Book Review

Book Review

Scientologist! William S. Burroghs and the Weird Cult

by David S. Wills

     The lifestyle and literature of William S. Burroughs were both equally unorthodox in practice. The strange life lived by the author of Junky and Naked Lunch was often as surreal and inexplicable as the themes and imagery of those two classic and disturbing novels. Burroughs’ literature and the detailed biographical portraits we have of him can be bound together to form what could be called the Burroughs mythos. Up until recently, one piece of the Burroughs mythos has not been given proper attention; the missing piece is the time he spent as a member of The Church of Scientology and how it influenced his works. David S. Wills fills in this gap in his book Scientologist!: William S. Burroughs and the Weird Cult.

     This book is broken into four sections. The first is a general overview of Burroughs’ life up until the time he started to seriously pursue a career as a writer. Wills covers his childhood in St. Louis, the sexual abuse he suffered as a young boy, his introduction to the occult by his mother and nanny, his fascination for quack cures and pseudo-science, and a few other traumatic events along the way. The years of his early adulthood were just as strange. Burroughs began experimenting with drugs, traveled in South America, got involved in criminal activities, tried and failed to operate a grapefruit farm in Texas, and met up with future Beat Generation superstars Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. And, of course, there is the time Burroughs shot his wife in the head in Mexico City. In short, this section is a standard overview of William S. Burroughs’ life. There is one hitch, though. The author David S. Wills has an annoying approach and takes every chance he possibly can to take swipes at the man for either doing stupid things or having stupid beliefs. It’s not that Burroughs lived an exemplary life or had infallible views; Burroughs fans take these things for granted. Wills fails to understand that these are what makes Burroughs such a mythical character and beating up on him just makes Wills look like a smug and condescending asshole.

     The editing in this book is poor. I will mention it but won’t dwell on it too much. The text is permeated with spelling errors, improper word usage, awkward grammatical constructions, and poorly organized paragraphs. Sometimes it gets bad enough that I had to go back and reread a sentence or two to figure out what Wills was actually trying to say. At least William Burroughs was intentionally trying to confuse his readers. Wills just accomplishes this through carelessness.

     The author also adds some sporadic details that don’t quite fit the narrative. For example, he mentions Brion Gysin’s creation of the Dream Machine and the sad details of Burroughs’ relationship with his son; while these events are true and also represent significant details of the general biography, they have nothing to do with Burroughs and his relationship to Scientology. They are not well incorporated into the narrative. Most readers already know these things anyways. These parts stand out in uncomfortable ways like pieces of broccoli in a bowl of ice cream.

     And couldn’t he have come up with a better title than Scientologist!: William S. Burroughs and the Weird Cult? That sounds like something you would find in the National Enquirer.

     Moving on to the second section, as Burroughs’ life continues, he begins making waves with his second novel Naked Lunch then heads off for more exotic locations where the police won’t be breathing down his neck. He ends up in Tangiers, Morocco and that is where he meets Brion Gysin, the man who introduces Burroughs to both the cut-up method of writing and Dianetics, a new form of therapy devised by science-fiction author L. Ron Hubbard, the future cult leader of The Church of Scientology. The two men were not impressed with each other at first but they later struck up a friendship in Paris where Gysin was running the now-legendary Beat Hotel.

     Wills really cocks up the narrative by going into a muddled account of when Burroughs first heard of Dianetics. He goes into some detail based on letters exchanged between Burroughs and Ginsberg because he wants to prove that Burroughs never accurately stated the proper date when he learned of the technique. Why should we care what the exact date was? The very fact that it happened is more interesting and relevant to the story. Wills is, once again, making a petty attempt at debunking Burroughs. This section of the book is also annoying because Wills writes about how Burroughs was condescending to Ginsberg in his letters, something that didn’t appear to bother Ginsberg much since the two maintained a close friendship until both of them died. Wills also expresses a lot of contempt for Brion Gysin, who he obviously doesn’t like. There are times when Wills’ cheap shots almost ruin the whole book.

     Nonetheless, William Burroughs, with his penchant for occultism and fringe science, took to Dianetics and its use of the E-meter/lie detector to erase language and memories of traumatic experiences from the unconscious mind. The goal is to become “clear”, a state of mind where a human reaches their full potential because all the junk they have accumulated in their thoughts throughout their life is no longer there. One strong point about this book, and one that Wills deserves credit for, is demonstrating how the traumas of childhood, the drug addiction, the manslaughter, the homosexuality, and failed attempts in psychoanalysis made Burroughs a prime candidate for membership in L. Ron Hubbard’s cult, as if it were tailor made for Burroughs to begin with.

     At about the same time, Gysin introduced Burroughs to the cut-up technique. In this method of slicing up written texts and randomly putting them back together again, Burroughs saw a useful counterpart to Dianetics therapy. He saw it as a way of tearing through the clutter of language to recreate the relationship between the individual person, time, and space. Burroughs went on to use cut-ups as a writing technique which he employed in the novels of the Nova trilogy. Wills runs into some more trouble here. He tries to make the case that since Burroughs saw a connection between Dianetics and cut-ups that he somehow lifted the idea of cut-ups from L. Ron Hubbard. But it was Burroughs who conflated these two practices, not Hubbard. There is, as far as I know, no mention of anything resembling cut-ups in Hubbard’s literature.

     There is another aspect of cut-ups that Wills overlooks. The technique was less likely to have come from Dianetics and more likely to have originated in modernist, avant garde art, particularly the technique of Analytic Cubism. A direct line can be traced from that seminal movement to Brion Gysin who was briefly a member of the Surrealists before their final demise. Surrealism grew out of Dadism which grew out of Cubism with Pablo Picasso being one of the connecting threads through all three movements. Brion Gysin in Here to Go: Planet R-101 stated that painting is always fifty years ahead of writing. Backtracking from 1960 to the pre-war years, we arrive in the neighborhood of Analytic Cubism, which depicted the fracturing of physical surfaces, and Dada collages and montages which made combinations of unrelated found objects and images. The Dadaist poetry of Tristan Tzara was randomly constructed word-salads meant to be nonsensical. The Dadaists sought to destroy language because language means logical structures and logic is what led to the atrocities of World War I. Therefore disrupting all lines of communication would liberate humanity from future atrocities. That idea brings us full circle back to Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs. Cut-ups are the application of Analytic Cubism and Dada techniques to the physically realized literary text.

     “Rub out the word” and “language is a virus” are quotes that Burroughs reiterates throughout his writings. According to Scientology, the reactive mind and engrams act like tape recorders in the mind by constantly replaying language associated with, and accumulated by, traumatic experiences in life. They unconsciously control a person’s outlook and behavior. This idea is a key theme in understanding Burroughs’ literature and it is correct to attribute Scientology as a source of his inspiration. The problem for Wills is that he overplays his hand in this matter. Burroughs had discovered the theory of General Semantics as proposed by the linguist Alfred Korzybski long before he had discovered Dianetics. This concept is also prevalent in the theories underlying hypnotism, psychoanalysis, and the system of magick developed by Aleister Crowley, all of which Burroughs had toyed around with before he knew about Scientology. Wills says as much in the first section of his book. Therefore, his assertion that Burroughs borrowed his ideas about language from the cult is overemphasized. It did play a role in the development of Burroughs’ themes but there is a lot more to it than that. Wills makes it sound like the Nova trilogy is a treatise on Scientology and this is not entirely off the mark but inaccurate nonetheless.

     The third section of Scientologist! Is the strongest part of the book. Wills really gets to the heart of the matter here by telling the story of how William S. Burroughs actually joined The Church of Scientology in London, going through the auditing sessions with the e-meter, taking their classes, and eventually reaching the stage of clear. Burroughs eventually lost interest in the cult and published some scathing articles about their shady practices, authoritarian nature, and obsession with making money. They once conducted a high level auditing session with Burroughs in a broom closet. A clear picture of what it would be like to be in this church is given to those of us who would never consider joining.

     Burroughs’ motives for joining are also examined. This section culminates with a dispute between Burroughs and a spokesperson for the church that plays out in the pages of the pornographic magazine Mayfair in which Burroughs had been writing a monthly column on the cult for some time.

