What's up? What's new in my life? We're reading through poems for the literary magazine in English club now--we give everybody five (the names have been removed from the papers) and we go around reading them. Mine came up, and everybody was in utter awe. Kellen even complimented me, he told me, "That was a nice poem, Angela." Which doesn't seem like a big compliment but I've never heard Kellen compliment anybody like that. But yeah, made me feel better after one hell of a stressful week.
And the other day I wore my Carl Sagan shirt to World Religions and Mr Stoloff just stared at me for a minute and then told me that I was amazing. Then when our speaker came in and Mr Stoloff was taking attendance he made it a point of pointing it out. It was awesome!
Let's see, and speaking of Allen Ginsberg--(actually, I guess I'll have to explain this one, Mr Stoloff looks kind of like Ginsberg) I'm painting a portrait of him. I'm using this picture, and hopefully it'll turn out as good (well?) as the Kerouac one. So far I've sketched out the most basic outline (I'm having trouble with his forearm, of course...) and yeah. I need to get bags before I can actually start painting to preserve the paints over day... Gee, painting sure is different when NBHS isn't buying the paints!
So, Queer. I believe this is Burroughs's second book, and like his first (Junky) it's autobiographical. Junky is about heroin addiction, Queer is about Burroughs's interest in a man--specifically, a fellow named Allerton. The book was written after Burroughs's wife was killed, just for the record. It wasn't published until the eighties because of its contents, but honestly, this is hardly anything compared to Naked Lunch. For Burroughs, it's pretty tame--though it has tendencies that definitely point towards Naked Lunch and made me nervous. (Not to sound tasteless, but I also got nervous every time Burroughs mentioned being in possession of a firearm.) After reading this I've come to realize that maybe it's not the surreality of Burroughs's writing style that weirds me out--his whole life was a surreal ordeal (yes, that was on purpose--go ahead, judge me). He was just writing it as it happened (okay, with the help of drugs, but he was kicking heroin in Queer) and that's pretty damned frightening. Um... Yeah. What else do I have to say? Oh, his obsession with yage is reiterated. At the end he and Allerton go on a trip and his ulterior motive--well, actually his main motive would be to get a hold of some yage, I guess. His ulterior motive would be to get a piece of Allerton... Which actually isn't so ulterior, he tells Allerton that's the only payment required for the trip... Fiiiine. Let's get this show on the road, eh?
The biography at the beginning of the book is kind of curious. It goes through the normal birth-death-bibliography bit, and it concludes with "He loved cats" (I). I don't know, it seemed kind of odd to me.
There's also an interesting picture used for the standard author picture. It's a picture of him sitting in a couch or an easy chair, but there's a shadow over his eyes and about three-quarters of his face. It's actually a really cool picture. Beneath it there's a cool note by Allen Ginsberg: "William Seward Burroughs 1953 New York, Queer... That's the look in his eyes" (II).
Burroughs has also added a 'new' introduction to the book.
"[Mexico] City appealed to me. The slum areas compared favorably with anything in Asia for sheer filth and poverty... Entrepreneurs, not infrequently lepers, built fires on street corners and cooked up hideous, stinking, nameless messes of food, which they dispensed to passerby. Drunks slept right on the sidewalks of the main drag, and no cops bothered them. It seemed to me that everyone in Mexico had mastered the art of minding his own business. If a man wanted to wear a monocle or carry a cane, he did not hesitate to do it, and no one gave him a second glance" (VI). GET THE DAMN TIME MACHINE. Actually, if I have a time machine, I'm just going to peace out to the 1890's. Maybe 1870's. Definitely no ulterior motives to that, there's absolutely no-one from that time period I'd like to meet/have a tryst with coughcoughOscarWildecough. Also, I'd like to hang out with Jules Verne. He seems like he'd be a very happy guy. My creative writing novel=living vicariously through fiction? Because now that I think about it, this is starting to look suspicious...
"As authority figures, Mexican cops ranked with streetcar conductors" (VII).
"While it was I who wrote Junky, I feel that I was being written in Queer" (XIV).
"Lee is being inexorably pressed into the world of fiction" (XVI). Lee=Old Bull Lee (On the Road)=William S Burroughs... Though in Junky he's more of a Kilgore Trout than the actual Burroughs.
"One wonders if Yage could have saved the day by a blinding revelation. I remember a cut-up I made in Paris years earlier: 'Raw peeled winds of hate and michance blew the shot.' And for years I thought this referred to blowing a shot of junk, when the junk squirts out the side of the syringe or dropper owing to an obstruction. Brion Gysin pointed out the actual meaning: the shot that killed Joan" (XX). I guess it's dangerous to assume that whoever may stumble over this knows automatically what exactly is being referred to--Burroughs was a bit of a gun nut. Apparently he and his wife had a William Tell-ish
So! We're into the story now. As you may or may not have gathered, Burroughs is in Mexico City and later other parts of South America... But yeah, for now he's still in Mexico City. (Isn't Mexico City in Central America anyways? Is Central America its own entity or what? Who does it get grouped with?)
