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The Talking Asshole
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The Talking Asshole Ladies and Gentlemen: For your elucidation and entertainment- a "Naked Lunch". "Naked Lunch" was William S. Burroughs' second published book. He had written "Junky" in the fifties and had got it published as one of those lurid "true confessions" potboilers that came as two novels in one…you read "Junky" and flipped the book over and upside down and got the Confessions of a Teenage Lesbian on the flipside. But probably you'd read about the lesbian first…I know I would have. Burroughs was<b> experimenting </font></b>with a cold, clinical "just the facts, Ma'am" style when writing "Junky". There was no moralizing or lamenting his fate. He simply presented it as it happened. This is Burroughs all over. He felt emotion but he understated it. His cry for help, if it could be called one, was sardonic, cynical and none too fucking hopeful. The facts of being here and being queer and an addict to boot spoke for themselves. He didn't wax poetic. And this stark prose has a horrific effect. It hits you cold and clear. Burroughs continued this in "Naked Lunch"…it is what you have on the end of your fork when your illusions are stripped away and you see what you consume for what it is. There is suppressed emotion in "Naked Lunch". Burroughs' jaundiced eye reveals the horror that he perceives in America, in the world, in the post war world. It's a little bit Henry Miller's "Air Conditioned Nightmare" but expressed in a style like Jackson Pollock or Max Planck. Quantum physics. The book wasn't written like a book, or to be a book. While living in Morocco Burroughs composed reams of vignettes- he called them routines, similar to an earlier work he'd done with Jack Kerouac titled "And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks". An outrageous event told in a crisp and mechanical manner which portrayed the agony of that event far more grimly than hyperbole can do. The book has no real beginning or end. You can start with any routine and read in any order. You can begin in the middle and try to read your way out. But unless you put the book away you can't escape. If you read even a little, good luck putting the book away. Characters are not solid, not static in "Naked Lunch". They won't stay where your brain tries to put them. They have a nasty habit of vanishing just when you feel you've gotten to know them and dislike them and then they magically and inexplicably re-appear later- sometimes as themselves, and sometimes as new entities. There is Steely Dan II the steam powered dildo, invented by a bull dyke…Steely Dan I blew up in a tragic and messy explosion. There is a grisly and perverse execution routine complete with ejaculating victims which exposes capital punishment for the perverse and grisly abuse of power that it is…and the sexual thrill that the powerful derive from it. Burroughs: "I feel that what we call love is largely a fraud- a mixture of sentimentality and sex that has been systematically degraded and vulgarized by the virus of power." Burroughs: "Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk?" It was a sound you could smell. The guy was a ventriloquist with a carnival, and he invented the routine as a novelty act. After a while, as it caught on, he didn't even write material- he'd just walk on stage and talk back and forth with his asshole, and they ad libbed the whole act. But after a while, he couldn't shut the asshole up- it grew teeth and chewed through his pants and ranted and raved and bitched up and down the street. And it got drunk too. And the guy couldn't stop it, and couldn't control it. Eventually his own mouth sealed over and the asshole did all the talking, and pretty soon did all the thinking as well. But it needed his eyes. The asshole couldn't get along without his eyes. But it had shut off the brain and soon no signals were able to transmit. In the end the brain died and the light went out in the eyes. The act was finished. It's a painful and disgusting book, lady, stark and unforgiving, but true. It's all a true story. Become a member now and get a free tote bag. |
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I LIKED Burroughs. There's no love expressed in his work....he won't admit it into his vocabulary let alone his writing and I think he wouldn't admit it into his thoughts. So I don't always agree with him- he's contradictory and coldly intellectual and contrary. But he can make you see what he saw, and it ain't pretty. Burroughs is Bosch and Pollock and Munch in the language of Bohr and a county coroner. I think he's one of the most essential writers of the last century, OF his time and yet far ahead of his time. Oppenheimer quoted when he witnessed the first A-bomb but Burroughs created a new and different way of expressing the horror of it all. Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
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This is positively eerie... This past Thursday evening I pulled my rather dusty copy of "Naked Lunch" off the shelves to share the Dr. Benway lavatory operating scene with a friend... at one point, I probably could have done that whole part by heart. It's among the funniest in the book. I think Burroughs read this bit aloud on a very, VERY early broadcast of Saturday Night Live. Video of this should be out there: It's worth tracking down. Still... after not having touched Naked Lunch in a decade or so, having my interaction and this is beyond weird. Something in the zeitgeist is leading us back to the Interzone... P.S. Burroughs's essay "Testimony Concerning A Sickness" is one of the best, sanest collection of thoughts regarding preventing addition in society ever written. It's available online,. The key two paragraphs regarding eliminating societal problems of addiction come in the middle: "If you wish to alter or annihilate a pyramid of numbers in a serial relation, you alter or remove the bottom number. If we wish to annihilate the junk pyramid, we must start with the bottom of the pyramid: *the Addict in the Street*, and stop tilting quixotically for the ``higher ups'' so called, all of whom are immediately replaceable. ** The addict in the street who must have junk to live is the one irreplaceable factor in the junk equation **. When there are no more addicts to buy junk there will be no junk traffic. As long as junk need exists, someone will service it. "Addicts can be cured or quarantined--that is, allowed a morphine ration under minimal supervision like typhoid carriers. When this is done, junk pyramids of the world will collapse. So far as I know, England is the only country to apply this method to the junk problem. They have about five hundred quarantined addicts in the U.K. In another generation when the quarantined addicts die off and pain killers operating on a non-junk principle are discovered, the junk virus will be like smallpox, a closed chapter--a medical curiosity." The whole essay is worth reading. Stop in, read, and offer comments at my "swinging as seen in the media" blog, "Confessions of a Lifestyle Man" humorlife, which is also the home of the monthly virtual symposium. New post: The Virtual Symposium Returns Lets Pick A Topic
