(No part of this reinterview-cum-pretext issues discussion may be published elsewhere without written permission from victor j. vitanza and
and the individual posters.) --Full Copyright notice at end of each file.
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The PreText Conversations held a Re/In/View with Lynda Haas, beginning July, 1997. The discussion quickly shifted when v posted the announcement that Bill Burroughs had died and Lynda posted a quote from him. For the previous conversation visit and read the last segment of the reinvw with Lynda Haas. In this segment (burroughs3), the discussion returns to Lynda Hass's article. |
Greg, you've actually made more sense out of my messages than I put in them (a not unusual characteristic of e-dialogism). I think your explanation of the situation is accurate:
> the society is in discourse network 2000 I'm not ready to give Burroughs Blakean status (but others are and, as that guy on SNL used to say, that's OK). I believe there is an inherent but possibly lazy desire in all people for coherent narratives (Freire calls them "generative themes," sort of personal explanatory paradigms). The cohering bureaucratic mechanism of the discipline is no exception. The discipline is not the sum of its intellectual parts but operates on separate structural terms, from a mechanism having much more to do with pay and privileges than with intellectual constructs. Since the Academy is (or has been) largely isolated from the checks and balances most of society has to deal with (a monastic independence), it has been able to support and defend an organizational scheme more akin to Medieval guilds than to the industrial flux of the nineteenth century or the digital flux of the late 20th. The operating structure of the discipline (how people are hired, given merit, tenure) easily retards the conceptual flexibility of the discipline, for in a Kuhnian sense we don't even have the advantage of empiricism to roust the hoary paradigms of the past. So the fact that the object of study is in discourse network 1900 is not by design but because of a kind of braking friction natural in a system that rewards seniority so mindlessly. Experimental fiction, as a sort of counterpart to the increasing abstractionism in painting in the early part of the 20th century --manifesting a desire to escape the tyrany of literal representation -- tears up coherent narratives, in the case of Burroughs in a most blatant fragmentation-for-fragmentation's-sake way. In the case of the self-destructive writers that I railed against, there seems to be a desire to subvert coherent narrative even in one's own life, a sort of cutting-and-pasting done on one's own behavior using alcohol or drugs or (most famously Henry Miller) sex. I understand the desire to escape petty-bourgoise narratives, to transcend all the dinky little cause-and-effect things that keep normal lives together, but I've escaped the desire of my earlier years to perform that escape with crude (in my opinion) verbal or chemical lobotomies (becoming, perhaps, an unrequited anarchist, the worst kind of witch hunter). One can't transcend restrictive bourgoise narratives by taking an axe (or scissors) to them, or blowing away your wife as a drunken joke that failed (the ultimate attack on family values...it cannot even be validated as a proper murder), and trying to do that is like trying to stop the railroadization of 19th century America by dynamiting a few trains. (Yes, I know, Burroughs got tame later on (or tamed), but no amount of self-revising could replace his towering iconic existence, IMHO, a fitting fate for the author of Naked Lunch). The discourse networking of the digital age superficially may seem similar to Joyce or Stern or even Burroughs, but the difference is that dismemberment of a cohering narrative (beginning, middle, end) arises out of a technologically assembled pastiche of separate intellects, engaging in each other's slightly spastic text with unimaginable (for an individual, anyway) complexity and immediacy. The technology has allowed a new kind of discourse network that cannot be dominated by an individual (which is why it is so hard to get the Sages of our discipline online). The entire career coherency that the discipline maintains is threatened, just as individualism in scholarship and in the aesthetic enterprise itself is. Tough times for the guys who just wanted to be another Emerson or Allen Bloom, being brilliant and fending off hoards of nerdie groupies. So dn 2000 may indeed provide a "legitimate" decohering of restrictive narratives, what the Romantics and Beats and Existentialists and hippies and all anarchists want (well, the Romantics are trickier to understand that that), but it will happen out of a kind of noncorruptible (albeit horribly messy) collective activity, not from the corruptible processes of individuals who, like people who purposely cut themselves, will do anything to get a transcendent buzz. (Sorry. Greg accidently cut into one of my main gas lines.) Fred Kemp