     But despite this well-detailed and well-researched section, David S. Wills still manages to drop the ball on a couple significant points. One example is his assertion that Burroughs was so enthusiastic about Scientology that he failed to recognize its darker aspect of being a mind-control cult. But this contradicts what Wills says about Burroughs approach to Dianetics in the second section; he claims that Burroughs was initially skeptical of L. Ron Hubbard’s motives, seeing him as being a money-grubbing, power hungry conman. This also contradicts Burroughs’ statement that he joined Scientology as an anthropologist, also mentioned by Wills. It might be more accurate to say he joined as an investigative journalist. But anyhow, my contention is that Wills misinterprets Burroughs’ motives because his own underlying intention is to prove that Burroughs was stupid. From my vantage point, I think Burroughs knew from the start what he was getting into. I do agree that he naively joined the church to reap the benefits of their therapy and come to terms with the nightmarish memories he had accumulated. Burroughs was about the age of 40 when he joined and it appears to me that this might have been the onset of his midlife crisis, a detail that Wills never considers. I also think Burroughs joined because he needed a new angle for his writing. It is not uncommon for authors to feel they have run out of ideas and go in search of something new, especially as they approach middle-age. Scientology was new territory, not just for Burroughs, but for everybody else as well since it was so new. I think Burroughs did know they were dangerous and joined for that reason. He was not a man who was averse to risky behavior, whether it be a matter of playing with guns, exploring the jungles of Colombia and Panama, experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs, or even buying a citrus farm in Texas hoping to get rich. Even his novels were daring; he possibly even wrote Naked Lunch with the intent of getting it prosecuted for obscenity; it is a work that takes extreme artistic, as well as, legal risks. It is part of the Burroughs mythos that he was attracted to danger while maintaining a calm, cool exterior. Wills never seems to put two and two together to get four; he lists all the separate pieces of the equation but never calculates them in order to come up with the correct answer.

     Wills also overemphasizes the role Scientology played in its influence over Burroughs’ writing. As previously mentioned, the place it holds in the narratives of the Nova trilogy is significant but the claim that The Wild Boys is a novel directly influenced by Scientology is a stretch. Wills points out two minor and densely opaque passages in that book that refer to Scientology but the novel overall has little of anything to do woth that subject matter. The story celebrates a group of young men who live in the wilderness of Morocco. They reject society for the sake of living a free life of unrestrained indulgence in drug use and gay sex. They form an international cabal that sabotages the machinations of the puritanical American establishment. This anarchic vision is more like a direct contradiction of the end goals of Scientology rather than an affirmation.

     The fourth part of Wills’ book simply narrates the remaining years of Burroughs’ life and how aspects of Scientology continued to linger in his thoughts. A glaring omission in this section is the influence of Burroughs’ theories on the early industrial music scene of the mid-1970s which is indirectly related to Scientology. Not only did Burroughs work with Genesis P-Orridge and Peter Christopherson of Throbbing Gristle but his theories of language, social control, his cut-ups, and his audio tape experiments provided the theoretical framework for industrial music. P-Orridge and Christopherson released a record of cut-ups on their Industrial Records music label long before the two of them went on to form their own cult, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth which bore some similarities to Scientology via their practice of magick, an original influence on L. Ron Hubbard. Genesis P-Orridge was also influenced by The Process Chruch Of the Final Judgment, a cult that spun off from The Church of Scientology. The original idea behind industrial music was to bring hidden cultural taboos to the surface of consciousness for the sake of erasing them and liberating the individual from the mechanisms of control imposed by the establishment in modern culture. As Michel Foucault would say, the structures of cultural power and domination are largely invisible to the people who are manipulated by them. The idea that language is a virus means that language, as a mechanism of control, is hidden in the way Scientologists conceive of engrams and the reactive mind. Alexander Reed’s book Assimilate: A Critical Analysis of Industrial Music gives a comprehensive account of how industrial music grew out of William S. Burroughs. His involvement with Scientology did play a significant role in this.

     Scientologist!, despite its obvious flaws and amateurish writing, is a book that had to be written in order to fill a gap in the mythos of William S. Burroughs. David S. Wills does a good job of detailing this story. He does a bad job of interpreting what it is all about. He comes across as some douschebag millenial with a chip on his shoulder who wants to prove that baby boomers suck; if that is his hidden agenda, he has failed. William S. Burroughs may have believed in things that weren’t real but he does prompt his readers to question the realities of the world we live in. In the end, he wasn’t a scientist or a philosopher, he was an artist and a writer of fiction. If believing in bullshit resulted in him writing novels that are truly profound in the effects they have on the reader, then so be it. Burroughs is iconic because of his beliefs, not in spite of them. Behind his fringe ideologies is a stubborn insistence to reject the miserable conditions of the world and create a better way to exist, a way of life that embraces pleasure, freedom, peace, and the ability to be who you are while minding your own business. Besides, I know from experience that while under the influence of drugs, things like orgone energy, Dianetics, and famailar spirits can make a lot of sense. It’s just that when you come down from whatever high you are on, the illusions wear off. How can you get yourself permanently into that ecstatic state of mind? Burroughs never figured it out. Hopefully someday somebody else will. 

Wills, David S. Scientologist!: William S. Burroughs and the Weird Cult. Beatdom Books, United Kingdom: 2013. 
 

The David Lynch Retrospective

The David Lynch Retrospective

critical analysis of David Lynch's films

by The Cinema Cartography

(2020)

 

Experiments In the Revival of Organisms

Experiments In the Revival of Organisms

short Soviet documentary film about bringing dead dogs back to life

directed by D.I. Yashin (1940)

 

R.I.P. Pierre Kezdy

Pierre Kezdy

bass player for Naked Raygun

1962 - 2020

 

Pierre Kezdy, bass player for influential punk rockers Naked Raygun, other Chicago bands, dead at 58

Pierre Kezdy, bass guitarist for Naked Raygun, one of Chicago’s most influential and best loved punk rock bands, died Friday at 58 at a hospice in Glenview. The longtime Evanston resident had cancer.

Read the full article on Chicago Sun Times here

 

Book Review

Book Review

Story of O 

by Pauline Reage

     In the 1950’s a journalist and professional translator wrote a series of letters to her husband. He was an enthusiast for the writings of the Marquis de Sade and once told her that no female could ever write erotic fiction as well as a man. The wife set out to prove him wrong and those letters were collected into a novel that eventually became published as Story of O by Pauline Reage, the pen name of Anne Decile Desclos. The book was controversial from the start and is now considered a classic in some circles. In our age when anything and everything is available on the internet it does not have the same impact it did in the 1950s. But if you approach the story with the right set of expectations, it might be a good book. Ultimately, a lot depends on who you are and what you are willing to tolerate.

     To start off, Story of O is not pornography. Pornography is explicit and its primary function is to sexually arose the audience. In porn story is less important than the sexual activity, if there even is a story to begin with. Pornography contrasts with erotica which is sexually oriented by nature but includes more emotion and character development even if the characters are shallow. Erotic art is less crude and allows more room for context and expression. But Story of O does not fit easily into either category. It blends elements of the two and hovers somewhere in between, almost as if it forms its own genre of literature. It tells the story of a woman who voluntarily enters a sado-masochistic relationship in which her boyfriend, Rene, takes her to a chateaux called Roissy. It is there that O gets tied-up, whipped, and forced to have sex with several anonymous men. Rene asks her permission before any of this starts and she agrees. She has become his slave and he can do with her whatever he wants.

     The description of physical sensations is central to both pornography and erotica. The sensations described by O are not necessarily sexual. It is true that she gets penetrated by men throughout the book, sometimes by multiple men at the same time, but the description never goes beyond the act itself. It is not phallo-centric in any way nor does O say what it feels like to have sex. The process leading from arousal to climax is given no attention. Actually, most of what she describes are secondary details like the textures of clothing, the softness of a bed, the surface of stone floors she kneels on, and, most importantly, what it feels like to be put in bondage and whipped. The act of tying her wrists and restricting her movements make her limbs feel separate from her body which results in a sensation of disassociation. When O gets whipped she has sensations of her body dissolving so that she feels outside of herself. In fact, when the men in the story bind her and flagellate her they describe it as “opening” her body. When the beatings stop, the sense of relief from pain gives O pleasure, probably a rush of endorphins. The relief gained from having her ordeals ended tends to be the point where agony turns into ecstasy.