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That's right...fifty years old and still controversial. He had his advocates- Norman Mailer, Anthony Burgess and Mary McCarthy were among them- but the imagery used in "Naked Lunch" is that of disgust. It's violent and queer and a condemnation of what America had become. He threw the disgust that good and upright citizens felt for queers, lesbians, "inferior" races, addicts, the poor- all the dregs of society- back in their faces, and with a vengeance. Not likely to be a popular read. Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
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This is positively eerie... This past Thursday evening I pulled my rather dusty copy of "Naked Lunch" off the shelves to share the Dr. Benway lavatory operating scene with a friend... at one point, I probably could have done that whole part by heart. It's among the funniest in the book. I think Burroughs read this bit aloud on a very, VERY early broadcast of Saturday Night Live. Video of this should be out there: It's worth tracking down. Still... after not having touched Naked Lunch in a decade or so, having my interaction and this is beyond weird. Something in the zeitgeist is leading us back to the Interzone... P.S. Burroughs's essay "Testimony Concerning A Sickness" is one of the best, sanest collection of thoughts regarding preventing addition in society ever written. It's available online,. The key two paragraphs regarding eliminating societal problems of addiction come in the middle: "If you wish to alter or annihilate a pyramid of numbers in a serial relation, you alter or remove the bottom number. If we wish to annihilate the junk pyramid, we must start with the bottom of the pyramid: *the Addict in the Street*, and stop tilting quixotically for the ``higher ups'' so called, all of whom are immediately replaceable. ** The addict in the street who must have junk to live is the one irreplaceable factor in the junk equation **. When there are no more addicts to buy junk there will be no junk traffic. As long as junk need exists, someone will service it. "Addicts can be cured or quarantined--that is, allowed a morphine ration under minimal supervision like typhoid carriers. When this is done, junk pyramids of the world will collapse. So far as I know, England is the only country to apply this method to the junk problem. They have about five hundred quarantined addicts in the U.K. In another generation when the quarantined addicts die off and pain killers operating on a non-junk principle are discovered, the junk virus will be like smallpox, a closed chapter--a medical curiosity." The whole essay is worth reading. It IS weird that we both dusted off "Naked Lunch" in the same week! But even though I haven't cracked it open in years, it's never far out of mind. It had a profound effect on the way I think and see. Burroughs was certainly the best read and most intelligent of the beat writers. He had a towering intellect. I cherish poor Jack Kerouac- when he writes well it's surpassingly beautiful, and tender and loving. But Burroughs might just be the one who ends up being remembered, in spite of all his tedious cut-ups and fold-ins. It was Burroughs refusal of sentiment that made him so fucking scathingly funny. A man without compassion could not do that. Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
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I don't really understand the controversy, I meet people that talk out of their ass' every day! Burroughs was called the godfather of punk. In "Naked Lunch" everything, every routine, decays into chaos and the jungle takes over. There's a lot of rage there- raging queens, raging dykes, raging baboons. Dr. Benway's assistant was a purple assed baboon named Violet, the perfect creature of violent animal rage run amok. Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
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It ain't for everyone...but it's also really funny. Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
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The book is a classic!  
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The book is a classic! Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
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I will now have to check this one out KZ hugssssssss V ty Become a blog watcher sweet_vm
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I will now have to check this one out KZ hugssssssss V ty Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
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3/17/2015 9:27 am |
I haven't read enough Burroughs; I am reluctant to admit. However, I'd suggest interested folks check-out Seven Souls - an audio CD by the fantastic experimental band "Material". I'm a HUGE fan of Bill Laswell. The voice is Burroughs reading from his The Road to the Western Lands. Put to "Material" music soundscapes. Five stars. I put the album on every Halloween.
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I haven't read enough Burroughs; I am reluctant to admit. However, I'd suggest interested folks check-out Seven Souls - an audio CD by the fantastic experimental band "Material". I'm a HUGE fan of Bill Laswell. The voice is Burroughs reading from his The Road to the Western Lands. Put to "Material" music soundscapes. Five stars. I put the album on every Halloween. Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
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Not in this book, anyway. But i've seen it done!  Burroughs was homosexual and I think something of a misogynist. There aren't that many women in his books and they don't really come off very well in his hands. Pun intended, Intenda. Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
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