Fred, it's always with trepidation that I rise to confute you, but you're wrong about Burroughs. I don't want to get into a moral argument here about whether a life spent deliberately on the edge of destruction is a "good thing." Burroughs' drug use, Beat canonization, homosexuality, killing of Joan, etc. are all lurid and interesting, but they're off the point of whether he was a "one-trick pony" as a literary artist. As someone who's taught a lot of Burroughs, I think you're selling him short. I'd make the claim that Burroughs was one of the very few American literary artists who evolved a truly original language and style during this century. He took language registers that he'd truly mastered, ranging all the way from the most formal and technical registers down to the most absolutely obscene and slang-based registers and created an instrument that had not existed before by mixing and juxtaposing them. This is not an instrument for the tender-minded to fool with, but it is capable of extraordinary satirical effects. Example:
"The reference is to lymphogranuloma, 'climactic buboes.' A virus venereal disease indigenous to Ethiopia. 'Not for nothing are we known as feelthy Ethiopians,' sneers an Ethiopian mercenary as he sodomizes Pharaoh, venomous as the King's cobra. Ancient Egyptian papyrus talk all the time about them feelthy Ethiopians. Yes, it's strong stuff. But it's not about nothing. Burroughs put the language of doctors, technicians, junkies, con men, cops, academics into a new sort of Vitamix and what came out was a satiric language of immense power and imagination. That's what Burroughs will be read for in a hundred years, not his cut-up stuff. Is Burroughs a literary artist of large scope? No, probably not. But to call him a one-trick pony is simply to ignore his real talent. He's a brilliant satirist and a daringly self-revealing and self-excoriating writer who brought self-revelation to a new point. He said things in 1959 which had not been said before and which helped create the intellectual world we live in--whether you like it or not. The cut-up method, which he learned from artist Brion Gysin in the late fifties, was at first an interesting turn for Burroughs, but it probably did him more harm as an artist than good; he became addicted to the theory of it in the sixties and his books became largely gibberish renderings of his own fantasies, which could be striking but had little forward momentum. Nearly all of his important writing was done by 1968. After that he recycled his persona in various ways but did little that was new. If that's what you mean by years of decline, I'd have to agree. But there weren't forty of them. Uncle Bill saw the trope of addiction in many things, and he told the truth about what he saw as fearlessly as anyone I've ever read. I, for one, am sure that I never took junk because he had been there and told me I didn't have to go myself to know it was a bad place. I know he's easy to dislike--he seems to have disliked himself. But his dispatches from hell have done a lot of us a lot of good. Leave him rest in a peace he seldom knew here. Bob Connors
Two more cents tossed in support of Connors' partial rehab of Bill: My main memories of Burroughs are from the 1980s. I saw him perform live in Lawrence, Kansas in '86 or '87 along with Alan Ginsberg, John Giorno, and Jim Carroll, among others. He held his own as he read anecdotes and mini-stories in that strange drawl of his. I'd say he was probably the most mesmerizing performer of the lot that evening. There are also scattered recordings of him performing from the 80s as well. When the mood is right, these are great to listen to, still. The other notable memory I can share was the tail end of an interview I saw with him a few years ago. He was asked if there was anything he did in his life that he regretted. He replied "practically everything." His life and his writings are to be learned from, not imitated or definitively judged. And that's enough. Edward Schiappa
..to Bob's and Ed's post, let me just say that WSB was one of the authors that I started reading in highschool and have continued to this day to read. I take the cut-up method more seriously, while still playfully, than others perhaps. I take the anagram machine in the same way. Nothing is more aleatory than language, though 'we' work hard at attempting to fix it, at attempting to make it 'work' for 'us'. Bill countered the fix and encouraged all of 'us' to counter the fix. 'the image [the word] is shit.' ..when i wrote and published my first article on the history of philosophical rhetorik (in Rhetoric Review, 1987), i alluded to Bill extensively. anti-virus. apomorphine against the philosophical image (virus) that infects 'your' minds with the shit that goes for THE hist.of.rhetorik. purge the shit. purge the shit. ..but my fondest memory comes from a previous time and place, when i was in grad school working on my masters. i was assigned _tristram shandy_ in a seminar on queen ann(e) satire and given 2 hours to speak about the novel, which is one of my favorite ones. i, instead, spoke only 15 mins. on it and then went on for the rest of time talking about the more important _Nova Express_. some how are other, i got away with it. purge the academik shit. ..and then there vvas the time when i was the first reader i knew of who got that copy of _naked lunch_ when it was set free for us to read in this country. ..sometimes, you just have to cut up, to survive. what better to cut-up than TIME magazine! and T.S.Eliot's poetry, when too many people have been bitten by the tsetse fly. etc. Bill used to say ... be a cut up when they are serious; be 'serious (serialize) when they are a cut up.' and so. ..Inspector J. Lee, Nova Police! ====== rotciV ps: john v. omlor, your thoughts?
