A stimulating piece in the New Statesman on William S Burroughs' Naked Lunch to mark the novel's 50th birthday. By Duncan Fallowell, natch. Click here. He writes: "At a time when gay people are very visible but homosexuality has been ring-fenced, Burroughs’s erotic explosions still wrong-foot many of his so-called fans."
My favourite bit of the book, which I now feel I once read before it was written, is the talking arsehole. And a question is asked in its dizzying text if I recall correctly: Can you laugh and come at the same time? Answer: Most definitely. Madame should know.
It tickles me that Burroughs believed in an afterlife - always underplayed by fashionable literary atheists - and was a proponent of anti-authority Chaos (or Xaos) Magic. This interview in 1987, when he was 75, is worth reading, click here. A sample:
Q: If you believe there’s an afterlife, wouldn’t it make this life less important?
Not necessarily, it would make it more important, much more important. Because what you do now will determine what form your afterlife will take. What one does right now is the way one does everything. And if you’re not taking, as it were, advantages of educational opportunities here, you’re going to be in a much worse position.
Do you find meaning in this life?
Everything means something. You walk down the street and you see something, that’s because you were there at that particular time and that has a meaning for you. A found meaning. I think anyone who doesn’t believe in ESP just hasn’t opened his eyes. Good god, ‘cause it happens all the time. It’s not an unusual occurrence that happens to a few people, it happens all the time. Anybody good at anything uses it.
Kathy Acker's interview with Burroughs on his montages and writings
22 comments:
If Burroughs believed in the afterlife that proves it's an hallucination.
Atheism is just a passing faith. An infantile delusion. x
I swear you make these things up.
No wonder you remember the talking arsehole. You've modelled yourself on this.
Yeah, Burroughs said it would simplify matters to have one all-purpose hole that did everything. Shit, talk, eat, take cock etc. What a genius.
Talking arsehole? Deja vu. Diderot published "Les Bijoux indiscrets" in 1748.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Indiscreet_Jewels
Thank-you for flagging my article, Madame. It gives me a chance to say that I did not describe the Sergeant Pepper cover as a work of genius but the album itself. A copy editor chose to present it otherwise. Insubordinate copy editors have given me more anguish than all my lovers put together. They should be shafted, shot and fed to hyaenas.
with best wishes, Duncan Fallowell
Always a pleasure, Duncan. You should have your own magazine and it should be called Fallowell's. Has a ring to it. I'm sure Arcatistes will agree. I plant this thought-seed in the rich humus of this blog.
As for sub-editors, they are not long for this world. Their ruthless envy of practising writers has brought nothing but woe to the periodicals that deludedly employ them. They do nothing but think up fiendish ways of sabotaging written works. I hate to think of what they will become in the next world. Slippery ice puddles?
how topical!
A piece by US forensic psychiatrist Robert M. Kaplan in a Murdoch newspaper titled "A talent for lies and abuse" rips into Michael Jackson and apart from making the odd claim that Jacko was
" perpetuating a lie of such magnitude that only Joseph Goebbels would have approved" concludes Jackson was "living a lifestyle that would have nauseated even William S.Burroughs"
Kaplan, author of Medical Murder: Disturbing Cases of Doctors Who Kill. (from personal experience ?)must never have met Burroughs as I did in New York in the 1980's.
He took up with a young friend of mine and said "I think I'll add him to my collection of twinkies", an act Jackson would surely have approved of.
But perhaps it was a different Burroughs.
An evolved sub-editor grows up to become a section editor at no-News un-International. Really hating on them at the moment.
Can't believe you left me hi-and-dry last night. You wicked teasing old tart Darling MA.
David Cronenberg's film of Naked Lunch has a fabulous soundtrack from Ornette Coleman
I can recommend the film Gonzo just out on DVD - about another wonderful wild weirdo intellectual, Hunter Thompson.
Dear Veritas, is it true Burroughs used to collect boys around Piccadilly Circus? Ican't imagine what he did with these waifs and strays (most of them future lawyers most probably).
Dear Farah (!) I told you I was on the BBC World Service (talking about newspaper phone taps and the like) and then I had to go to bed. When you reach my age the wonder is that one can get up in the morning let alone disrobe for sleep.
Dear Anon, I don't care for any of Cronenberg's films but I'll have a listen again to the soundtrack.
Perhaps I should do an astrological analysis of these druge-fuelled modernists. I'm not interested in merely taking their work as presented.
Oh and Veritas, did Burroughs ever talk about magic with you? It's important we focus on this aspect of his thinking before the atheists claim him as their godless messiah ....
You know how fundamentalist atheists are.
Duncan Fallowell's account of his visit to William Burroughs in Kansas is printed in the Penguin Book of Interviews (edited by Christopher Silvester). In it, re the Burroughs period in London, Fallowell asked him 'Did you use the Piccadilly boys?' and Burroughs replied 'Certainly. Who wouldn't?'
I can't say I was a friend Of Burrough's Madame A. but he was friends with a group of us who would go to the Ninth Circle in the Village but he always had a nice young lad in tow, most who seemed to be new in town, wide-eyed and innocent.
Never met him in London but as the Ninth Circle would have given Picaddilly Circus a run for it's money I'm quite sure he would have gravitated there.
Mind you, from what I heard he was perpetually broke and lived off the kindness of friends.
So often the case with novelists, broke.
I very much doubt someone like Martin Amis id broke...
Ooops, IS broke, of course. You're allowed to publish my comment without the typo. :-)
Oh no, I don't believe in censorship ...
... But censorship believes in you. ;-)
Post a Comment