"Moor was a thin young man with blond hair that was habitually somewhat long. He had pale blue eyes and very white skin. There were dark patches under his eyes and two deep lines around the mouth. He looked like a child, and at the same time a prematurely aged man. His face showed the ravages of the death process, the inroads of decay in flesh cut off from the living charge of contact. Moor was motivated, literally kept alive and moving, by hate, but there was no passion or violence in his hate. Moor's hate was a slow, steady push, weak but infinitely persistent, waiting to take advantage of any weakness in another, He had aged without experience of life, like a piece of meat rotting on a pantry shelf" (6). Look at how eloquent Burroughs is when he's not tripping balls! Maybe he should do that less often! Well, while writing at least. I'm not a monster you know.
That's in chapter one, second page of chapter one in fact. Next quote is from the first page of chapter four, page forty-seven.
"Saturday night Lee met Allerton in the Cuba, a bar with an interior like the set for a surrealist ballet. The walls were covered with murals depicting underwater scenes. Mermaids and mermen in elaborate arrangements with huge goldfish stared at the customers with fixed, identical expressions of pathetic dismay. Even the fish were invested with an air of ineffectual alarm. The effect was disquieting, as though these androgynous beings were frightened by something behind or to one side of the customers, who were made uneasy by this inferred presence. Most of them took their business some place else" (47).
Burroughs rambles around Allerton, annoyingly long two or three, once even five page monologues. I guess anybody around someone they like (yes, Burroughs wanted to get into bed with Allerton, but I imagine that end is mainly from the fact that he wasn't sure how else to attract Allerton into a relationship, I mean an unsexual one) is apt to, but good lord, it is painful having to read them. Not just that they're boring and pointless, but also that everybody's been there at some point, and you're wincing for yourself even as you wince for him. On the other hand, it makes you anxious and uncomfortable, so you know exactly how Allerton is feeling.
"Joe Guidry had a young man with man. The young man was telling how he was treated by an Army psychiatrist. 'So what did you find out from your psychiatrist?' said Guidry. His voice had a nagging, derogatory edge. 'I found out I was an Oedipus. I found out I love my mother.' 'Why, everybody loves their mother, son,' said Guidry. 'I mean I love my mother physically.' 'I don't believe that, son,' said Guidry. This struck Lee as funny, and he began to laugh" (53-54). I include everything after Guidry's first response out of formality. I think its funny enough if you just cut it off there, but I thought it might look incomplete to someone who hasn't read the book/full passage.
"'You making it with him?' asked Guidry, which seemed to shock his young friend. 'Not even. I got bigger fish to fry,' said Lee. He glanced over at Allerton, who was laughing at something Mary had said. 'Fish is right,' quipped Guidry. 'Cold, slippery, and hard to catch'" (55). Obviously Guidry is referring to the difficulties Burroughs will have in grabbing Allerton. I think there's also a sexual connotation here, maybe fish not meaning just Allerton, specifically Allerton's, well, junk. His phallic symbol junk, though, not his Junky junk (heroin).
"Like many people who have nothing to do, he was resentful of any claims on his time" (60).
"A feeling of cold desolation came over him at the thought of arriving alone in another country, far away from Allerton" (61). Burroughs was debating on just giving up and leaving for Panama or somewhere else in South America. But what I find curious--well, it's mostly a comment about myself rather the writing. Desolation means barrenness, lack of people, lack of companionship, solitary, deserted, et cetera--but thanks to Jack Kerouac's Desolation Angels I don't necessarily see it as such. I mean, it means those things, but the negative tones of it aren't necessarily there. Like, I understand that Burroughs means it to be a depressing feeling of loneliness and all, but I am disconnected from that version of that. I see it, but I don't quite--eh--grok it.
Oh yeah, the actual deal is that while they're in South America, Burroughs gets Allerton at least twice a week. How he actually puts it is: "You can lay all the women in South America if you want to. All I ask is be nice to Papa, say twice a week" (72). What's even worse is that he keeps on referring to himself as Papa. So creepy. Like James Joyce creepy. Well, maybe not that creepy, but the gateway creepiness to James Joyce creepiness.
"[Lee] ordered another rum and swallowed four Benzedrine tablets. Then he went into the head and smoked a roach of tea. 'Now I will ravish my public,' he thought. The busboy had caught a mouse and was holding it up by the tail. Lee pulled out an old-fashioned .22 revolver he sometimes carried. 'Hold the son of a bitch out and I'll blast it,' he said, striking a Napoleonic pose. The boy tied a string to the mouse's tail and held it out at arm's length. Lee fired from a distance of three feet. His bullet tore the mouse's head off" (73-74). JESUS WHO GAVE BURROUGHS A GUN, WHY HAS HE NOT LEARNED. Also, jeez! This sickens me! I don't like mice--in fact I hate the nasty little buggers--but talk about cruel! Disgustingly cruel!