An Open Letter to Lwhy?NDA (DNA?), dEAR/est Adnyl, Has 'this' been 'some fluidity, some flood, to carry [all of] us along the rivers together, journeying together in search of some horizon, writing with ... demanding not only a love and respect for our company ... but also a rearrangement of priorities, a shifting of attitudes, a change in how and what we VALUE'? rotcivvie
Bob, yours is a good message and shows clearly (with comments by other pretexters) that my reading of Burroughs is colored by a sort of contextual mythology that may be causing me to veer off from discovery of the man's literary puissance. Like most of us, I have my literary prejudices and have concocted my invisible shields here and there. I have long since placed in such an isolation booth (seen but not heard) a genre of writing for which Burroughs in my mind is the Grand Apologist, the sort of sacrificial one-way probe into hell that turns more into an egotisic martyrdom than anything else. If, as a writer, you have no other theme, then destroy yourself slowly and provide self-absorbed commentary about what a terrible thing you've done on the way down. The Pretext discussion will definitely make the strangely familiar strangely new, with regards to Burroughs, and maybe I can come to see the antidotal value of his obsession with addiction and his commensurate overboard prose, a sort of literary version of a Hardcopy interview with Charlie Sheen. I'm not supposed to be doing what I do with blinders on: thanks to Pretext for making me reconsider something I've long since stopped considering much. I still believe, however, that the "body is the basic unit of technology" comment is as blind in its way as some of my anti-Beat views may possibly be. Fred
test
twiny spaces' wave-snort of contexual mistology which subscribes to a clothed wrist in an apparent trance-triggered answer to a question writely quested individual turned up missing individual showed up missing individual appeared missing that is he/she had a missing appearance I could see her but she was not there or anywhere that I could tell while he on the other hand was excessively present it might well have had something to do with the similarity betwining us into a booth together too close to one another so close it's hard to breathe hardly any air at all where is she I wanted to know? twin-like numbers deleted from this beginning looking into the possibility of keeping something that could not be kept nor is it a thing as such though we may agree to call it a thing to wine and to dine the two split up like that because it occurred that only to this degree was there something different so it was accepted as a gift the actual opportunity to answer an actual difference so close to one another that we found it hard just stood there unattached to anything else but honey ebb the chase ensues immediately there is nothing else to consider only that for the purposes of being engaged fully if foully the judge was quick to to rule himself out (re-accuse himself (re-cues/re-queues himself with all kinds of Q's (noted not to be possessive in this/these (thesis) instance(s) but plumply plural)) he was replaced by a woman her name was Essa she appeared to disappear as if that were her purpose to first appear and then to disappear and thus disappoint most classically the deleted primitive I found delectable and what wonderful voices (soar) our servents building up connections without our knowing nor caring it came to me that the interruption might not be offended if I didn't answer always so extensively to it come now you know that hasn't been the case hardly at all been the caves from within which to sense the world which in fact is also itself a cave in which now to(o)[l]/instrumentality (musically operationally) freely ride way up on that hill the stars above in the overly clear sky this nothingness the old voices: asymmetric replacements for one another harshly grill-select loin(s) the too-quick ass-humption that that would necessarily (in Essa Sarah Lee) flower from that place once it had been led up to in that quasi-conventional wave progression how did you find them? they're everywhere that's how or is it that you wonder about my assessment? no I did not pay it much mind if you don't mind my frameness/frankness the mistaken error-written to take the lead this times the spaces in iterative re-iterative fashion trend to render a(n advertised) sense of being out there ahead of the curve instead of being in there where it's warm it's the sense(-science) of being in the air but hugely bound that took advantage of the silence which was so rich to its golden core now ravagely plumbed but with deep sorrow the rare sincerity sane as the above but with some changes additions
http://www.inch.com/~abz/ -------------------------------------
Dear rotcivvie and Lwhy?nda (DNA?), An eavesdrop: Have we/are we carried along some flood, some destiny in search of some horizon? It flooded here in Louisville last spring. The skies cried and the waters of the oHIo swelled and heaved and spilled upon the shores. Yet, what was on the otherside, but more water? Other tributaries, other rivers that had spilled over their banks and in their excess crept up into the fields and then the farmhouses and then the suburbs. The Louisville Courier-Journal carried the pictures of sad and confused faces which looked out across a seeming directionaless pool of water that covered a once intersection of mainstreet. Adnyl and RociVV: can we ever be carried along, "journeying together in search of some horizon;" or is time also rhizomatic? And if our excesses sw\\\ell\\\ and he//a//ve and spill outside our banks until we are brought together in the aimless pools of water that lap up against the walls of the city bank, are we then "journing together"? An eavesdrop? todd
Todd asked: """""""Adnyl and RociVV: can we ever be carried along, "journeying together in search of some horizon;" or is time also rhizomatic? And if our excesses sw\\\ell\\\ and he//a//ve and spill outside our banks until we are brought together in the aimless pools of water that lap up against the walls of the city bank, are we then "journing together"? An eavesdrop?""""""" Todd, floods are too biblical (too HEbible) for m(or)e. I'm not much 'for' Irigaray's (irrigations) flood.