     Roissy is a secret society, maybe like what people imagined the Hellfire Clubs of the 19^th century to be like. When Rene takes her away, he gives her a signet ring with a triskellion symbol on it meaning she must submit to the desires of any man who knows what the symbol means. As the story moves on, O is coaxed into having a sexual relationship with a fashion model named Jacqueline. She is also handed over to Sir Stephen, a superior to Rene in the Roissy society.

     O’s subjectivity is described along the way. At the start of the novel, she agrees to Rene’s requests because she loves him and wants his acceptance. This need for acceptance plays a running theme throughout the story. O also describes her desire to be treated like an object and deprived of her ability to choose. Why she feels this way is never explained. This is one shortcoming of the novel; O says how she feels about her situation but she doesn’t say enough to give the reader a deep understanding of what she truly wants. The descriptions of her subjectivity give her depth but do not go deep enough.

     Sir Stephen takes over as her dominant partner but again, she gives her permission to him and Rene before they begin their dominant/submissive relationship. Every time O reaches a new stage in her development as a submissive woman, she is asked for permission before the torture begins. O feels a lot of ambivalence every time she is asked to cross that line and it is the resolution of that hesitancy, fear, and desire for pain that gives her pleasure. The physical sensation of torture is less important to her than what it does to her psychologically. Keep in mind that this type of ambivalence is called "cognitive dissonance" and the process of helping someone overcome that state of uncertainty is used by cult leaders as a method of coercion and manipulation, making the person more loyal to the group through resolution of their conflicting emotions

     Speaking of psychology, as her relationship with Sir Steven intensifies, she goes back to Rene who convinces her to lure Jacqueline into going to Roissy. Rene says he loves Jacqueline. O does not want her to go there because of her infatuation and does not want her to suffer. However, when Rene says he loves Jacqueline, O is inflamed with jealousy and it is then that she wants to see Jacqueline tied up and tortured with tears running down her face. O has reached another turning point: she is no longer just a masochist because the doorway to her sadism has been opened. Rene appears to have learned from the others in Roissy how to manipulate women and get what he wants from them.

      At Sir Stephen’s Request, O is taken to the luxurious house of Anne-Marie, a middle-aged lesbian who has three younger female slaves working for her. As the bondage and whippings continue, Sir Stephen asks O to allow herself to be branded and to have her labia pierced in order to hold two links of a chain and a pendant stating his ownership of her. Again, O is asked for permission and she gives it. She also sleeps with Anne-Marie before going back to her apartment. It is interesting that Anne-Marie will not allow herself to be seen undressed. At this point O’s body is scarred and covered with welts but she is also becoming more confident in her status as a slave. But is Anne-Marie’s refusal to be seen nude an indication that her body is just as scarred as O’s? It is possible that Anne-Marie may be serving the function of a role model for O as she progresses up the hierarchy of the secret society.

     Roissy does have a hierarchy. Rene gives O to Sir Stephen as a gift but towards the end another mysterious man called the Commander enters the story. He is the man that Sir Stephen takes orders from. But where O is a two and a half dimensional character, the men in the story are one dimensional. On the surface this may look like a flaw in the writing but as the wider picture of the Roissy society emerges this gives the novel a little more depth as you begin to wonder who these men are and what they are up to. The chateau and the society itself reek of wealth, privilege, and aristocracy. How powerful are these people in the outside world? Is dominance and submission merely a hobby for them or are they part of something larger, something with a hidden plan? The lack of detail and closure makes the whole story more creepy. And who are all the people attending the party at the end?

     O is eventually taken to a villa outside Paris by Sir Stephen and the Commander. O is completely nude except for an owl mask over her head; Jacqeline’s younger sister leads her along on a leash attached to her leather collar. In some cultures, owls are symbols of evil and in others they are symbols of wisdom. In reality they are nocturnal creatures and birds of prey so this marks another transformation in O’s status. O has taken another step deeper, and possibly higher up, in the secret society. At the villa, there is a large party going on in the moonlight. O gets put on display to the guests. Sir Stephen and the Commander have put her on a figurative pedestal and she is admired as an idol and an example of what other female guests at the gathering should aspire to be. By the end of the book, O is the center of attention and she says she is proud of what she has become.

     Story of O possibly makes some people uncomfortable because of the ambiguities it arouses in the readers as well as the shock value of what takes place. Is O being coerced, manipulated, or brainwashed? It is possible that the questions it raises are more unsettling than the descriptions of the ordeals O goes through. If a person uses their freedom to choose to give up their freedom of choice aren’t they actually free? If a woman chooses to be submissive, does she have a certain power that she can not obtain in other ways? When people use use their freedom to choose to do something we find repugnant or disgraceful, do we have any right to condemn them? Does O benefit in any way from her subservience? A lot of people don’t like these kinds of questions and it is difficult to get through this novel without confronting them. The story provides no answers. You have to figure it out for yourself or, certainly, you could always ask someone from the BDSM community to help you understand. If you approach them with sincere interest, many of them would be happy to share their thoughts on the matter.

     This novel certainly has some problems. The prose is long winded and sometimes vague; paragraphs go on far longer than they should. This is partly a translation problem because French does not translate into English without causing these types of problems. Still, the section titled “Sir Stephen” is especially dull and unnecessarily wordy. There is an abundance of description but a lot of the things being described are of peripheral importance to the story; for example, some passages about clothing and furniture are too ornate and descriptive for their own good while some of the sex and BDSM scenes could benefit from more detail. The characters also lack depth. The writing suggests that they have depth but doesn’t actually deliver it.

     Still, Story of O is an interesting book. It goes just a little bit beyond ordinary erotica. One thing that makes it unique is the understatement of O’s psychological development. It is there but it is buried and hidden beneath the layers of florid prose. It is like a small reward for those readers who look hard enough and pay attention to the fine details. As a work of pornography it fails and people who approach it as such will be disappointed. Even if those subtleties are not handled as well as they could have been, those understated details are what give Story of O its charm. 

Reage, Pauline. Story of O. Ballantine Books, New York: 1973.

 

Call It Sleep: A Situationist Film

Call It Sleep: A Situationist Film

directed by Isaac Cronin and Terrell Seltzer

 

Book Review

Book Review

The Revised Boy Scout Manual:

An Electronic Revolution

by William S. Burroughs

     In the early 1970s, William S. Burroughs was mostly writing articles for underground newspapers and pornographic magazines like Mayfair. The hippie scene was winding down and urban guerilla movements like the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, the Angry Brigade, and the Red Army Faction were springing up all over the place. Burroughs had just voluntarily left the Church of Scientology because of their authoritarian and potentially fascist overtones and was trying to maintain his status as a writer and counter-cultural icon. He began work on a manifesto to explain his unorthodox world viewto the younger generation. He never completed the project but parts of it were sold as spoken word pieces on cassettes and other fragments were published in scattered places. These pieces were put together as The Revised Boy Scout Manual: An Electronic Revolution and recently published in paperback. The finished product serves as a good, but incomplete, overview of his ideas.

     The opening sections of this short work lay out strategies for overthrowing the established order and explain a variety of weapons, both conventional and unconventional, that can be used in the pursuit of building a free society. These passages are seasoned with little bits of Burroughs’ acerbic humor and eventually make a transition into fantasy vignettes that read like the fiction Burroughs is famous for. A smooth transition is made from realistic-sounding essay writing to the gallows humor of his dark scenarios. Readers who are less experienced with Burroughs’ writing style may get disoriented and wonder whether they should even take this prose seriously. The answer is both yes and no or at least the intent of his writing is serious while the realized result is fiction. But that is how Burroughs always operated. He melted the boundaries of reality like hot candle wax dripping into a pool of molten lava. He didn’t merely think outside the box; he did everything he could to destroy whatever box it is you are in when you think.

     There are key ideas to this revolution. One is that ten percent of the human race has to be killed but it has to be the ten percent that is responsible for controlling and oppressing everybody else. His idea that ten percent of the population controls ninety percent of society prefigures, by forty years, the contention of the failed Occupy Wall Street movement that one percent of the population controls ninety percent of the wealth. Political activists of our day should take note because they are not as unique or original as they think they are. To add to this idea, Burroughs points out that genocides and mass murders have historically been acts of violence perpetrated by the powerful elite against the masses of common people. Another component of this revolution is M.O.B. which means “mind own business”. When governments and police do not allow people to live freely then they are not doing as such; M.O.B. is to be the cornerstone law of a newly liberated humanity. The result of the revolution will be communal societies, some of which will be located on the beaches of Ecuador or in the dense jungles of the Amazon River basin. It is not surprising that Burroughs’ preoccupation with power, domination, and control made an impression on the mind of a young Michel Foucault who cited him as an influence on his philosophy of biopolitics.

