Doing some reading

You're probably wondering what comes after Naked Lunch, and I'm quite excited about the answer: bell hooks. If you're not familiar with her, she's the Distinguished Professor of English at City College in New York, famous as an author, feminist, and social activist; her seminal (yes, I'm thinking about the source of that word more than usual too) work is Ain't I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism, though I've been thinking that perhaps I'll look for one of her more recent works since, I would hope, feminism (and the issues of racial equality and cultural politics) will have changed quite a bit since 1981. If you have an opinion on which of her books I should read, I would love to hear it - don't be shy!

Meanwhile, here's something for those of you who like typography and/or aren't fans of suspense! I was recently introduced to a great little web thingy called Wordle, which takes a bunch of words and arranges them in wonderful ways. Here's what I managed to do with Wordle and the lyrics to the Moxy Früvous song that kicked this whole blog off, My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors - it'll give you a taste of things to come!

"Cuddle up with William S. Burroughs"

A week or so ago I finished Naked Lunch. Now it's time to document the experience.

William Lee, "Agent" and drug addict, goes on the run to Mexico. The amoral Dr Benway corrupts the bodies and minds of citizens for the state. Addicts queue for the secretions of the creatures known as mugwumps, or crave the "Black Meat" of giant centipedes. The rich indulge in expensive orgies where young men have their necks snapped during orgasm. Bizarre factions battle for control of the vice-ridden city known as Interzone. After all this and many other episodes, Lee shoots two narcotics officers and goes in search of another hit, perhaps slipping into a different reality as he does so.

That's about as close as I can get to summarising the "plot" of Naked Lunch. Plenty of stuff happens, but there's no narrative, and that's intentional. Instead, there's a tone, a mood, and the evocation of emotion. Burroughs doesn't seem to like pretty things, either, so it's all very ugly. I'm not one to flinch at reading something unpleasant, but the despair and awfulness is unending in Naked Lunch. No-one is happy, everyone's addicted - to junk, to sex (particularly homosexuality, which is presented along "these queers all have something wrong them, and so do I" lines), to a corrupted ideal. Certainly this is not a book that glorifies drug culture, and it often feels like it's written in the blood and junk dripping out of someone's works rather than in ink, but Burroughs spreads the misery around pretty evenly.

It's not hard to see how this was a touchstone for counter culture at the time when it was written. There's plenty of swearing, plenty of explicit sex - which is mostly violent and occasionally fatal - and a hovering intimation that everything here, while surreal, really exists there. This is social commentary by insane allegory, though there are passages where the differences between the book and the real-world being protested are only ones of degree.

Stylistically it sucks you in, and it's not like anything I've read before, but then this is my first experience with the Beat Generation. Burroughs writes with rhythm and pace, his prose like ugly yet effective poetry. He reuses phrases, sometimes within a chapter, sometimes at opposite ends of the book; these motifs reappear in different contexts but, like proper "shelving" in a comedy routine, they make the otherwise random zig zagging seem planned, given pattern to the chaos.

Speaking of comedy, there are occasional laughs, though they're dark laughs, the kind you make so you don't cry from despair. Then there's the use of unsual devices; in the latter third of the book, Burroughs uses fade outs to end some scenes, cutting to conclusions or another thread entirely. For something written in the fifties, that must have crossed literary boundaries; even now, when the grammar of film and television is in ll of our heads, it's not something you see in books.

I came away from Naked Lunch with mixed feelings, that sort of knot in your stomach of "I really wanted to like that, and I did, except for..." My exception, really, was the sex; not that there was so much of it, nor even that it was graphic, but that it was so consistently unpleasant and frequently mixed with awful violence. The sex of Naked Lunch is generally less appealing than the drugs; it's also hard to place when I don't know the context of the writing, so I have to comfort myself with the thought that surely 50s counterculture embraced sex, and the homophobic and prudish language is all satire and irony.

Still, the beat of Burroughs got into my head and soul and I do like Naked Lunch. I'll be back for more Beat writing, though probably I'll try one of the others.

