Straight Up | Jan Herman

For the 50th anniversary celebration of William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch, which begins any minute now -- it's scheduled for July 1-3 at the University of London Institute in Paris -- have a look at the cover of the original edition brought out in 1959 by French publisher Maurice Girodias's Olympia Press. Have a look, too, at 60 other covers (scroll down) of various editions that have appeared worldwide since then.

Meanwhile, here's a leetle sumzeeng in honor of le maître, excerpted from Cut Up or Shut Up (a slim Burroughsian volume I did in 1972 with Carl Weissner and Jürgen Ploog):

Back Page Item. It seems likely," said Randolph, "that the KGB tapped directly into the past on Nikita's phone. He had endless conversations with Mark Cayn of the Absolute Daily News -- used to be put in shape every morning by the official Novosti news agency which specialized in the juicy parts of Operation Feedback. Then they slipped the dross into books, magazines and other newspaper features ..."

Was Victor Louis right? A pusher of so-called Soviet secrets? So let's fit another piece into the puzzle from World Edible News. How come every time Mr. Louis looks into the bathroom mirror it produces such a wondrous literary cancer?

"To such a degree, gentlemen, if I may say so, you might check with Central Dogma," Victor says blithely.

"Make your own DNA and see an old pal of mine," says Randolph. He points to half a suitcase worth you can't translate backwards and comes up with a manuscript typed for conspiratorial auto-da-fé.

"Very funny. Wait till the government teat becomes hazardous to your health," says Victor

The hazardous part, of course, is that Randolph (a rundown leukemia agent) is Victor's American double and no slouch in his own department. While occupying Suite 223 at the Stardust Hotel, he was quoted as saying: "Russian emigré fixers in for their health? Hah! Don't make me laugh! So they use perfume, and as chance would have it, they cover up the odors? A certain Vassily Lewis .?. Never heard of him ..."

The hint is obvious: perhaps we will be able to use synthesized humans to find cryptic viruses in literature of the future. If Victor/Randolph can turn up grinning like a ventriloquist dummy, then anything is possible. So the missing pieces in our story can very well be turned over to the Moscow bureau for synthesis ... a warning to all my uh fellow writers against a myopic belief in 'style or content.' May I draw your attention to the fact that reverse translation may one day explain all literary cancers?

As Burroughs wrote in his "Atrophied Preface": "The black wind sock of death undulates over the land, feeling, smelling for the crime of separate life, movers of the fear-frozen flesh shivering under a vast probability curve.... Population blocks disappear in a checker game of genocide.... Any number can play.... You can cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection point ..."

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

He died earlier this week in San Francisco just short of his 93rd birthday. I met him on a bitterly cold winter day in Paris, in 1962. I was keeping warm sitting in a seedy little cafe behind the Place de l'Odeon. It was a neighborhood hangout where you could buy pot and waste your time all day. I was writing on a napkin when I felt someone hovering over my shoulder. He asked what I was writing. A poem, I told him. He said he was a poet, too, and introduced himself. I no longer recall what we talked about, but it didn't take long for him to invite me back to his room at 9 rue Git-le-Coeur, the so-called Beat Hotel. He broke out his hashish and regaled me with stories of the expat life. I was 20, just out of college, trying to become an expat myself. He was more than twice my age and seemed to know everyone I knew only from books and magazines. Not just his former inmates at the Beat Hotel -- Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg and, most notably, William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, all of whom had recently moved out -- but also William Carlos Williams, W.H. Auden, James Baldwin, Anais Nin, Tennessee Williams ... the names went on and on. He gave me a slim volume -- it was "The Roman Sonnets of G. G. Belli" in his translation (with a preface by Williams) -- and I staggered home dazzled by our encounter. Years later, in 1968, he offered to let me publish his poem "Hotel Nirvana" in The San Francisco EARTHQUAKE, a little magazine I edited. It began ...

Spent a few hours listening to the performances at the BANG ON A CAN Marathon 2009 with a friend of mine who has little patience for la sonorité artistique. She described much of what she heard as "beehive music." I had to laugh. She wasn't wrong. (One composer, Jeppe Just Christensen, played two pairs of amplified coffee grinders. Watch the video.)

Even so, The Smith Quartet seduced me with "White Man Sleeps," by Kevin Volans:

Nails it again with his latest piece of essential writing about the so-called "core American values" and "moral authority" claimed for and by the United States since its founding: "Unexceptional Americans." The shorter version with the longer title -- "Why We Can't See the Trees or the Forest: The Torture Memos and Historical Amnesia" -- is lopped in half, so read the full-length original (including Tom Engelhardt's intro). It's worth the time.