     The rest of the book suggests ideas for experiments using film and audio. By the 1970s, Burroughs wished to expand on his practice of cut-ups to apply it to other, more current forms of media. A lot of the tape splicing he describes are now common practices in editing sound, music, and video. Some people have claimed his hypotheses are silly, ridiculous, and impossible but they may be misunderstanding the concept of experimentation. That particular word means to try something new and see what happens. The outcome may or may not be predictable but you really can not know until it is tried. Most experiments fail. Sometimes the intend outcome is not realized but serendipity occurs and a new method of doing things is accidentally discovered. In the end these tape recorder experiments had a profound influence on music and other arts. Burroughs used tape loops and sampling long before hip hop artists did and his philosophical ideas had a directed impact on industrial and punk music in the 1970s.

     Another aspect of revolution Burroughs explores is the presence of language. He briefly explains how language can be used as a mechanism of control. He also writes about the encoding of meaning in words by the speaker and the decoding of its meaning by the listener; he makes suggestions for experiments with language scramblers to determine if a listener can unscramble distorted messages subconsciously. This is a crude take on semiotics but it explains some passages from his novels that read like disorientating gibberish; some of his texts were scrambled using cut-ups and montage and it is up to you to decide if you can derive some meaning from it. Burroughs also suggest eliminating the words “the”, “either/or”, and “is” from the English language. He describes the way “is” causes distortions in our perceptions of reality. This sounds like an idea lifted from Martin Heidegger’s An Introduction to Metaphysics but actually it is inspired by the General Semantics theory developed by the linguist Alfred Korzybski in the 190s. In any case, these ideas anticipate the philosophies of poststructuralism and deconstruction by at least a few years.

     A lot of people have criticized William S. Burroughs for believing in things that are simply not true. They also overlook the fact that he was primarily a writer of fiction and fiction, by definition, is not true. But good fiction makes statements about truth. The Revised Boy Scout Manual should be read as a fictional document, maybe even as comedy or satire, but keep in mind what it actually says about the world we live in. It is some of Burroughs’ most clear and direct writing and does a good job of explaining his theories in a way that can clarify some of the confusing and opaque passages of his difficult prose. 

Burroughs, William S. Revised Boy Scout Manual: An Electronic Revolution. The Ohio State University Press, Columbus: 2018. 

 

Book Review

Book Review

Troubled Sleep

by Jean-Paul Sartre

     The final book in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Roads to Freedom trilogy mostly continues the story of Mathieu Delarue, the wishy-washy philosophy professor preoccupied with the pursuit of freedom. Troubled Sleep takes up his story after World War II has begun, Germany has invaded France, and Mathieu has been deployed to serve in a second-line unit that sees no action. Stylistically, it is a return to the form employed by Sartre in The Age of Reason. The story of Brunet, a minor character from the first two volumes, gets taken up along with some brief explorations of other people from the previous books. Troubled Sleep is an uneven novel, a combination of finished and unfinished narratives that soars at times and seems half-baked and incomplete at others.

     When we left Mathieu in the previous novel, The Reprieve, he had decided against committing suicide and was heading off to the war. As his story begins in this book, he is waiting with a bunch of bored soldiers on a farm; they have not been called on to fight and are waiting for the armistice so they can go back to doing something, anything, with their lives other than loitering. They move on to a farming village and Mathieu struggles to fit in with them. His profession as an educator sets him apart; he has a sense of higher purpose in life even though he really has no idea what that means but they, on the other hand, care mostly about getting blind drunk and talking about their genitals. When they receive word that France has surrendered to Germany and the invading troops are coming to seize the village, Mathieu and another soldier decide to fight.

     This is a big turning point in his life. For the first time he decides to take action rather than allowing his life to just happen. Mathieu and the other man meet up with four soldiers from another battalion and they go up to the top of a church tower to shoot at the Germans as they arrive. Mathieu takes delight in killing the soldiers and every time he shoots at one he thinks about something that has gone wrong in life. At that moment he becomes transformed from a mild-mannered intellectual into a psychopathic killer. But in the act of killing Germans he frees himself from his past. He does not die a hero’s death because France has lost the war and the Germans have seized the town but he wants to take some sort of action that will create his freedom, even if the ultimate freedom means his own death.

     After that, the story of Brunet takes over. Brunet is a dedicated member of the Communist Party. Before the war, he wrote ideological propaganda articles for a newspaper. In Troubled Sleep he is imprisoned in a Nazi prisoner of war camp. He strikes up an awkward friendship with an intellectual soldier named Schneider. Brunet sees himself as being on a mission and starts building a clandestine cell of communist prisoners. Like other characters in the Roads to Freedom trilogy, Brunet is too close to himself to see himself clearly and this is where Schneider comes into the narrative. Schneider wonders why Brunet wants to build his cell when he is so cut off from the Communist Party itself. Stalin, the Comintern, the Politburo, and the locals in the French party do not know where he is and are probably too busy to care. But Brunet realizes that he has to do something while imprisoned. He can not let his life go to waste even if his actions are ultimately inconsequential. He is like a priest who builds a church to honor God even though he knows in his heart that God does not exist; he needs something to do with his time and it does not really matter what it is as long as he does it well.

     The narratives of Mathieu and Brunet are the strongest parts of the novel. The other narratives that restart the stories of characters from the previous books do not deliver quite as well. Mathieu’s friend Gomez, a general from the Spanish Civil War, has escaped to New York City where he gets employed as an art critic. His abandoned wife Sarah and their son Pedro have to flee Paris on foot as the German troops begin to arrive. Ivich has gotten married and lives unhappily with her inlaws while her brother Boris can not decide if he should stay and marry Lola or take off for England to continue fighting the Nazis. All of these stories start and end without going very far or saying very much. Sartre probably intended to finish them in the fourth book of Raods to Freedom but he never got around to writing it.

     The story of Mathieu’s friend Daniel gets restarted and continues on a little more successfully. In all his hatred, he wanders around an abandoned Paris, happy the Nazis have shown up to destroy the society that he dislikes so strongly. He sees Philippe, the upper-class pacifist from The Reprieve, trying to commit suicide by jumping into the Seine. Daniel prevents him and takes him back to his apartment to seduce him. He wants to build Philippe up for the purpose of tearing him down. This passage is psychologically intense and complex but does not reach its full potential because it too is incomplete. We never find out what happens between these two men. (Incidentally, this is written to completion as a short story in Jean-Paul Sartre’s collection The Wall).

     Troubled Sleep is a mixed bag. The completed stories are brilliant while the incomplete ones are rather pointless and read as if Sartre was getting tired and running out of ideas. There is also less philosophy involved. We know that all the characters are searching for freedom in one way or another and their actions show how they pursue those paths but we do not actually learn a whole lot about them that we did not already know. If you have read the first two books of the trilogy, it is worth reading to get a sense as to where this is all going but it really is the weakest of the three novels. Sartre’s writing here is still good though, even when it does not reach its full potential. 

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Troubled Sleep. Bantam Books, New York: 1968.

 

Book Review

Book Review

The Cat Inside

by William S. Burroughs

     Shortly before he died, William S. Burroughs put together The Cat Inside, probably a last ditch attempt to capitalize off his enduring fame to make enough money to keep his heroin habit going until the end. He might not have actually written it; rumor has it that he dictated it to James Grauerholz. There are two categories of people who will get something out this: William Burroughs admirers and people who love cats. I am one of the former, not the latter but that does not influence my opinion much that those in the former group will get the most out of The Cat Inside because of the insights it offers into the character of William S. Burroughs himself.

     The reading is simple. Written in short, simple descriptive prose, most passages are less than half a page long. It almost has the feel of Buddhist or Taoist allegories in its direct and brief delivery, albeit without a whole lot of goofy morals tacked on at the end. Cats, for Burroughs, are like the familiar spirits of witches and magicians; quiet and mysterious, they appear to be inhabiting more than one world at the same time. He covers the relationship between cats and humans throughout history and contrasts them with dogs who he does not actually dislike. What Burroughs does dislike is the way humans have taken the nature out of dogs and made them more like humans whereas cats have always maintained their independent nature.

