The Ticket That Exploded

[Benny Bunter]

Was reading an excerpt of Comte de Lautreamont's Maldoror last night that I have in an anthology, and it reminded me of the more horrible parts of Burroughs. Not quite as extreme, but somehow more off-putting than WSB though. Leaves you feeling dirty and soiled.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Was reading an excerpt of Comte de Lautreamont's Maldoror last night that I have in an anthology, and it reminded me of the more horrible parts of Burroughs. Not quite as extreme, but somehow more off-putting than WSB though. Leaves you feeling dirty and soiled.

Isn't there a bit in that book where he imagines himself bumming the universe?

Edit: guess you might not have read that bit if it's only an excerpt.

 

[version]

... somehow more off-putting than WSB though.

It's because it's French.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Isn't there a bit in that book where he imagines himself bumming the universe?

Edit: guess you might not have read that bit if it's only an excerpt.

Lol, I dunno but apparently he fucks a shark at some point according to Wikipedia.

 

[version]

Is nothing sacred?!

 

[Mr. Tea]

It's because it's French.

The true perpetrators of 9/11. Just ask Craner.

 

[version]

There's a lot of splitting in two in this book, much moreso than the others. He's talked about blood-temperature water dissolving the boundaries of a body in other books, but he keeps bringing up this image of a body splitting down the middle and things getting inside it or slathering goo all over it and absorbing it.

The book seems to get softer and more biological as it progresses too. Everything was very hard and metallic at the start, now it's all liquid and porous, lots of melting and dissolving, lots of flesh.

 

[Benny Bunter]

There's a lot of splitting in two in this book, much moreso than the others. He's talked about blood-temperature water dissolving the boundaries of a body in other books, but he keeps bringing up this image of a body splitting down the middle and things getting inside it or slathering goo all over it and absorbing it.

"There are no good relationships - There are no good words - I wrote silences -"

"My God what a mess - The difficulty is with two halves - other parasites will invade sooner or later - First it's symbiosis, then parasitism - The old symbiosis con - Sew him up nurse" -

 

[Benny Bunter]

I haven't really unravelled it but it surely has a lot to do with his homosexuality and squeamishness about women.

 

[version]

There was a time when he claimed the biological separation of the sexes was a mistake and that in the future they would, and should, merge.

 

[version]

I haven't really unravelled it but it surely has a lot to do with his homosexuality and squeamishness about women.

It's the fold-ins again too. He's applying the textual technique to the body, splitting it down the middle and moving the sides around, exchanging them, putting one inside the other. He talks about using two tape decks too, playing them alongside one another, cutting between them. It's all the same thing.

 

[Mr. Tea]

I haven't really unravelled it but it surely has a lot to do with his homosexuality and squeamishness about women.

Yeah, there are very few mentions of women but when they are mentioned, they seem to be sinister or threatening in some way.

He was married, of course, twice in fact if I'm not mistaken. Though he did, uh, kill one of them, so there's that.

 

[Mr. Tea]

There's a lot of splitting in two in this book, much moreso than the others. He's talked about blood-temperature water dissolving the boundaries of a body in other books, but he keeps bringing up this image of a body splitting down the middle and things getting inside it or slathering goo all over it and absorbing it.

On one of the handful of times when I've smoked salvia, I had the distinct impression of my spine being unzipped and the two halves of my body floating off in different directions.

 

[version]

Celan

When I was having a look at him the other day, some of his titles struck me as quite Burroughs.

'Language Mesh'
'Line the Wordcaves'

 

[Mr. Tea]

On one of the handful of times when I've smoked salvia, I had the distinct impression of my spine being unzipped and the two halves of my body floating off in different directions.

Which reminds me of a great Burroughs anecdote from when he was studying in Mexico. It makes more sense if you know that he had a very strong aversion to - bordering on phobia of - centipedes, and I'm sure the ones you get in the tropics are really massive. (There's that brilliant passage in Naked Lunch about the "dead-end horror of the Centipede God".)

Anyway, he hated them so much that he lashed a knife to the end of a stick that he took with him everywhere so he could kill any than he came across. One day he was walking down a narrow path in a more or less jungle-like area and an especially huge centipede ran out across the path in front of his feet. He slashed at it twice, cutting it into three pieces, which all then scuttled off in different directions into the undergrowth.

 

[version]

I haven't really unravelled it but it surely has a lot to do with his homosexuality and squeamishness about women.

Always found this line from Queer quite sad along those lines:

Now he was in a bamboo tenement. An oil lamp lit a woman's body. Lee could feel desire for the woman through the other's body. "I'm not queer," he thought. "I'm disembodied."

 

[version]

Which reminds me of a great Burroughs anecdote from when he was studying in Mexico. It makes more sense if you know that he had a very strong aversion to - bordering on phobia of - centipedes, and I'm sure the ones you get in the tropics are really massive. (There's that brilliant passage in Naked Lunch about the "dead-end horror of the Centipede God".)

Anyway, he hated them so much that he lashed a knife to the end of a stick that he took with him everywhere so he could kill any than he came across. One day he was walking down a narrow path in a more or less jungle-like area and an especially huge centipede ran out across the path in front of his feet. He slashed at it twice, cutting it into three pieces, which all then scuttled off in different directions into the undergrowth.

There's a guy I and a few of the younger Americans know who used to live in the Caribbean and said they had centipedes like that over there and that people would smash them with cinder blocks then cut them up with scissors to make sure they were dead.

 

[Mr. Tea]

There's a guy I and a few of the younger Americans know who used to live in the Caribbean and said they had centipedes like that over there and that people would smash them with cinder blocks then cut them up with scissors to make sure they were dead.

You then have to cut their hearts out and bury them at a crossroads to prevent them from coming back from beyond the grave.

It's fiddly work because they have like 20 hearts each.

 

[version]

I don't like killing things, but I do feel the horror of the centipede. I remember seeing a nightmarish clip of someone dropping a giant one in a tank with a mouse.

 

[version]

Yeah, there are very few mentions of women but when they are mentioned, they seem to be sinister or threatening in some way.

ancient evil odors on the trade winds — bottled female smells in corridors of silence —