Criticism
Notes on Burroughs (1964)
By Marshall McLuhan 1. Today men's nerves surround us; they have gone outside as electrical environment. The human nervous system itself can be reprogrammed biologically as readily as any radio network can alter its fare. Burroughs has dedicated Naked Lunch to the first proposition, and Nova Express (both Grove Press) to the second. Naked Lunch records private strategies of culture in the electric age. Nova Express indicates some of the "corporate" responses and adventures of the Subliminal Kid who is living in a universe which seems to be someone else's insides. Both books are a kind of engineer's report of [...]
Wired for Shock Treatments
A Review of The Soft Machine By Joan Didion There sometimes seems a peculiar irrelevance about what is claimed for William S. Burroughs, both by those who admire him and those who do not; the insistent amorphousness of his books encourages the reader to take from them pretty much exactly what he brought to them. Burroughs has been read as a pamphleteer for narcotics reform. He has been read as a parabolist of the highest order. He has been read as a pornographer and he has been read as a prophet of the apocalypse. The Naked Lunch I read first [...]
Terry Southern on Naked Lunch
"...A Devastating Ridicule of All That Is False..." In life there is that which is funny, and there is that which is politely supposed to be funny. Literature, out of a misguided appeal to an imaginary popular taste and the caution of self-distrust, generally follows the latter course, so that the humor found in books is almost always vicarious — meeting certain "traditional" requirements and producing oNaked Lunchy the kind of laughter one might expect: rather strained. Burroughs' work is an all-stops-out departure from this practice, and he invariably writes at the very top of his ability. The element of [...]
The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs
RealityStudio Reviews the New Book by Rob Johnson Rob Johnson, The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs: Beats in South Texas, published by Texas A&M University Press, May 2006. Available now from Amazon. "'SHOOT THE BITCH AND WRITE A BOOK! THAT'S WHAT I DID,' William Burroughs suddenly shouted, standing up fast." The bitch was Joan Vollmer (the common-law wife whom Burroughs shot in Mexico in 1951), the book was presumably Naked Lunch, and this improbable outburst occurred before astonished visitor George Laughead Jr. in March 1997, just a few months before Burroughs died. "Did he just say what [...]
The Junky's Christmas
Review of Koch Vision's New DVD It is always difficult to establish objective criteria for determining the literary worth of a book, but one possibility would be to consider its filmability. Is it easy to transpose a given book into film? If so, it implies that the qualities that might distinguish the book as a text — a sense of verbal style, for example, or a unique perspective on inner reality such as stream of consciousness provides — are not particularly prominent. The book still might tell a good story, but if it's easily filmable then you have to wonder [...]
Yage Letters Redux
RealityStudio Reviews the New Edition Prepared by Oliver Harris It is an acknowledged paradox at the heart of William S. Burroughs' work that his greatest books called into question how much they were even his. Whereas Samuel Beckett tried to eviscerate the novel from within — to "naughten" it, to borrow a term from Heidegger — Burroughs seemed to do the same to authorship as such. Friends and chance helped to assemble his masterpiece, Naked Lunch, from fragments he claimed not to remember writing. In the 1960s he advocated mechanical procedures, the cut up and the fold in, for composing [...]
What Happened to Cursed from Birth?
In 2002 Grove Press was supposed to publish a new book called Cursed from Birth: The Short, Unhappy Life of William S. Burroughs, Jr. The book was to be a selection of autobiographical writings culled by David Ohle from unpublished works by the son of the famous Beat author. However, after appearing on publisher lists, the book mysteriously disappeared. Cursed from Birth never made it to press, and proof copies have been selling to Burroughs collectors for extraordinary amounts of money. What happened to the book? Will it ever see the light of day? RealityStudio tracked down author [...]
Cursed from Birth: The Short, Unhappy Life of William S. Burroughs Jr.
Review by Tom Bowden The son of a heroin-addicted father and an alcoholic mother addicted to Benzedrine, William S. Burroughs, Jr. had the kind of start in life most of us would rather avoid. Things went downhill from there when he was four after his father shot and killed the mother in Mexico. His older sister (whom he was to never see again) was sent to live with his mother's parents, and Billy was sent to live with his father's parents. His father skipped the country and lammed it to Tangiers, where he remained addicted to various opiates, smoked lots [...]
Dead Aim: The Unseen Art of William S. Burroughs
By Paul Pieroni Some words a year on... Other than producing some of the most profoundly prophetic works of Twentieth century prose, William Seward Burroughs — especially during the latter half of his long lifetime — vicariously painted, created collage and cut and paste works, made films and cut experimental spoken word musical tracks — his notable collaborators here including Kurt Cobain, Patti Smith and Tom Waits. But how are we to read these works? In many ways the fractured immensity of his creative output reflects the nervous jingling intensity of his constitution; Burroughs catalysed his existence through a continual [...]
Evil River
A Burroughs Memoir? Evil River If you search for William Burroughs' name on Amazon.com, you'll discover a book that is supposed to come out in July, 2005 called Evil River. What exactly is this? In Word Virus, an editor mentions that a "memoir begun by Burroughs, which he called Evil River (from the St. John Perse line "My past was an evil river" ), will be completed soon." Apparently "evil river" was one of the many lines lodged in Burroughs' prodigious memory, since he mentions it often. In the entry for August [...]
Roundup at the O.P. Corral
Thoughts on Brion Gysin and Wyndham Lewis By Jan Herman I wrote the following article in the summer of 1971. I'm tempted to rewrite it, mainly to improve the prose and eliminate the foolishness. Despite its deficiencies, I offer it here with minor corrections for two reasons though it may be no more than a curiosity: 1) to lend support to Jed Birmingham's masterly column Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker; and 2) to explore a largely neglected aspect of Brion Gysin's early writing and intellectual development. (I haven't yet read John Geiger's recent biography of Gysin, Nothing Is [...]