     Aside from his love of cats, Burroughs comments extensively on the human capacity for brutality towards the natural world. He is deeply critical of the way people have destroyed animal habitations for pleasure and for the progressian of an increasingly stupid, authoritarian, and oafish movement away from our free and natural selves. The presence of Burroughs the environmentalist is heavily felt throughout the book.

     Most of the rest of the passages are about Burroughs and his cats. They play, they hunt, they wrestle, eat, and cuddle with him in bed at night. One insightful passage tells the story of how one of his cats ran away and was later found in the animal shelter. He asked the police what the cat was doing when he got picked up and they answered that cats must be on a leash when outside a home. But Burroughs wanted to know what the cat was actually doing; the idea of a dopey cop busting cats on vagrancy and loitering charges looked a little too pathetic to this writer who had a lifelong hatred of the police.

     Overall, a clear picture of William Burroughs emerges as he describes his relationship with cats. He comes off as quiet, humble, soft spoken, and downright gentle. This is a sharp contrast to such novels as Junky, Naked Lunch, and the Nova Trilogy with their excessive filth and violence. But looked at from a distance this makes sense; the world could seem extremely harsh and cruel in the eyes of a rather calm and introspective man.

     This is certainly not a work of great literature. Descriptions of the things cats ordinarily do are not novel or unique and reading about them is not the most exciting thing in the world. If The Cat Inside had been any longer it would not be worth reading at all. There are a few moments of dark humor that keep it going along though.

     For cat lovers, The Cat Inside will not cover any new territory. What makes it worth reading once is the candid account of William S. Burroughs. This is the only literature where he sheds his grotesque armor and shows the world who he really is. For a lot of the people who love his works, this is the best gift and final chapter to his life that he could give.

Burroughs, William S. The Cat Inside. Viking, New York: 1992. 

 

Book Review

Book Review

The Reprieve

by Jean-Paul Sartre

     Most human beings spend their lives pursuing freedom in one way or another. The existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre wrote his trilogy Roads to Freedom to portray French society and how his philosophy applies to such a pursuit. In The Reprieve, the second volume of the series, he depicts the lives of people from the full spectrum of the social strata as the threat of war with Germany looms over their heads. The uncertainty of their lives in the face of probable death and disaster is compellingly described and the anxieties of people with the horrific memory of World War I in their near past is well-articulated. It is a grim picture of a society on the brink of atrocity.

     A lot has been said about the style Sartre chose to write this novel. The narrative switches between people, location, and situations unpredictably. Sometimes the transition is from scene to scene, sometimes it takes place over a paragraph or two, and sometimes it even happens mid-paragraph or mid-sentence. Some transitions are abrupt while others overlap or hinge on minor details that two or more characters have in common. This method is effectively done and creates depth and literary textures that may not have been possible otherwise. It blends the lives of all the characters and shows how they are all part of an organic whole, even if their connections to each other are only tenuous or remote. Sometimes they even cross paths at random, making the reader see how we are all connected without even knowing it.

     Some people really love this writing style while others hate it but very few people comment on the themes throughout the story. A full range of people are portrayed. At the top is Hitler, Chamberlain, and Daladier meeting in secret council to discuss negotiations for peace and the German annexation of Sudetenland, the western rim of Czechoslovakia. A step or two down there is Mathieu, the protagonist of the first book in Roads to Freedom. While visiting his brother Jacques and his wife Odette who secretly loves Mathieu, the two brothers debate the pros and cons of defending Czechoslovakia while Mathieu wonders whether he should commit suicide or go fight in the war. Philippe is the stepson of an upper-class army general; he has embraced the ideology of pacifism, admires the life of Arthur Rimbaud, wishes to be a poet, and gets himself into trouble by publicly announcing his opposition to the war. Lower down the social scale are Maurice and Zezette, a working class proletarian couple who must break up as Maurice gets called up to fight. Zezette does not like the idea of war but Maurice is a committed communist and he sees it as a chance to end poverty. At the lowest end are a good natured but illiterate shepherd who arrives in Marseilles to find work but ends up, to his disappointment, getting deployed. And there is Charles, a physically disabled veteran of World War I who lives at the mercy of nurses who manage a home for invalids. When the war is about to start, the patients are transferred by boxcar to another location to keep them safe from the invading German troops. The characters of Sarah, Ivich, Boris, Daniel, and Marcelle from The Age of Reason also reappear and there is a whole host of other people with their own subplots throughout the book. Each is faced with the freedom to make choices despite the seeming inevitability of an unwanted war. They still have freedoms even if they are not the freedoms they want.

     All the characters have their reasons for being for or against the war. For some it means liberation in the long run, for most it appears to be an unwanted obstruction to the pursuit of the lives they were already living. For Mathieu it is both. Most of the characters think of the war as a means of defending Czechoslovakia against the German aggressors and most of them do not care about that issue. Most of them do not think much about the Holocaust or the concentration camps and ethnic cleansing of Jews. They know about the atrocities but their reasons for wanting to prevent the war are mostly selfish as if the issue of Sudetenland is used as a smokescreen and distraction to prevent them from thinking about the Holocaust. The issue is discussed by some Jewish characters in the novel but Sartre made this such a small issue to show how willfully ignorant the French populace was to the injustice of fascism. He is also throwing a punch at the anti-war people who can not see that peace would guarantee the slaughter of millions of innocent people. That is what happened anyways but reusing to engage with that issue proves that their pacifism is well-intentioned but an act of bad faith.

     If you are wondering what the French people get a reprieve from, you have to read the novel to its conclusion to find out. But it can be said here that their reprieve is an illusion. Sartre shows how the people are too close to their situation to be able to see it with clarity while, at the same time, they are myopic and can not see beyond their own noses well enough to comprehend the bigger picture. The consequences of their naivete is examined in the third installment, Troubled Sleep.

     The Reprieve is worth reading both for the smooth complexity of its narrative stylization and the nervous ambiguity of its themes. It is a deeply detailed and believable portrait a society’s collective mind when faced with the uncertainty of an unwanted disaster that is too close for comfort.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Reprieve. Vintage Books/Random House, New York: 1973

 

Book Review

Book Review

The Ticket That Exploded

by William S. Burroughs

     William S. Burrough’s Nova Trilogy is a set of experimental novels that use his cut-up technique of text creation and non-linear narrative to portray an inter-galactic war between the Nova Mob and the Nova Police. To say the trilogy has a narrative is actually misleading. There is no beginning to end story line, no character development, and often no cohesive themes to make it all mesh together. It is more like looking into the back of a garbage truck as it churns and mashes recognizable objects into a mush or rotting filth. These books contain vignettes, situations, moods, sex scenes, explanatory passages, and mind-altering word collages. The Ticket That Exploded is the second book of the trilogy, though in a non-linear work of fiction like this, it really doesn’t matter if you read the novels in sequence or even if you read all of them in their entirety. This book is possibly the most accessible of the three and stand up well on its own.

     It is difficult to summarize exactly what happens. There are heavy metal boys made of blue steel from Uranus and green fish boys with purple gills from Venus. There is space travel and unusual sexual experiences with space creatures that are surprisingly well-described. A man gets a bed in a sperm-harvesting factory where people get absorbed into new skins and sodomized by dummies. Members of the Nova Mob are introduced. Dr. Benway gets called in to fix up the mess they made. A pair of gay lovers wander around a post-apocalyptic suburb of a city with metal streets. The pages are saturated with ejaculating cocks, soft blue lights, vampires from outer space, vomit, anal mucus, pubic hairs, drug addicts, and all kinds of other nasty things.

     One major theme throughout the books is experimentation with splicing. In one passage, men are put together in a sensory deprivation chamber so they can not tell where one body begins and another ends. Human body halves are spliced together to make a third person out of two. The cut-up method is explained where two texts are cut in half and then randomly put back together again to disrupt the linear lines of communication. There are lots of tape recorder experiments too; voices are recorded onto tape and then randomly spliced together or sounds of riots are recorded and then played back in various locations to wreak havoc and cause chaos.