"'Tibet must be about like this. High and cold and full of ugly-looking people and llamas and yaks. Yak milk for breakfast, yak curds for lunch, and for dinner a yak boiled in his own butter, and a fitting punishment for a yak, too, if you ask me" (81). I mark this only because of Gregory Corso's poem "The Mad Yak". Undoubtedly there is no real connection, it's just Burroughs rambling again, and anyways Corso's poem wasn't written--or at least published--until 1958... Seven years after Queer was written. (But then again, maybe Corso read the manuscript and was inspired by it instead of the other way around, how I originally imagined it.) But I think to compare the two is interesting, even if it isn't truth and wasn't really meant to be on any solid grounds--the "fitting punishment" versus the tone of Corso's poem. I don't know, I think it's worth thinking about, even if it's not a completely legit connection...
"Come to think of it, that is the wisdom of the East. The Westerner thinks there is some secret he can discover. The East says, 'How the f--k should I know?'" (82).
"[Lee] got into a conversation with a man at the next table. The man was thin and blond, his head caved in at the temples. Lee could see the blue veins pulsing in the cold, high-mountain sunlight that covered the man's weak, ravaged face and spilled over the scarred oak table onto the worn wooden floor. Lee asked the man if he liked Quito. 'To be or not to be, that is the question. I have to like it'" (84). I like this response. This is how I feel about a lot of tiresome questions--you know, how do you like your college, your classes, are they too hard, do you wish you had done this instead, and so on--it doesn't matter if I like what I'm doing or where I am or any of that, it is what it is. People have trouble with that answer, it never satisfies them and they act as though they don't understand (though they must, right?). Anyways. I like the man from Quito.
"In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality. It is as final as the mountains: a fact. There it is. When you realize it, you cannot complain" (94).
"What happens when there is no limit? What is the fate of The Land Where Anything Goes? Men changing into huge centipedes... centipedes besieging the houses... a man tied to a couch and a centipede ten feet long rearing up over him. Is this literal? Did some hideous metamorphosis occur? What is the meaning of the centipede symbol?" (95). The centipedes, the goddamn centipedes! Helloooo, Naked Lunch.
And more surreality: a group of boys (Burroughs estimates their ages to be twelve to fourteen) surround Burroughs on a waterfront and pull their pants down. Burroughs follows suit, but he keeps his legs tightly held together--however, when the boys try to pull his legs apart he allows them to do so. He then receives a blow job, while another one of the boys just stands there and instead of watching Burroughs with any curiosity or the other boys, stares at his own erection with his hands on his hips. That one boy disturbs me far more than anything else--and I can't figure out why. It's the end of sanity, what the hell is going on here, I can't even comprehend it. I don't get it. It's mad!
"Now he was in a bamboo tenement. An oil lamp lit a woman's body. Lee could feel desire for the woman through the other's body. 'I'm not queer,' he thought. 'I'm disembodied'" (97).
"'Someday I am going to have things just like I want,' he said to himself. 'And if any moralizing son of a bitch gives me any static, they will fish him out of the river'" (97).
William S Burroughs has a dream in which he is holding and attempting to comfort his crying son. This is the only time his son has ever been mentioned in the four Burroughs books I've read. Where is his son this whole time? I don't know, probably wherever Jack Kerouac's daughter was.
"Many so-called primitives are afraid of cameras. There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit" (124). I marked this for more reasons than Ms Basetti. I knew the thing that primitives feared cameras because they thought they captured their souls, but Burroughs expands it. I mean, yeah, you want to keep whatever you see in your mind--chain it there, even if that's not what's meant to be because human memory is so faulty anyways--or keep something exactly as it was. You want to see it that way forever. Ooh. This is getting a little too eerie for my liking.
Also, Junky has an interesting anthropological tone to the whole thing (apparently that's what Burroughs studied in college, or had studied at some point in his life). This is the closest we really get to that in this book, which is kind of a shame.
"Stupid people can learn and language quick and easy because there is nothing going on in there to keep it out" (126). As someone who simply could not pick up a foreign language, I love this quote. Straight A Italian students thinking they're so high and mighty. Which one of us is so awesome now!?
So. Burroughs's Queer. I realize I haven't done a fantastical job of explaining plot or characters or anything like that, but there's really nothing to explain. It's like a diary that he attempted to make a story--that he tried much too hard to make a story. It's not forced, exactly, but it's terribly clumsy. It doesn't have the interesting voice and style of Junky, and nothing really interesting happens. He just wants this Allerton fellow, and... and his life. Well, okay. I have life too. Give me something that's not mine so I'll be interested. (I understand that contradicts my reasons for disliking Naked Lunch, but there's a fine line between fantastic and BAD TRIP.)
Let's see, what else? According to Wikipedia, Burroughs's writings aren't well accepted by the gay community... In fact, they're not really sure what to do with it, because although Burroughs openly talks about it, he makes it sound as undesirable and dirty as he makes everything else sound.
Another note on Burroughs himself: he had money. He came from a rich background. He could afford to live like a bum off a junk habit, or a bum in a shack in the middle of the swamp. I think that's an interesting paradox: You've got to be really rich to be able to afford living poorly.
Burroughs, William S. Queer. Penguin Books: New York, 1987.
Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics: Kids by MGMT (This is the EP version. I like it less, but talk about a horrifying music video.)
This post's cryptic song lyrics: Boys stood up on their chairs to make their point of view, I smiled sadly for a love I could not obey
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