(no subject)
I just discovered last.fm. It's pretty much one of the best music tools I've stumbled upon in awhile. Does anyone out there have an account? My account name is Dinosaur-J if you do!
Also
My paper is really coming along. That's good considering it would be pseudo-expected of me to turn it in tomorrow
Jonathon Edwards
ENGL 105 G12
The folklore behind William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch has become inseparable from the novel itself. It seems Burroughs’ life, whether related anecdotally or biographically, can overshadow his work and therefore becomes a part of the debate surrounding the novel, though not always overtly. Naked Lunch is tied to the time Burroughs spent in Tangiers, though it is more informed by his experiences there than it is a documentary account (http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/5/22/221925/006).
This story begins in 1944 when Burroughs moved to New York City and shortly after began living with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Edie Parker, and Joan Vollmer who would later become Burroughs’ common law wife (Skerl). The Burroughs’ family would move to a farm in New Waverly, Texas in 1946 after William could “feel the heat closing in”. Vollmer already had a little girl from a previous marriage and in 1947 gave birth to William S. Burroughs Jr. Traditional cash crops proved unable to handle the financial burdens of a family of six: two children, a Benzedrine addicted Joan, and William, whose drug habits had earned him the epithet “master addict” (Skerl 18). During a subsequent search of Burroughs’ home following an arrest for drunk driving police found a letter from Ginsberg discussing plans for a large shipment of marijuana to New York. This led the family to move to Algiers, Louisiana, right across the Mississippi River from New Orleans.
It is here in Louisiana that we find Burroughs characterized in Kerouac’s On The Road as Old Bull Lee. He is depicted as a fatherly, sage-like figure who has experienced more than anyone else in the group and is in a constant state of learning. But we also see his junkie side during a calm Louisiana night, as Kerouac writes:
Bull was in the bathroom taking his fix, clutching his old black necktie
in his teeth for a tourniquet and jabbing with the needle into his woesome arm
with the thousand holes;
Kerouac says of Burroughs during this time that “now he was settling to his life’s work, which was the study of things themselves in the streets of life and the night” (Kerouac 120). Burroughs fascination with weapons is also mentioned in On The Road and it was this penchant for guns and drugs that got him in trouble with the law again and led to his flight to Mexico City (Skerl 12). Here he descended deeper into his morphine and heroine addictions until on September 6, 1951 he shot and killed Joan in what has been described as a drunken game of William Tell (Grauerholz). The children were sent to stay with their grandparents and Burroughs stayed in Mexico City until 1952 when his lawyer skipped town due to legal problems of his own. For the next year Burroughs travels between Tangier where he is beginning to lay roots, New York city where Ginsberg helps him to edit letters into a publishable work, and Central and South America where he pursues the psychotomimetic drink yage.
In December of 1953 Burroughs finally settled in Tangier, taking a hiatus from his incessant traveling. This period from 1951 until 1953 was highly influential on Burroughs in several ways. We can see the roots of his mistrust of authority and specifically law enforcement in his many legal entanglements in Mexico and the bureaucratic corruption he witnessed in South America (citation needed). His entire trip to South America was ostensibly a search for the ayahuasca vine, known in Columbia as yage. A tea brewed from this vine is sought after for its known hallucinogenic properties. This fantastical trip in search of a fantastical substance is not just evidence of Burroughs’ deep interest in psychoactive substances but also of his “study of things themselves,” displaying a marked tendency toward Existentialism which would serve as a basis for the values of his writing.
Perhaps Burroughs’ most important development from this time period is the introduction of the routine, a form described by Skerl as “satirical fantasy improvised from a factual base (Skerl 32).” Burroughs’ first routine was “Roosevelt After Inauguration” which is first mentioned in the May 23rd note in The Yage Letters, a collection of the correspondence between Burroughs and Ginsberg detailing the South American trip and eventually Burroughs’ experience with yage. The notes and observations he collects from this point on will later be refined into the routines that make up Naked Lunch and several works after it. Routine from dream!