     The idea of language is also examined. Burroughs’ claim is that language is an entity that once had a symbiotic relationship with humans but language took over the brain and the relationship became parasitical. Now people and what they see are controlled by it. The disruption of linear linguistic patterns and the erasure of words can liberate us from the damaging vampire spirits of the Nova Mob that inhabit our bodies. The techniques of Scientology are mentioned since their cultish form of therapy involves tape recordings that constantly run in our heads and by erasing them we can free ourselves from control. Wilhelm Reich’s theory of orgone and orgasm is given some time too and that would explain the abundance of references to soft blue light throughout this book.

     A lot of this novel is descriptive. Often Burroughs will present us with a passage and then transition into a part where another text is cut into what has just been read. The resulting effect is like sliding along a spectrum of clarity and confusion. If you can get your mind thinking in multiple dimensions simultaneously then it is like reading two or three chapters of a book at the same time with varying levels of transparency, chaos, and noise. In other places it is similar to watching two films being projected onto one screen at the same time so that your brain mixes the images as the overlap transparently. Some of the explanatory passages, particularly the ones explaining the Nova Mob’s actions and intentions, also appear word for word in Nova Express. If you have read that book then this might be a little redundant.

     The Ticket That Exploded is like a short novel that was chapped into pieces which were put into a bag and then picked out randomly to be re-assembled in a new form. The conscious crafting of the language is minimal and the end product is just whatever happens to come out. In the process of the writing, the technique of composition explains itself. Burroughs believed it is necessary to liberate the human mind and the straitjacket formula of the novel from linear, rational structure that makes life boring, repetitive, and predictable. He literally believed that creating these cut-up texts were acts of magic that disrupted lines of communication between the spirits that control us and the entity they take orders from. To what extent Burroughs has succeeded is a matter of what you can tolerate. The Ticket That Exploded might work better than the other books in the Nova Trilogy because the mix of cut-ups, vignettes, and explanations just happened to fall into the right places by chance. Or did they? 

Burroughs, William S. The Ticket That Exploded. Grove Press Inc., New York: 1978.

 

R.I.P. Ruth Bader Ginsburg

R.I.P. Ruth Bader Ginsburg

American Supreme Court Justice

1933 - 2020

 

Huey

Huey

short documentary film about the Black Panthers

directed by Sally Pugh (1968)

 

BACHIR ATTAR AND THE MASTER MUSICIANS OF JAJOUKA

Though Brian Jones brought world-wide notice to these Moroccan master musicians in the early 1970s, their tradition goes back a millennium. Beyond Jones and the Stones, they’ve influenced Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, Bill Laswell, Steve Lacy, Peter Gabriel and Sonic Youth, among many others. Musician John Kruth contacted Bachir Attar, their current leader, to find out how they were riding out the worldwide pandemic and about the future of their world-healing music.

Read the full article on Please Kill Me here

 

Book Review

Book Review

The Age of Reason

by Jean-Paul Sartre

     Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Age of Reason is a soap opera. It follows the life of Mathieu Delarue, a philosophy professor whose main preoccupation in life is freedom. But he is enmeshed in the lives of other people and this causes him to confront himself in a way he never thought he would need to.

     First off there is Boris, one of Mathieu’s students at the university and his friend. Boris comes from a family of Russian emigres who fled to France after the Bolshevik Revolution. He also has his own concept of freedom and his passion in life is stealing things that he really does not need. For example, he has a collection of twenty-four toothbrushes that he never uses. His crowning achievement is stealing an antiquarian book that has no relevance to his life. Boris steals to prove to himself that he is above and outside ordinary humanity; it makes him feel unique and liberated but he fails to see how pointless this freedom is. His big dilemma though is his relationship with Lola, an older woman and an aging nightclub singer and drug addict who clings to Boris because she can not handle the pressures of getting old. Boris and Lola are a shadow of Mathieu and his relationship with his girlfriend Marcelle.

     Mathieu is also pursuing the affections of Boris’s sister Ivich, though it is not exactly clear why. She is not in love with him and she isn’t exactly a great catch. Ivich spends a lot of time with him and Boris but she takes very little interest in him. Mathieu appears to be more like a big brother to her than a possible romantic partner. His fasciantion for Ivich is probably more interesting than Ivich herself. She is unobtainable to him and he knows it but his fawning over her is like a flight from his advancing years. His belief in freedom entails a turning away from maturity and the responsibilities that go with it.

     Another character is Daniel, a financially secure stockbroker who is secretly gay. He fantasizes about ruining and destroying other people’s lives. He desires to turn his envy, self-loathing, and malice outwards but ultimately can not do it. He acts as though he fears causing harm to others and suppresses his cruelty, holding it inside where it eats away at him, causing him to contemplate suicide. When first introduced into the story, he sets out to drown his cats in a basket but he can not bring himself to murder them. Throughout the novel he thinks about wounding everybody he meets up with, all except for Mathieu’s lover Marcelle. Secretly, he has a relationship with her and Mathieu does not know about it. The climax of the story involves Daniel’s calculations to hurt Mathieu who he envies for his calmness and self-composure.

     Then there is Marcelle herself. Boris is sleeping with the elder woman Lola and Mathieu is sleeping with the elder woman Marcelle. The two pairs play off each other because both involve a young man in a relationship with an older woman who they like but do not actually love. Neither of the younger men have what it takes to end the relationship even though the possibility of it working out in long run is obviously not in the women’s favor. This is further complicated because Marcelle is pregnant with Mathieu’s baby. Mathieu insists on having her abort the fetus and the plot of the novel revolves around him wandering around Paris trying to borrow money for the procedure. Then Marcelle decides she wants to keep the baby.

     Mathieu is the central character and it is to him that we look to find Sartre’s philosophical illuminations. Mathieu has a strong belief in freedom but what that means in reality is not revealed to him until the end. Until that point he is entangled in the lives of everyone he knows. When he goes to visit his brother Jacques to borrow money, Jacques explains Mathieu’s life to him. After all, as Sartre would say, the eye can not see itself and an individual is too close to themselves to clearly see who they are. Other people are needed for that. Jacques explains that Mathieu has reached the age of reason. In the younger years a man develops himself ideologically and then reaches a liminal point where he has to stop thinking and starting acting according to the reality that surrounds him. This is the age of reason and that is where Mathieu is. Before that point, he avoided decisions and responsibilities, letting life take him where it would. His play-acting at living a free-spirited bohemian life was nothing but an escape from his bourgeois origins. Mathieu is living a lie, a life of bad faith, refusing to see or be what he really is. Now the time has come for him to make an existential choice and start to grow up. What he decides to do with Marcelle will be a significant turning point that will effect him for the rest of his life. Mathieu’s dilemma is that he is not ready to make that choice or accept full responsibility for who he will become. The circumstances have thrown him into an existential crisis.

     It is common for people who don’t like philosophy to say that it does not apply to real life. Sartre wrote this novel to show how his existentialist philosophy does apply to people and the internal struggles they face. Ironically, Mathieu’s philosophy of freedom appears to be detached his own life and unfortunately we see how his mentoring is causing Boris to avoid making good decisions as well. This is one strength of The Age of Reason. Another is the way in which Mathieu and the other characters are so well-written. The reader gets to know them inside and out. By the end of the book, the reader feels as though they are as real as people they know in their own lives. The only exception to this is Marcelle who plays such a marginal role in the narrative which seems wrong since she is such an important component of Mathieu’s problems. Maybe Sartre, the husband of Simone de Beauvoir, was making a statement about the marginal status of women in French society but somehow this really seems more like an oversight.

     This near masterpiece is a soap opera but it is a soap opera for intelligent people. The plot is simple but that is significant because too complicated a story could distract the reader from the more important points being addressed. The characters embody the ideas of existentialist philosophy: freedom, the importance of choice, emotions, rationality, and the examination of morals in the absence of religion.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Age of Reason. Bantam Books, New York: 1959.

 

Fragments of Sol Chaneles’ Lost Manuscript on CIA Book Publishing Operations

 One of the alternative press’s most significant scoops of the 1960s was Sol Stern’s February 1967 Ramparts magazine’s exposé revealing that the Central Intelligence Agency had long secretly funded and controlled the National Student Association (NSA). The story was significant because it revealed the NSA was a CIA front, but its greater significance came with the many derivative investigative journalistic pieces published in the months that followed. This later wave of stories used Stern’s methods of tracing CIA funding fronts to reveal a hidden world of CIA infiltrations of organizations. Once Ramparts published the names of the funding fronts the CIA had used, others followed Stern’s methods and in the months that followed, dozens of news stories revealed CIA front operations. These ranged from the funding of labor unions, judicial organizations, professional associations, to publishers and organizations like the International Conference of the Boy Scouts Movement.