***[...]
Irigaray is to Nietzsche asAdnyl wanted to know why I read LI's _Marine Lover_ in that manner. I never answered Adnyl, for I would have had to accept the question as answerable. (If I recall ... I remembered that silence that was--and still is a thoughtful silence--and included a bit of a 'nyanza' somewhere in "Negation." I think it's at the end-cum-middle of my consideration of Helen and in the heading of 'Postscript: Kofman and Irigaray'.) ...here it is ... what I wrote:
"As Bataille points out that Gide said that Nietzsche was 'jealous of God' ..., Irigaray poetically states that Nietzsche envies her and other women.... Womb envy! After reading Irigaray's inquisition of Nietzsche, I get the impression that, as analyst, she is doing an unintended parody of Freud interpreting Dora. She writes: 'I want to interpret your midnight dreams, and unmask that phenomenon; your night. _And make you admit_ that I dwell in it as your most fearsome adversity' ... If Nietzsche were alive, he, too, like Dora, would give Irigaray a two-week notice, never to return. And yet--comedy of comedies--we must eternally return." (Negation, 304-05)Unmask? Make you admit! that I am your fearful adversity!! When I read this kind of neomomism, I go read seekzoo. And yet, I continue to read irrigation. You see, I prefer the Volcano to the Ocean! Irrigation has an interesting discussion in her _ML_ on water vs. lava (pp. 52- ). For me, as I said to AdnyL, The flowing Volcano ... as it irrupts or spills slowly from the tip of Aetna over the precipice down onto the island among islands into the midi-terrainean, sinking to its floors, bubbling up, and then rising again to the surface to form the north african continent, ... the flowing, as it irrupts or spills slowly from the tip of Aetna over and over and over, is a different flowing from water flowing. And what might that difference be? Irigaray knows better, but she, in assigning lava as incrusted, rock lava, to Nietzsche, can see water as 'feminine' but can only see lava as 'masculine.' Why? I keep saying as Henry Miller (Oh, Oh!! gasp! did vv mention him!!) says ... I love all things that flow! HM writes:
"Yes, I said to myself, I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amiotic fluid when it spills out of the bag. I love the kidney with its painful gall-stones.... I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed unfecund.... the milk of the breast and the bitter honey that pours from the womb, all that is fluid, melting, dissolute and dissolvent, all the pus and dirt...." (tropic of cancer, 257-58). This is saying yes, YeS, yEs, YES...without the sir or mam. This is the acceptance of life and death, while waiting for the third. Irigaray (whom LyndaadnyL uses in her article that we are discussing and throughout her dissertation) sides with water, but not lava. Why? Is it because there is no lava in the womb?! If so, then *esse*ism, *esse*ism, sentimental *esse*ism. But I am not sure that there is no lava in the womb! There is, however, water in lava! (there is air, earth, fire). Pus. Urine. Etc. It's all there, here. I am not sure that there is no lava in the womb along with pus, urine, shit, and all other things that flow! ***[...] But Irigaray says there is no 'other' ... after Nietzsche, who, in the name of Dionysos, kills off the other! (And what did Heidegger in his four volumes on Nietzsche say? Hee, Hee, Hee! [Irigaray would throw Nietzsche into the ocean and tell him to swim in the element he is so afraid of, while Heidegger would have us all, especially Nietzsche, thrown into esse and find ourselves in a new guilt brought on by fear and trembling!] What, the difference?) And what, the condition of the possibility of the other that Nietzsche says NO to? Irigaray would have Nietzsche embrace the other and kill (overcome) oneself in that fashion! But Nietzsche says No to No. To the Condition. And ... T/herein lies the difference? Not really! Not even virtually! Afterall "is" said and undone, ... a lovers' difference. A marine lover and a lava lover's difference. And so you see ... There esse no difference. There, in that lovers' xchange, a revaluing of value.
without verbs, |
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