Burroughs finally settled in Tangier because of the inexpensive cost of living, the expatriate community of other artists and writers, the accessibility of morphine and any drug, and because of Paul Bowles’ book Let It Come Down, which is set in Tangier (Harris 180). Tangier was made an international zone in 1923 and was under the joint administration of Britain, Spain, France, and later Italy until 1956 when it was returned to Morocco. The city gained a reputation in the 40’s as a playground for crooks, addicts, artists, and millionaires due to it’s political neutrality and commercial liberty during World War II. Tangier also has a long history of use by spies and detectives, appealing to Burroughs’ interest and later style of noir writing. It is rumored that the Pinkerton Detective Agency used to send new detectives to Tangier to learn how to shadow targets in the medina (182).
This is the setting for Burroughs’ life for the next three years as he descends further into his addiction and collects notes and routines. In 1957 he finally decided to do something about his self-described “terminal addiction” (Skerl 33). Haunted by a sense of imminent death he traveled to London to undergo Dr. John Yerbury Dent’s apomorphine cure. The procedure was a success and barring a few relapses he was clean by 1959 (13). He became a vociferous proponent of apomorphine treatment for addiction and believed that the rejection of the treatment by several federal agencies is part of a “conspiracy to spread the narcotics problem in the United States in order to expand bureaucratic control, especially to control youth” (34).
Now clean, Burroughs begins the daunting task of editing nearly a thousand pages of notes, many he doesn’t remember writing while in the cycle of addiction and withdrawal, into the novel that would eventually become Naked Lunch (Deposition). This took nearly two years to accomplish and the help of both Kerouac and Ginsberg in Tangier in 1957 and Brion Gysin and Sinclair Beiles in Paris in 1959 (Skerl 34). Ginsberg began taking the novel to various publishers as soon as they had a working order. In 1957 Ginsberg brought a “rather bulky, pasted-up manuscript” of Naked Lunch to French Publisher Maurice Girodias who had created Olympia Press, famous for publishing works that both American and British publishing houses would not print due to the frank treatment of sex in the books (Goodman 8). Though at first Girodias turned down the manuscript since it was almost illegible, Olympia published Naked Lunch in 1959 after the 1958 incident involving the Chicago Review.
In 1958 all but one of the editors at the Chicago Review, internationally famous for being run entirely by student editors, resigned after an issue was indirectly censored by a committee of the university for running portions of Naked Lunch (Goodman 21). Irving Rosenthal, the former chief editor, found a new magazine to be titled Big Table (24). Rosenthal was slated to be the editor of the first issue and was committed to featuring the material that had been censored over at the Chicago Review. However, when a literary critic informed the Post Office of the obscene material in Big Table #1 the first run was seized and sent to the Post Office’s General Council and subsequently ruled obscene, thus unable to be mailed.
The publicity from these two incidents ultimately served to help Naked Lunch by bringing it into the spotlight and disseminating the shining reviews other respected writers had given it. Ginsberg went to bat again as a literary agent for Burroughs and succeeded in getting American publisher Grove Press to pick up Naked Lunch in 1962 (Skerl 35). As soon as it was published a court cases were filed in Boston and shortly thereafter in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles case was dismissed at a hearing in 1965, but the same year Massachusetts Superior Court Judge Eugene A. Hudson ruled that Naked Lunch was “obscene, indecent, and impure… [and] taken as a whole predominantly prurient, hard-core pornography, and utterly without redeeming social importance” (Goodman 235). The Massachusetts Supreme Court reversed this decision in 1966 ruling that Naked Lunch did have redeeming social value demonstrated by the serious treatment of the novel by the literary community (243). They left a qualification to the ruling that new proceedings are not discouraged if the advertising exploits the book for “its possible prurient appeal.”
All of the issues surrounding the publication of Naked Lunch arise from the willingness of some to label the novel obscene and without redeeming value. At the time it was necessary for many prominent writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer to testify the novel’s merit (Goodman 5). Now we can easily see how Naked Lunch fits perfectly in a description of post-modern literature and realizes the characteristics of this description. I find post-modern literature can be roughly described by these attributes, taken from an essay by Professor John Lye:
- A reaction to, refusal and diffusion of, the elements of modernist thought which are totalizing: which suggest a master narrative or master code, i.e. an explanatory cohesion of experience; the result may be
-a sense of discontinuity, of the world as a field of contesting explanations none of which can claim any authority,
-parodies of all sorts of meta-narrative and master-code elements, including genre and literary form,
-the challenging of borders and limits, including those of decency,
-the exploration of the marginalized aspects of life and marginalized elements of society.