Read the full article on CounterPunch here

Book Review

Book Review

Three Novels: The Soft Machine/Nova Express/The Wild Boys

by William S. Burroughs

   Grove Press put together this volume of three novels by William S. Burroughs soon after the time he toured America to give readings, a tour that culminated in The Nova Convention festival celebrating his work. For readers who are fascinated by his most famous books, Junky and Naked Lunch, this trio is the obvious next step for exploring the wilderness of this Beat Generation author’s mind. What we get here are The Soft Machine and Nova Express, the first and third books of The Nova Trilogy, and The Wild Boys, another short novel written in a similar style and addressing similar themes. The experience of reading these three novellas together is not just hallucinatory and disorienting but also disturbing, disgusting, sometimes beautiful, and often phantasmagorical. It is a dirty and entrancing nightmare, a subversive attack on the modern human condition that could possibly cause harm to your sanity.

      The title The Soft Machine is a metaphor for the human body. In a sense this first book examines the fluid boundaries of the human flesh as a vehicle for consciousness. It starts in familiar Burroughs territory, the criminal underground of junkies and dealers and the shady cops who pursue them. But the descriptive narrative gets interrupted by his use of the cut-up technique; the story becomes jumbled and confusing and the reader starts to feel lost. There is lots of stuff about movies of men being hung and ejaculating when their necks snap amongst a whole heap of other vile images. When it comes back into sharper focus, the narrator is visiting a shaman in Panama. The shaman performs a ceremony that transports him back in time to an ancient Mayan village to inhabit the body of a field-working slave. The Mayan priests control the society until the narrator sneaks into their temple and alters their calendar so that crops get planted at the wrong time. The priests get killed and then all hell breaks loose. The village is subjected to a deadly heat ray, a giant centipede, green fish boys with purple gills and anything else you might expect to encounter when a calendar gets altered and the crops get planted at the wrong time. Then we are back in the confusion of cut-up territory with lots of gay sex scenes involving Central and South American young men.

     Nova Express is a little more focused at times. There are plenty of cut-ups but the conflict between the Nova Mob and the Nova Police gets explained. There is also a giant corporation that controls the Earth. The Nova Mob are criminal vampire-type spirits that originate in other planets and enter peoples’ bodies at times when their consciousness is disrupted like when taking drugs or having orgasms. The abundant instances when men ejaculate while being hung from a gallows pole is an especially powerful time, making it easier for them to enter our planet. So basically the nameless corporate syndicate manipulates the minds of humans by using film and sound recordings. Notice these are the most significant components of television, the media, and nowadays the internet. Cut-ups are used to disrupt their lines of communication with the people they control. The Nova Mob creates chaos by disrupting these recordings and the Nova Police are trying to stop them. All this happens at a molecular level; recorded images, sounds, and language are shrunk to miniscule size and implanted into human cells where they later emerge in peoples’ mind screens in order to control them. Wait a minute...did William S. Burroughs, in the early 1960s predict digital technology? Isn’t that similar to the way microprocessors and microchips operate? Anyhow, the Nova Police try to apprehend the Nova Mob by administering apomorphine and restraining them with antibiotic handcuffs because the Nova Mob’s plan is to heighten all the social and political conflicts to incite a global nuclear holocaust, the ultimate planetary orgasm. It’s hard to tell what side Burroughs is on; he doesn’t appear to have any particular fondness for any of the characters involved in this mess with the exception of the young Latino boys who are constantly having sex with each other. And Burroughs dedicates more literary space to the subject of anal mucus than any other known author in history. OK take a breath; it’s a lot to take in but its fascinating all the same.

     The Wild Boys is the odd story out. While some cut-ups are used, the narrative is more descriptive and sometimes more clear and easy to follow. Or do you just get more used to the literary technique by the time you get his far? The Wild Boys are a renegade gang of homosexuals in Morocco who indulge in heavy drug use and sexual orgies. They have expanded to a worldwide underground network and criminal cabal. The puritanical and hypocritical American establishment of rich WASPish evangelicals, military commanders, CIA agents, and politicians have set out on a mission to capture and exterminate them. Of course, the Wild Boys are too smart to allow that to happen. If gore and gay sex are things that bother you, this is not a book you should be reading.

     William S. Burroughs may seem incomprehensible if looked at in the wrong light. Knowing the details of his unusual life may be a key to it all. Aside from being a gay heroin addict, he also wrote these books while he was a member of The Church of Scientology. The passages about time travel and the movement from one human body to another are direct references to the times he spent traveling in Central and South America in search of the hallucinogenic drug yage. But most importantly, knowing he was the grandson of William Seward Burroughs, the inventor of the adding machine and founder of The Burroughs Corporation says a lot about what is going on here. Burroughs had a contentious relationship with his family who rejected his lifestyle. Notice all the references to the bedroom with roses on the wallpaper in the suburbs of St. Louis; that is a direct reference to where he grew up. His corporate syndicate that controls the world could easily be seen as The Burroughs Corporation, a company that played a major role in the mechanization of American society during the Industrial Revolution. The adding machine was one of the first computers but they also invented the time clock and punch cards used in factories as well as being a major contributor to the industrialization of the military during World War II. IBM started as as one of their divisions and eventually splintered off. Burroughs use of non-linear narratives, psychological dissociation through the use of drugs, and randomly inserted elements from his use of the cut-up technique might be read as an attack on his family’s legacy and the role they played in the routinization and control of modern society. It is as if he wanted to tear this cybernetic society to shreds and see what comes next.

      Another way of looking at this writing is that it may be a solopsistic fantasy of a man coming to terms with his drug addiction and homosexuality played out on a universal scale. The vampire spirits of the Nova Mob that control people at a biological level can easily be a metaphor for a heroin habit. The gay sex is a magical act that allows to bodies to inhabit the same space simultaneously while disrupting the boundaries of a rigidly gendered society. Like the poetry of William Blake or the painting of Hieronymus Bosch, his personal vision of cosmic conflict is both outside the understanding of ordinary thought but still close enough that we can see how it all works even if we don’t know what it all means. And all this is expressed by a highly articulate writer who just happened to have one of the most bizarre minds of the 20^th century.

     Whatever the case may be, this is not easy literature to approach. The plot of these books does not really hold the narrative together. Rather it hangs over the text like a blob of slimy eviscerated guts mixed with gallons of sperm, raw sewage, and vomit. Even those who are familiar and experienced with this literature might find these books to be abrasive and bewildering. The cut-ups do wear a little thin at times and the narrative isn’t even really a narrative. It is more like an altered state of consciousness where comprehension fades in and out as if you are watching a film reel that has been double exposed in some places or a movie on tv getting interference from another channel so that you can only understand bits and pieces of what is going on. Sometimes this writing degenerates into the literary equivalent of white noise or the static on the radio between stations.

     Again, this is not easy or even pleasant reading but it is great art. You will not come away from it feeling the same as you did before reading it. Your mind may actually never be the same again. 

Burroughs, William S. Three Novels: The Soft Machine/Nova Express/The Wild Boys. Grove Weidenfeld, New York: 1988. 

 

Book Review

Our Lady Of the Flowers

by Jean Genet

     What would you do if you were locked up alone in a prison cell for a crime you know you are guilty of? One obvious answer is that you might spend a lot of time fantasizing about life on the outside. Another thing you might do is masturbate. This is what Jean Genet does in Our Lady Of the Flowers.

     The prisoner Jean awaits trial for theft. He sticks pages from magazines on his cell wall and, while pleasuring himself, he uses his imagination to construct lives for them and stories about who they are. Divine is the protagonist of the non-linear narrative. He is a gay, cross-dressing prostitute who lives in an attic apartment with his lover, a pimp named Darling. Divine is close to thirty, worried about aging and wracked by insecurities, a decaying mental state that is made worse by living in a society that despises gay people. His friends are spiteful and mean and Darling does not pay him the attention he deserves. Divine is marginalized in the underclass of homosexuals and criminals and that underclass is marginalized by the host society so there is nowhere else for him to go except into fantasies.