Chapters: 25, plus the "deprecated preface"
Page count: 196 (not counting the additional materials in my edition)
Book's title mentioned on page: 187 (3 times on one page, in reference to the book itself)
Best name encountered: Liquefactionists (one of the warring factions of Interzone)
New words: Bang-utot, curare, Espontáneo, Latah, mezuzzoth, paregoric, pathic, rinderpest, yagé
Inner Five-year-old score: 1 (it has monsters and violence in it, but only of the serious nightmare-inducing kind)
Fun Wikipedia fact: One of my Mum's favourite bands, Steely Dan, takes its name from a dildo featured in the book.

"Here's some books I'd like you to read!"

While I navigate my way through the final three "chapters" of Naked Lunch, interrupted by sporadic returns to the relative sanity of What Does A Martian Look Like?, I thought I'd peruse the rest of the source for this literary adventure and see how many authors I need to squeeze into my year. As with so many things in life, my memory cheated me a little.

Somewhat disappointingly, while the first verse includes four authors, the rest of the verses - and choruses - have none. Only the break (or middle eight, or bridge...I'm never sure of the correct terminology) has more, and then it's only six. That makes a grand total of ten, including the two you already know about. The Wikipedia entry for the song reveals that the original version had a few changes, so I can be a bit crafty and add two more, but that's still only twelve.

On the up-side, the authors are more diverse than I could have hoped, as you'll see when the next one comes up (I don't want to spoil it in advance). I'm still going to be expanding my literary geography far beyond the small patch visible from the top of my current bookshelves.

But, now it's obvious I'll have time to read plenty of other books this year, I'll be blogging about them too. For starters, my Mum gave me five great books for Christmas - four biographies of different sorts (next to good science writing, they're my favourite kind of non-fiction) plus the only one whose cover I've cracked so far: Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, by Maryanne Wolf. (Yes, I'm reading a book about how humans learned to read. It's things like this that makes you glad to live in the 21st century.) Plus I finally bought a book of essays about The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, titled The Anthology at the End of the Universe; the first one is pretty good but covers ground plumbed much more in depth by the great Alan Cooper's The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, which I read last year. And there are other books I've promised myself I'll read, too.

Which all adds up, I hope, to an interesting chronicle of one fellow's reading. Don't worry, though: I'll still be sticking to the plan of getting through the Früvous authors by the end of the year. To keep things on topic, posts about the challenge (which includes all of them so far) will be tagged with "Bunch of Authors", and titled with lines from the song.

Hark at me, speaking as though to a vast audience. If anyone is reading this, do drop me a line. I'd love to know I'm not writing into the void!

"Cuddle up with"...?

I've moved on to author number two:

"Cuddle up with William S. Burroughs,"

I realise now just how incongruous this marriage of verb and noun is intended to be. I mean, if there were any author whose work you wouldn't want to cuddle up with... Even the author himself is suspect in this regard, having famously accidentally shot his first wife, but I should note that the song's fictional "baby" is enamoured with the authors' works, not with the authors themselves. Well...for the most part. I'll explain later.

I didn't ask for book suggestions this time around: it seems to me that if you're going to read Burroughs, you ought to read Naked Lunch. Nearly half way through it, I'm wondering if that was a wise choice.

My experience so far has been...unusual. I've found most of it surprisingly easy to read, but that ease is surprising: there's no real plot, only the slightest of tenuous structures, no clear point of view. There are three themes knitting it together, though if it is knitted then Burroughs is using some kind of viscous bodily secretion instead of wool, because those themes are drug addiction, violent (mostly homosexual, and frequently fatal) sex, and disease.

This is not a kind of book I've experienced before.

I don't know how representative he is of Beat; perhaps I should try some Ginsberg or Kerouac (neither appear in the song). I've certainly earmarked J. G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun for a post-project read - he's not of the some mould, but in his introduction to my edition of Naked Lunch he claims Burroughs as a major influence, and I can't imagine how that translates to a work like Empire. (I just discovered he also wrote Crash, though, so who knows? They're at least linked by Cronenberg, though given the themes above I can't imagine anyone else making the decision to film this book.)

In any case, this is a new kind of writing for me. More thoughts soon.