- A sense that life is lived in a world with no transcendent warrant, nothing to guarantee or to underwrite our being as meaningful moral creatures. Life just is. We no longer look for a pattern. We may celebrate its specificity, its immediacy; or not. Postmodernism goes different directions here.
- A reaction to, refusal of, the totalizing of modernist form -- of the dominance in modernism of form and of the idea of the aesthetic, which concept created a 'special world' for art, cut off from the variety and everydayness of life (a negative judgment on this 'refusal' is that postmodernism simply aestheticizes everything, see the next point).
- An attempt to integrate art and life -- the inclusion of popular forms, popular culture, everyday reality; Bakhtin's notion of 'carnival', of joyous, anti-authoritarian, riotous, carnal and liberatory celebration, makes sense in this context and adds a sense of energy and freedom to some post modern work
- A refusal of seriousness or an undercutting of or problematizing of seriousness -- achieved through such things as the above-mentioned notion of carnival, of the turning upside-down of everything, and through the use of parody, play, black humour and wit; this refusal and these methods of undercutting seriousness are associated as well with fragmentation, as traditional notions of narrative coherence are challenged, undone. The 'problem' with seriousness is that is has no room for the disruptions necessary to expose the oppressions and repressions of master narratives, in fact seriousness tends almost inevitably to reinforce them and hence the ideologies they support; to attack seriousness does not mean, in this context, to abandon conviction or good intentions.
- A crossing or dissolving of borders -- between fiction and non-fiction, between literary genres, between high and low culture
- A move away from perspectivism, from the located, unified 'subject' and the associated grounding of the authority of experience in the sovereign subject and its processes of perception and reflection. (see next point)
- A fragmentation of the self (the unified, located subject), or a disappearance or flatness -- the self, or subject, is no longer a 'psychological' reality but henceforth a cultural construction, located rhetorically (in terms of the kinds of language used, the subject matter, the situation), differently configured in different situations.
- A greater emphasis on the body, on the human as incarnate, as physical beings in a physical world. This is tied to postmodernism's distrust of rationalism and of the ideology of the Enlightenment.
Shoot me some advice or encouragement! I'm going to be up all night working on this and stuff for jazz ped...
Also
My paper is really coming along. That's good considering it would be pseudo-expected of me to turn it in tomorrow
Jonathon Edwards
ENGL 105 G12
The folklore behind William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch has become inseparable from the novel itself. It seems Burroughs’ life, whether related anecdotally or biographically, can overshadow his work and therefore becomes a part of the debate surrounding the novel, though not always overtly. Naked Lunch is tied to the time Burroughs spent in Tangiers, though it is more informed by his experiences there than it is a documentary account (http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/5/22/221925/006).
This story begins in 1944 when Burroughs moved to New York City and shortly after began living with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Edie Parker, and Joan Vollmer who would later become Burroughs’ common law wife (Skerl). The Burroughs’ family would move to a farm in New Waverly, Texas in 1946 after William could “feel the heat closing in”. Vollmer already had a little girl from a previous marriage and in 1947 gave birth to William S. Burroughs Jr. Traditional cash crops proved unable to handle the financial burdens of a family of six: two children, a Benzedrine addicted Joan, and William, whose drug habits had earned him the epithet “master addict” (Skerl 18). During a subsequent search of Burroughs’ home following an arrest for drunk driving police found a letter from Ginsberg discussing plans for a large shipment of marijuana to New York. This led the family to move to Algiers, Louisiana, right across the Mississippi River from New Orleans.
It is here in Louisiana that we find Burroughs characterized in Kerouac’s On The Road as Old Bull Lee. He is depicted as a fatherly, sage-like figure who has experienced more than anyone else in the group and is in a constant state of learning. But we also see his junkie side during a calm Louisiana night, as Kerouac writes:
Bull was in the bathroom taking his fix, clutching his old black necktie
in his teeth for a tourniquet and jabbing with the needle into his woesome arm
with the thousand holes;
Kerouac says of Burroughs during this time that “now he was settling to his life’s work, which was the study of things themselves in the streets of life and the night” (Kerouac 120). Burroughs fascination with weapons is also mentioned in On The Road and it was this penchant for guns and drugs that got him in trouble with the law again and led to his flight to Mexico City (Skerl 12). Here he descended deeper into his morphine and heroine addictions until on September 6, 1951 he shot and killed Joan in what has been described as a drunken game of William Tell (Grauerholz). The children were sent to stay with their grandparents and Burroughs stayed in Mexico City until 1952 when his lawyer skipped town due to legal problems of his own. For the next year Burroughs travels between Tangier where he is beginning to lay roots, New York city where Ginsberg helps him to edit letters into a publishable work, and Central and South America where he pursues the psychotomimetic drink yage.