     Genet constructs his narrative along strings of associations. Jean’s prison cell is easily transformed into Divine’s attic apartment. The other characters in Divine’s story are aspects of Jean’s personality. Notice how he physically describes Divine’s and Darling’s physical appearance using identical wording and then look at a picture of Jean Genet; you will find that they correspond exactly. Divine, in his imagination, associates the downtrodden society he belongs to with the heavenly realm of Catholic saints and scatological references to farts, shit, and toilets are transmuted into pearls, gems, and sunlight. After Divine gets rejected by the church for his sexuality and criminal behavior, he seeks transcendence in the imminent world of prostitutes and thieves; in his fantasies he sublimates his reality by canonizing these outcasts so that he both transubstantiates them and transgresses Catholic dogma. Jean creates a chain of association between his own imagination and Divine’s dreams of security and acceptance.

     The links of this chain are rooted in Divine’s childhood with the narrative shift being demarcated by switching to the child’s given name of Louis Culafroy. He grows up in rural France as much an outcast there as he is in Paris. His mother neglects him and his father is absent; take note that there is no God or Heavenly Father in Divine’s mysticism. The other children bully him and ignore him but he lives in the nicest house in the town. Culafroy’s family descended from the old aristocracy and as a child he imagines himself in relation to nobility and royalty to compensate for his loneliness. To his mother he is an outsider just as much as he is at school. Jean’s cell becomes Divine’s apartment which becomes Culafroy’s bedroom where he spends his time pretending. He asks his mother to buy him a violin but she says no so he makes one out of cardboard. In his fantasies, the unplayable violin becomes a vehicle for him to imagine playing a real violin, mastering the art of music, and becoming a world-class violinist. The chain of contrasts and wish-fulfillment fantasies is again realized in the narrative.

     Culafroy’s first sexual experience is with an older man who catches snakes by the river. When Culafroy touches one of the snakes, he feels the essence of a whole collection of serpents entering his body and becoming a permanent part of him. The symbolism is both unmistakably Christian and homoerotic. Culafroy’s fall from grace initiates a chain of association between him and religious imagery. Jean builds on this association by telling the story of how Culafroy got put into a juvenile detention center for stealing. He escapes by stealing again, this time from the laundry room where he puts on a nun’s habit and walks out; thus we see how dressing as a woman helps him escape the ugly reality he does not want to belong to. Of course, as Divine finds out later in Paris, as he sits in a cafe with both gay and straight people who all seem to despise him, cross-dressing does not actually resolve the problems he wishes to solve.

     Eventually Darling falls in love with another gay prostitute and moves out of Divine’s apartment, abandoning him. This is when a teenage boy who killed an old man during a burglary moves in. Divine falls in love and christens him Our Lady Of the Flowers. At about the same time, Divine’s mother arrives in Paris, searching for her son who she had not seen for a very long time. Notice the connection between Our Lady Of the Flowers, an alternate name for St. Marie or the Virgin Mary and Culafroy’s neglectful mother. The aging Divine seeks for atonement with a teenager to compensate for the love he never got from his uncaring mother. But Our Lady Of the Flowers fall in love with an attractive Black man and then gets sent to prison. Divine’s mother, horrified to see the life her son is living, shoots him. The illusions are shattered and Divine never fulfills his ultimate dream; he spends his life trying to please other people and never gets his ultimate wish: the acceptance and love he desires. Despite being a thief, he never wanted to hurt anybody and his only true crime was being different.

     The crime of theft is a central and reoccurring theme throughout the novel. The teenager Culafroy gets sent to a detention center for stealing and he escapes by stealing the outfit of a nun. Divine makes money as a streetwalker but he also earns a living by shoplifting items to be fenced. Towards the end of the novel, Divine is shoplifting in a department store. The items he steals are luxury goods like wallets, perfumes, and expensive scarfs. Being the outcast that he is, the host society has stolen the opportunity for Divine to make an honest living so that he can buy these items legally. Theft is a means of compensating for the place in society he has been denied because of his sexuality. Likewise he steals imagery from the Catholic church and uses it to ornament the people he associates with because the church has denied him membership and the sense of belonging he craves. For Jean, Culafroy, and Divine stealing is as central to his identity as fantasy. Then he gets caught by the department store’s policeman only then he isn’t dressed as a woman. Divine isn’t Divine anymore because Divine is Jean and Jean is on his way to a prison cell. The illusion is pierced, the fantasy collapses, Divine’s attic becomes Jean’s prison and everything has come full circle.

     Our Lady Of the Flowers is a lot more than a portrait of a gay man in French society. It examines the nature of an outcast’s identity, thrown into a world of modern, existential alienation. It examines the nature of creativity and the writing of literature. It shows how fantasy can make a person complete when they are denied the chance to obtain what they should be allowed to have. It shows how imagination is necessary. There is one passage in the book where Jean and a Black cellmate, who may or may not be imaginary, are painting an army of toy soldiers blue as if they are gods creating human beings. But underneath the blue paint and metal surfaces, the toy soldiers are hollow, they are something wrapped around nothing, a synthesis of being and nothingness. The soldiers are the world of people where the illusion of reality is a cover for the emptiness of life. In the end, the illusion may not be real but without it there is nothing so the illusion may be all that Jean has to cling to in order to stay alive. That is how a reader with nothing in common with Jean can find a way to relate to him.

Genet, Jean. Our Lady Of the Flowers. Panther Books, London: 1969.

 

Book Review

Book Review

Junky by William S. Burroughs

     In 1950 or so, the family of William S. Burroughs were embarrassed by his lifestyle and drug addiction so they cut off his trust fund, leaving him stranded without a steady income. Dealing heroin only gave him enough money to keep his habit going and fencing stolen goods didn’t prove to be very lucrative either. Burroughs decided to write a novel for the pulp market in order to buy food and pay rent. Writing about what he knew helped him make an easy transition into the world of cheap and sleazy paperbacks. Junky, originally published under the pen name William Lee, was his first published book and initiated the world into the mythos of WSB. But Burroughs had natural talent and this book is far better than standard pulp fiction fare.

     Junky is the most straightforward novel Burroughs ever wrote. Going by the name of Bill, the narrator spends time in New York City, New Orleans, and Mexico City doing all the things a heroin addict does. He deals to maintain his habit, spends a lot of time buying and getting his fixes, rolling drunks in the subway for money, going in and out of jails and rehab centers, and spending as much time kicking his habits as he does indulging in them. There appears to be two Bills in this narrative; one Bill is using heroin and the other Bill is trying not to use heroin. The latter Bill is the darker of the two. When he isn’t shooting up he compensates by smoking weed, sniffing coke, getting blind drunk, and experimenting with hallucinogens. Sometimes he also plays with guns and has sex with teenage Mexican boy prostitutes.

     That is what happens throughout the whole book. What really makes it great is the Burroughs style. In his spartan sentences, he describes people and places using the least number of words possible but such bone-dry descriptions are always clear. This is direct, no frills communication and if his other books make you feel confused or alienated from the text, you should try out Junky to get a good grasp of what Burroughs was all about. His sparse prose is delivered so that you can always hear his nasal, monotonous voice reciting these lines in a way that is avuncular and hypnotic, speaking directly to that part of your brain that makes him impossible to forget.

     Then there is the humor. It should come as no surprise that heroin addicts are a sorry bunch of characters. Burroughs describes these outcasts and losers with a stark, deadpan approach that is often hilarious. He comes across as what he is: an upper class rich guy thrown into a scumpit society where his only connection to the other people in it is through their shared sickness of drug addiction. He cannot admire or glamorize these people. He doesn’t even feel affection for them. He just describes them as they are with gallows humor. Burroughs’ literary persona is so rigid and unemotional that you could be forgiven for not immediately recognizing all the jokes he makes but once you get a sense for what he is about, there might be times when you cannot stop laughing.

     Junky is one of the first books you should read if you are new to Beat Generation literature. It is also a lucid entry into the mind of William S. Burroughs. It stays interesting after multiple readings too and can actually function as a skeleton key to the more stupefying novels of this genius writer. But do not enter the world of this author blindly since readers unfamiliar with this man should be warned: the literature of William S. Burroughs could possibly be works of The Devil.

Burroughs, William S. Junky. Penguin Books, New York: 1977.