, there’s a shaman slouching on every corner and tinhorn messiahs are a dime a dozen. Some are "political" and some are "mystical" and some are building their kingdoms on a "cosmic" stew of both, and each seems to have his little cadre of glaze-orbed acid casualties proselytizing for him.

Then there are also the cultural shamans, Dylan being the supreme artifact. Burroughs too, of course, and his "Hassan i Sabbah" is nothing more than a particularly malevolent form of shaman, while the "Nova Police" are the benevolent regulation agency out to save the universe from addiction and control. Burroughs has been one of the foremost moralists in American literature; his work amounts to a demonology for our times, portraying the forces currently threatening our planet’s survival as evil gods operating from without.
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Loved this bit:
"We never have been into Black Magic. But one time, just to get a break, we decided to do a thing because it’s never been done before—the crosses and all that, that black mass on the stage, but we didn’t intend it to be a thing where you go onstage in a pair of horns, and yet even now people come up and think we’re going to put a ****ing curse on them. Or if they’re not afraid they think we’re heavy, heavy heads. For instance we did a gig on one of the tours, and after the show we went back to the hotel, and I could hear a lot of feet walking up and down the hall outside, so I went and opened the ****ing door and there’s all these weird people with black candles walking up and down and writing crosses on the doors and things, and they ****ing frightened me, I tell ya. We all blew the candles out and sang 'Happy Birthday,'" he laughs. "They didn’t like that at all."
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woops

woops

is not like other people
i was looking at a copy of Andy Warhol diaries in a cafe the other day and there was a photo of them together in there though he's only mentioned fleetingly in the text
 
V

version

Well-known member
version said:
The Soft Machine
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Some of the additional material in this edition's brilliant. There's a big chunk from the first version (1961) which was apparently the most extreme form of the book - the later ones having been revised for accessibility - that's incredible.

Motor scooter wings along the rubble road of sputtering arc lights. Nettles, mud wall, Indians shit in rows. Vultures fight for fish heads and tear entrails from other mouths in air, pink eyes pulsing carrion hunger. . .

Patios and porticos littered with flops. An old man with white beard sleeps on the red tile floor, his temple pulsing in the violent dusk. On the Brass and Copper Street purple twilight. Faces of scarred metal. Copper youths spit bloody crystals from rotting lungs. Black gauze feelers on control spots of sex. Touched the head of an Indian boy. Fur of plaintive rodent. Whistling on an empty plain. Vulture wings husk in the dry sound of insects. Giant centipedes in cocoons of black gauze. Green crab people in the broken stellae. Neon claws swept out in the blast of morning by an old junky coughing and spitting in the sick dawn. Blue morning blast. Stale sheets stained with crab time shit. Manipulated spasm serving the brain photo of sex. Scorpion men in tight black suits. Tattoo needle stings etch the frozen spine with cuneiform songs of the centipede goddess. Flickers from every eye. Lighting red pagodas and copper domes. The phosphorescent metal excrement and fatal spasms of the city: (a sleeping youth hanged in wet dream. Bones sucked out by the crab guards). Boy chrysalis in cobwebs of rancid jissom. Brain-eating birds patrol the iron streets. Porticos. Plazas of red tile where brass statues twist in metal combat. Tortured centuries. Copper youths stalk the centipede men. Spitting needles from eyes blue and cold as cocaine crystal. Red nitrous fumes sear the aching lungs of screaming larval peoples clawing at crab parts. In red clay cubicles over a swamp of warm mud bubbles coal gas. The spine cylinder turns crystal locks of ejaculation. Penis flesh invades the face. Withers arm-legs to vestigial insect members. Centipede legs thru the diseased purple flesh. Monster crustaceans boil in black mushroom clouds of West. Fade out to green mist and lichen on ancient rock of Marwan. Under the static red sky.

It's interesting there are no em dashes and only one instance of an ellipsis given the later editions are full of them. The colour thing's really heavy though, lots of reds and blues.

The description of that edition in the intro's really exciting. Shame it's a collector's item now and probably costs a ton.

The 1961 Soft Machine mixes elliptical episodes of science fiction fantasy with ethnographic travelogue, repetitious sex scenes, pulp genre parodies, and a variety of unclassifiable and uncompromising language experiments. The text is so relentlessly bizarre that it seems simultaneously
impossible to read and yet - unlike the second and third editions, where the reader is left confused by non-narrative sections - not in the least frustrating. Instead of a narrative scenario, it is dominated by long image-lists (redolent of, and sometimes cutting up, the prose poems of Rimbaud and St. John Perse) that depict toxic landscapes - swamps, jungles, canals, rotting cities of concrete pillars and bamboo bridges - and whirling machinery - penny arcades, Ferris wheels, pinball machines, cable cars, elevators. Ginsberg described it as "page after page of heroic sinister prose poetry." Although the polluted wastelands clearly develop out of Naked Lunch , the dominance of South American locations and the recurrent use of Spanish signals Burroughs' vision of a new global colonialism, the planet's occupation by an alien empire: Trak Utilities - the dominant corporation in The Soft Machine, precursor of the Nova Mob in Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded - extends the imperial ambitions of sixteenth-century Conquistadors from the New World to the whole of reality. ("You can't walk out on Trak," Burroughs would clarify for the revised text; "There's just no place to go.")
 
V

version

Well-known member
I think Harris is right about sticking the narrative sections in later editions actually making it more rather than less frustrating as you're made aware there is a story in there somewhere.
 
V

version

Well-known member
Some good phrases popping up in the appendices.

Cop face of scarred iron.

Ejaculated dream wind over a swamp of war mud.

Cocaine glass and insect cops serving the black message.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
version said:
I think Harris is right about sticking the narrative sections in later editions actually making it more rather than less frustrating as you're made aware there is a story in there somewhere.
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Ha, this would be the Burroughs expert with the same name as me, I take it.
 
DLaurent

DLaurent

Well-known member
Never read the whole things but that goes for so many books. You can just pick out passages and think wow. I think it's Nova Express that has the genital scanning passage.
 
V

version

Well-known member

William Burroughs’ 10 Favorite Novels​

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Process, Brion Gysin
The Satyricon, Petronius
In Youth Is Pleasure, Denton Welsh
Two Serious Ladies, Jane Bowles
The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles
Under Western Eyes, Joseph Conrad
Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Querelle of Brest, Jean Genet
The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works, Thomas Nashe
 
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