In December of 1953 Burroughs finally settled in Tangier, taking a hiatus from his incessant traveling. This period from 1951 until 1953 was highly influential on Burroughs in several ways. We can see the roots of his mistrust of authority and specifically law enforcement in his many legal entanglements in Mexico and the bureaucratic corruption he witnessed in South America (citation needed). His entire trip to South America was ostensibly a search for the ayahuasca vine, known in Columbia as yage. A tea brewed from this vine is sought after for its known hallucinogenic properties. This fantastical trip in search of a fantastical substance is not just evidence of Burroughs’ deep interest in psychoactive substances but also of his “study of things themselves,” displaying a marked tendency toward Existentialism which would serve as a basis for the values of his writing.
Perhaps Burroughs’ most important development from this time period is the introduction of the routine, a form described by Skerl as “satirical fantasy improvised from a factual base (Skerl 32).” Burroughs’ first routine was “Roosevelt After Inauguration” which is first mentioned in the May 23rd note in The Yage Letters, a collection of the correspondence between Burroughs and Ginsberg detailing the South American trip and eventually Burroughs’ experience with yage. The notes and observations he collects from this point on will later be refined into the routines that make up Naked Lunch and several works after it. Routine from dream!
Burroughs finally settled in Tangier because of the inexpensive cost of living, the expatriate community of other artists and writers, the accessibility of morphine and any drug, and because of Paul Bowles’ book Let It Come Down, which is set in Tangier (Harris 180). Tangier was made an international zone in 1923 and was under the joint administration of Britain, Spain, France, and later Italy until 1956 when it was returned to Morocco. The city gained a reputation in the 40’s as a playground for crooks, addicts, artists, and millionaires due to it’s political neutrality and commercial liberty during World War II. Tangier also has a long history of use by spies and detectives, appealing to Burroughs’ interest and later style of noir writing. It is rumored that the Pinkerton Detective Agency used to send new detectives to Tangier to learn how to shadow targets in the medina (182).
This is the setting for Burroughs’ life for the next three years as he descends further into his addiction and collects notes and routines. In 1957 he finally decided to do something about his self-described “terminal addiction” (Skerl 33). Haunted by a sense of imminent death he traveled to London to undergo Dr. John Yerbury Dent’s apomorphine cure. The procedure was a success and barring a few relapses he was clean by 1959 (13). He became a vociferous proponent of apomorphine treatment for addiction and believed that the rejection of the treatment by several federal agencies is part of a “conspiracy to spread the narcotics problem in the United States in order to expand bureaucratic control, especially to control youth” (34).
Now clean, Burroughs begins the daunting task of editing nearly a thousand pages of notes, many he doesn’t remember writing while in the cycle of addiction and withdrawal, into the novel that would eventually become Naked Lunch (Deposition). This took nearly two years to accomplish and the help of both Kerouac and Ginsberg in Tangier in 1957 and Brion Gysin and Sinclair Beiles in Paris in 1959 (Skerl 34). Ginsberg began taking the novel to various publishers as soon as they had a working order. In 1957 Ginsberg brought a “rather bulky, pasted-up manuscript” of Naked Lunch to French Publisher Maurice Girodias who had created Olympia Press, famous for publishing works that both American and British publishing houses would not print due to the frank treatment of sex in the books (Goodman 8). Though at first Girodias turned down the manuscript since it was almost illegible, Olympia published Naked Lunch in 1959 after the 1958 incident involving the Chicago Review.
In 1958 all but one of the editors at the Chicago Review, internationally famous for being run entirely by student editors, resigned after an issue was indirectly censored by a committee of the university for running portions of Naked Lunch (Goodman 21). Irving Rosenthal, the former chief editor, found a new magazine to be titled Big Table (24). Rosenthal was slated to be the editor of the first issue and was committed to featuring the material that had been censored over at the Chicago Review. However, when a literary critic informed the Post Office of the obscene material in Big Table #1 the first run was seized and sent to the Post Office’s General Council and subsequently ruled obscene, thus unable to be mailed.
