Benny Bunter
Well-known member
They're deliberately ambiguous at least.
The Ticket That Exploded
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- a series of oblique references baggy bumhole due to heroin blue notes of pan can't even con can't even hustle cool mineral silence cuntsville usa diseased metal drumbeats of ghost people fish boy garden of delights hypnotizing chickens i wrote silences it's a sick picture b.j. knees up to the chin meme falling open shirt flapping picking up junkies for bum sex rectal mucus silence to say good bye smoke up the path something called love the final ape of history the happy cloak the japanese sandman the other half there are no good words what you need will hollywood never learn? word falling photo falling writing machine
woops
is not like other people
The whole thing stinks if you ask me. I've seen that line selectively quoted (in the introduction to the WB reader I think) as "Love. What there is." - an example of the disgraceful practice of posthumous editing. Seems "convenient"that WB typed "what" instead of "that".
While I'm on the subject that first exquisite corpse the Surrealists wrote always seems a bit fishy too. "The exquisite corpse / will drink / the new wine" - Just as well they didn't have him drinking the old hat or whatever
While I'm on the subject that first exquisite corpse the Surrealists wrote always seems a bit fishy too. "The exquisite corpse / will drink / the new wine" - Just as well they didn't have him drinking the old hat or whatever
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
I'm sure he did go soft, in fact I hope he did for his sake. Still, the "most natural painkiller" is a pretty funny way of defining love, and it can still fit in with his earlier outlook. "The most natural" sort of implies it's not actually fully natural, and 'painkiller' implies numbingness. Surely it's supposed to be ambiguous and ironic, as well as genuinely touching. Good last lines.
version
Well-known member
The whole thing stinks if you ask me. I've seen that line selectively quoted (in the introduction to the WB reader I think) as "Love. What there is." - an example of the disgraceful practice of posthumous editing. Seems "convenient"that WB typed "what" instead of "that".
While I'm on the subject that first exquisite corpse the Surrealists wrote always seems a bit fishy too. "The exquisite corpse / will drink / the new wine" - Just as well they didn't have him drinking the old hat or whatever
Yeah, not hard to picture those hangers-on he had around him in his later years carefully curating his legacy.
version
Well-known member
Also that he still thought of it as some sort of narcotic, presumably that one could become controlled by and hooked on.
Reminds me of this from Gravity's Rainbow:
The American vice of modular repetition, combined with what is perhaps our basic search: to find something that can kill intense pain without causing addiction.
“Results have not been encouraging. We seem up against a dilemma built into Nature, much like the Heisenberg situation. There is nearly complete parallelism between analgesia and addiction. The more pain it takes away, the more we desire it. It appears we can’t have one property without the other, any more than a particle physicist can specify position without suffering an uncertainty as to the particle’s velocity—”
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
Yeah, however you read that quote, it's still a negative definition of love as absence of pain, not much different from his earlier outlook.
version
Well-known member
There is, or was, a rumour Burroughs had been working on an autobiography called Evil River but nobody seems to know whether he ever really got started on it or what exists of it if he did. Good title though. Apparently he got it from St. John Perse, but there's no evidence Perse ever wrote it and it may actually be from a book on the American occupation of Germany after WWII.
There's this line from his intro. to Queer too:
“When I started to write this companion text to Queer, I was paralyzed with a heavy reluctance, a writer’s block like a straitjacket: ‘I glance at the manuscript of Queer and feel I simply can’t read it. My past was a poisoned river from which one was fortunate to escape.'”
There's this line from his intro. to Queer too:
“When I started to write this companion text to Queer, I was paralyzed with a heavy reluctance, a writer’s block like a straitjacket: ‘I glance at the manuscript of Queer and feel I simply can’t read it. My past was a poisoned river from which one was fortunate to escape.'”
Evil River – RealityStudio
A Burroughs Memoir? Evil River If you search for William Burroughs' name on Amazon.com, you'll discover a book that is ...
realitystudio.org
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
There's got to be a bit of tongue in cheek here, I think. Burroughs, of all people, knew that morphine is produced by the opium poppy, and surely nothing is more natural than a plant.
Also, is it splitting hairs to point out that painkillers are not the same as anaesthetics? Hmm, probably.
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
Of course. If that guy was really taking those lines as a straightforwardly sincere and soppy Hallmark card statement about love and therefore some sort of betrayal, he was being pretty simple minded.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Reminds me of these hilarious ads I've seen for "nature's morphine" - or "morphine", as it's also know.
version
Well-known member
The time travel thing and his and Gysin's penchant for alternate histories could resolve this. I wouldn't be surprised to read him postulate the controllers going back through time and retroactively applying the apparatus, like his character in 'The Mayan Caper' going back through to break one.
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
That's brilliant. It's impossible to locate the origin of the system once you bring time travel into it. And once the whole berserk machine is set in motion across time and space it just perpetuates itself - even the controllers don't even remember the point of it all anymore, and are actually very stupid, definitely not criminal masterminds.
Need to go back to soft machine and read the mayan caper again now, I remember it being the outstanding chapter in that book.
Need to go back to soft machine and read the mayan caper again now, I remember it being the outstanding chapter in that book.
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
"Deleuzoguattarian schizoanalysis"
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
I can't read this type of stuff, think I'll stick with Burroughs.
version
Well-known member
Burroughs is much better and a lot of it's built on him anyway, him and William Gibson.
LEMURIAN TIME WAR
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
It totally flies over my head that stuff. I like Oliver Harris on Burroughs though.