the WILLIAM SEWARD BURROUGHS thread

V

version

Well-known member
version said:
Reading The Yage Letters: Redux now. So far it's Burroughs the bumbling white man getting sick, getting hustled and saying obnoxious things about South Americans.
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It picked up a bit and it was interesting to spot the bits and pieces that made their way into the later books, but not one of his best; Ginsberg's contributions in particular were a real chore to get through.

Onto The Wild Boys now and, barring the fixation on young boys, it's one of his best. A more elegant, ethereal Naked Lunch.
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
version said:
He has a go at Christian anti-vaxxers in the one I'm reading atm, but I can't help picturing him going full crank in response to vaccines and lockdown re: COVID. That whole period feels like it was conjured out of his nightmares.
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He'd have had such a field day with COVID

IMG_20230626_221100.jpg
 
WashYourHands

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
B23 too. Is it NE with the nod to vaccines and a routine where a clucking addict Dr is examining a naked boy covered in an engineered ailment, who subsequently jizzes in his face, wrecks his fix and sniggers

The volume of jizz does bleed from text to text
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
WashYourHands said:
B23 too. Is it NE with the nod to vaccines and a routine where a clucking addict Dr is examining a naked boy covered in an engineered ailment, who subsequently jizzes in his face, wrecks his fix and sniggers

The volume of jizz does bleed from text to text
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Don't remember that bit. There isn't actually all that much weird sex stuff in NE apart from one chapter near the end.
 
V

version

Well-known member
Having recently read four in a row, currently reading a fifth, he's not actually as samey as you feel he is when you aren't reading him. He has his voices, themes and fixations, but there are differences in technique and tone between the books, different settings, characters and perspectives. They're deliberately blurred in some respects, what with material being recycled, cut-up and folded in across his bibliography, but reading Nova Express is a different experience to reading The Wild Boys or even The Soft Machine.
 
V

version

Well-known member
There's something I really like about the lack of commas. There's a great James Ellroy piece on Dashiell Hammett I've posted here before titled 'The poet of collision' and that phrase comes to mind when I read those Burroughs sentences, the adjectives hammering into each other in the absence of punctuation.

The Word broken pounded twisted exploded in smoke -
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
i don't use many commas these days either. it does do something interesting to the sentence i think.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
one of the things i can do is it can create a kind of equal emphasis between words. it depends how you use it. but you can kind of democraticse the sentence or something so that words just flash in their own space, all equally bright
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
i knew craner would come along and say something like that. commas are very dear to him.
 
V

version

Well-known member
What about the dreaded semicolon? I still don't quite know the proper usage. I just think of them as an outlandish comma, I suppose.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
version said:
What about the dreaded semicolon? I still don't quite know the proper usage. I just think of them as an outlandish comma, I suppose.
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no one really understands that stuff. i think i asked on here and no one knew.
 
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