The publicity from these two incidents ultimately served to help Naked Lunch by bringing it into the spotlight and disseminating the shining reviews other respected writers had given it. Ginsberg went to bat again as a literary agent for Burroughs and succeeded in getting American publisher Grove Press to pick up Naked Lunch in 1962 (Skerl 35). As soon as it was published a court cases were filed in Boston and shortly thereafter in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles case was dismissed at a hearing in 1965, but the same year Massachusetts Superior Court Judge Eugene A. Hudson ruled that Naked Lunch was “obscene, indecent, and impure… [and] taken as a whole predominantly prurient, hard-core pornography, and utterly without redeeming social importance” (Goodman 235). The Massachusetts Supreme Court reversed this decision in 1966 ruling that Naked Lunch did have redeeming social value demonstrated by the serious treatment of the novel by the literary community (243). They left a qualification to the ruling that new proceedings are not discouraged if the advertising exploits the book for “its possible prurient appeal.”
All of the issues surrounding the publication of Naked Lunch arise from the willingness of some to label the novel obscene and without redeeming value. At the time it was necessary for many prominent writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer to testify the novel’s merit (Goodman 5). Now we can easily see how Naked Lunch fits perfectly in a description of post-modern literature and realizes the characteristics of this description. I find post-modern literature can be roughly described by these attributes, taken from an essay by Professor John Lye:
- A reaction to, refusal and diffusion of, the elements of modernist thought which are totalizing: which suggest a master narrative or master code, i.e. an explanatory cohesion of experience; the result may be
-a sense of discontinuity, of the world as a field of contesting explanations none of which can claim any authority,
-parodies of all sorts of meta-narrative and master-code elements, including genre and literary form,
-the challenging of borders and limits, including those of decency,
-the exploration of the marginalized aspects of life and marginalized elements of society.
- A sense that life is lived in a world with no transcendent warrant, nothing to guarantee or to underwrite our being as meaningful moral creatures. Life just is. We no longer look for a pattern. We may celebrate its specificity, its immediacy; or not. Postmodernism goes different directions here.
- A reaction to, refusal of, the totalizing of modernist form -- of the dominance in modernism of form and of the idea of the aesthetic, which concept created a 'special world' for art, cut off from the variety and everydayness of life (a negative judgment on this 'refusal' is that postmodernism simply aestheticizes everything, see the next point).
- An attempt to integrate art and life -- the inclusion of popular forms, popular culture, everyday reality; Bakhtin's notion of 'carnival', of joyous, anti-authoritarian, riotous, carnal and liberatory celebration, makes sense in this context and adds a sense of energy and freedom to some post modern work
- A refusal of seriousness or an undercutting of or problematizing of seriousness -- achieved through such things as the above-mentioned notion of carnival, of the turning upside-down of everything, and through the use of parody, play, black humour and wit; this refusal and these methods of undercutting seriousness are associated as well with fragmentation, as traditional notions of narrative coherence are challenged, undone. The 'problem' with seriousness is that is has no room for the disruptions necessary to expose the oppressions and repressions of master narratives, in fact seriousness tends almost inevitably to reinforce them and hence the ideologies they support; to attack seriousness does not mean, in this context, to abandon conviction or good intentions.
- A crossing or dissolving of borders -- between fiction and non-fiction, between literary genres, between high and low culture
- A move away from perspectivism, from the located, unified 'subject' and the associated grounding of the authority of experience in the sovereign subject and its processes of perception and reflection. (see next point)
- A fragmentation of the self (the unified, located subject), or a disappearance or flatness -- the self, or subject, is no longer a 'psychological' reality but henceforth a cultural construction, located rhetorically (in terms of the kinds of language used, the subject matter, the situation), differently configured in different situations.
- A greater emphasis on the body, on the human as incarnate, as physical beings in a physical world. This is tied to postmodernism's distrust of rationalism and of the ideology of the Enlightenment.
Shoot me some advice or encouragement! I'm going to be up all night working on this and stuff for jazz ped...