Postscript: May 24 -- Here's Chomsky's final version, posted today on his Web site.

As usual, he's right on target ... his latest bull's-eye.

By releasing the torture memos and then rebuffing calls for an independent truth commission, the president is doing much worse than cementing a reputation for compromise: He's siding with the rightwingnuts and with all the Congressional pols -- Republicans and some Democrats -- who want to bury the past. Does Barack Obama truly believe that "looking forward" without laying blame will erase what happened during the Bullshitter-in-Chief's regime? Does he really want to become known as the Eraser-in-Chief?

In another context, he might find it worth reading Benjamin Schwartz's article in the current Atlantic, describing how the Nazis established the genocide of the Jews as a pervasive "open secret" so that all Germans would be made complicit. Then, as long as I'm on the subject, he might read Nick Bravin's article in the current Foreign Policy, describing how Lithuania's chief war crimes prosecutor has -- tragically and absurdly -- targeted Jewish Holocaust survivors as war criminals. And finally he might want to hear Mandy Patinkin sing the Yiddish song Oyfn pripetchik, accompanied by images to remind him of history's worst war crime -- because he apparently needs that kind of reminding.

Postscript: April 25 -- From Josh Brown's point of view:
PPS: May 15 -- To release pictures of detainees being tortured like this one will "further inflame anti-American opinion" and put U.S. troops at greater risk, says Mr. Obama, who is fast becoming the Eraser-in-Chief. But ordering more drone attacks that kill indiscriminately -- including this strike in Afghanistan -- won't? Americans who voted for him believed he would spare the bullshit. Sadly, he is proving them wrong. I recall Paul Krugman saying way back before the Bullshitter-in-Chief was returned to power in 2004 that if "regime change" comes he hoped the next administration would "throw open the records" and not be "too magnanimous" to the BananaRepublicans. Five years later regime change has come, but that hope fades with each passing day.

In London The Guardian posted its obit Sunday at 9 p.m., which means it went live in New York at 4 p.m. But this morning's print edition of The New York Times makes no mention of Ballard's death.

OK, print is slow -- but not that slow. And how come there's no obit on the NYT Web site either? Not even a link as of 8:50 a.m. ET this morning on its obit page, which looked like this. (Screen grab, right).

It's not as if the news was The Guardian's alone. Or that Ballard was unimportant. Here's the lede from the obit in The Times of London:

Pinteresque, Dickensian, Shakespearean. Not many writers are so distinctive and influential that their name becomes an adjective in its own right. J. G. Ballard, who died yesterday morning after a long battle with cancer at the age of 78, was one of them.

It goes on to cite the dictionary definition of "Ballardian" as especially suggestive of "dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments."

I heard about Ballard's death from a friend via email at 7:10 p.m. ET on Sunday. And another friend at realitystudio.org let me know at 8:29 pm ET: "There's already a thread on the RS forum."

The Telegraph's obit was posted Sunday at the equivalent of 4:53 p.m. ET. The BBC had an obit posted at the equivalent of 5:19 p.m. ET. And Yahoo posted the AP obit at 11:40 pm ET.

There were other postings, too, like Michael Moorcock's, which was probably the earliest, or the blogpost at REsearch and the one at Ballardian. Even the Los Angeles Times has posted an obit and, what's more, an appreciation. So somebody was asleep at my paper of record.

(Crossposted at Huffpo)

Postscript: April 21 -- This morning's NY Times carried a well-made Ballard obit, describing him as "a writer of dystopian, literary fiction whose novels and short stories of a contemporary society in insidious thrall to technology, the media and relentless progress both expanded and defied the genre of science fiction."

Bravo for that. It's nice to know the editors were not too busy celebrating the paper's five Pulitzer Prizes to overlook the news of his death. It would have been nicer, though, had they acknowledged his importance by playing it on the Web site's obit page above Doc Blanchard's. Ballard is likely to be remembered in the historical record long after "a Heisman Trophy winner [who] teamed up with Glenn Davis on the unbeaten Army teams of the mid-1940s," no matter how "storied [that] backfield pairing" was.

Meanwhile, Michael Moorcock has posted a striking tribute to Ballard, who was a close friend of his for 50 years. It is heartfelt and revealing, and offers personal history as well as literary context.

This is my twitter to the world
That never twittered me --
The inane things of daily life
Deserve obscurity.

Incessant streams of messages --
They come in starts and fits --
What one's eating, whom one's dating --
A universe of twits!

-- Leon Freilich
(He's our Calvin Trillin.)

Postscript: June 15 -- Looks like Emily made a bad guess ... see "Iran's Twitter Revolution." "I was also wrong about YouTube a few years ago," she says.