Also, zine piece:

I'm working on several short plays in the style of Suzan-Lori Parks' 365 Days, 365 Plays, each one somehow capturing the feeling within one of the Adding Machine essays. Stolen from Parks' website, "Some plays are very short, less than a page. Others last forever." I hope to sort of combine the two parts of this idea in each play. Additionally, I would like to say that writing plays is hard. Ugh.

I think this dramatic format, even simply printed on a page, might be effective for capturing the vivacity of Burrough's ideas. If anyone is interested in staging them, however, let me know--it's definitely doable, and I'm definitely up for the challenge.

This is a newspaper article about Mexican druglords and hitmen who abide by the rules of logic entitled "Hitmen's bloody reign all about logic." My favorite paragraph from the article?

"From the outside it might look like the cartels are just going around killing people. But on the inside there's a code of conduct, rules. You might not want to kill somebody but you have to because it's all about respect," he [an anonymous cocaine trafficker] said. "This cannot work if there's no respect. Above all, the capos use logic to solve the problems."

If we've determined that logic--and language--are simply tools used to navigate the world, can we consciously choose to not use these tools? In the streets of Camargo, Mexico, where no reporter can step within the town boundaries without being threatened with death and captured victims are forced into drug-selling businesses, lawlessness is actually dominated, CONTROLLED by logic. How random can Burroughs' cut-up method be? It is, after all, a method. I would argue that, in some way, it has to be regulated by a version of logic. How do we escape the chains of logic? Is this a viable possibility? I'm having trouble even, while composing this, to determine what the essence of logic is comprised of. We could think about logos, which of course meant "language" or "discourse" to the ancient Greeks--a system of language or discourse? Language is logical in its consistency, in its patterns of letters or characters which create or, depending on the language system, represent words. Is logic simply a collection of patterns by which we... hmm. By which we relate to each other? How, then, can we fruitfully dissipate logic?

Well, I don't know.

So I missed the highly-anticipated meditation session Thursday to go to a graduate philosophy conference at Johns Hopkins. Was it worth it? Meh. However, while most of the papers were way over my head, there was one presented paper that definitely caught my attention in relation to this class. From Lisa Ann Villarreal's "Tracing the Limits of Representation; Freud and Todorov on the Fantasy of Historical Memory," I could at least attempt to grasp some sort of meaning.

Very Fascinating Concepts from the Paper:

-Memory seems to be a visible image. Is it?

     -From this, the relationship between words and language mimics the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious.

-The fantastic is often a vehicle for violating taboos. (not that fascinating but still important)

-According to Wittgenstein, using language to refer to things is exhaustive.

When we consider words as consciousness and language as unconsciousness, what happens? Is this to say that words are tangible and language is representative? Words create our subjective reality, which is unconsciously manifested in language? What, then, is language? Burroughs, I would argue, definitely uses the word as a slap in the face to bring us "back to reality" or to be present and observing the blunt, raw world we're handed. However, in Burroughs, the word flows seamlessly into the unreality of language just as what seems plausible in Burroughs runs seamlessly into what does not appear to be plausible. In dealing with the fantastic in Burroughs, is it necessary to make distinctions between words and language, consciousness and unconsciousness?

Just pondering. More to come on this, maybe, I'm not making any promises.

Yesterday, we spent a lot of time thinking about dreams in the context of Cities of the Red Night (sort of). A few days ago, I started sporadically watching the Japanese anime film Paprika by Satoshi Kon. If anyone has seen this film (perhaps at the State Theater last year), you know that the loose concept of the plot involves a young female therapist who adopts an alter ego, Paprika (heh), who can infiltrate her patients' dreams to simultaneously save them from this torture and better understand their mental afflictions. In terms of lucid dreaming, a person is arguably in control of his own dream, his own mind, essentially the perversion of his own subjective experience. Paprika complicates this problem (labelling the potential for lucid dreaming a problem is arguable, of course) by colliding her subjective experience with another person's subjective experience. Which is what we do in everyday life. The complication enters when she seeks to manipulate the dreamer's experience using the assumptions of her own, of what is good, bad, helpful, hazardous, etc. What are the implications, in Kon's fantastical parallel universe, of one person manipulating another's subjective experience? What does this say about control? The tagline of this 2006 film, comically enough, is "Only a young female therapist can stop it." LOL. But stop what? Assumably, the patient's psychological illness. She can do this by melding herself with the experience's that only the patient can have, actually becoming part of the patient, beyond just his experience at this point.

OH MY GOD THIS IS SO BURROUGHSIAN WE ALL FLOW HARMONIOUSLY INTO EACH OTHER

Says Parika in the film, "Don't you think dreams and the Internet are similar? They are both areas where the repressed conscious mind vents."

more to come when i finish the movie.

Just for fun:

(Sorry you have to click on the link, it won't let me post the picture) ffffound.com/image/cf8da76f46210451f241b2546904892e40edf6cc

I stumbled upon this picture a few days ago on a graphic design site, and it struck me as hauntingly Burroughsian--the metal, robotic hands both menacing, threatening and coming together (bringing the whole image together, in fact), the neon colored portrayals of opposite ends of the world in the background but merging together discordantly but in an aesthetically pleasing manner, a gorgeous portrayal of what we know as the SOFT MACHINE.

__The Ticket That Exploded__:

p. 2 "well I took his queen in the first few minutes of play by making completely random moves. He won the game without his queen. I had made my point and lost interest." I feel as though this is a pointed metaphor for cut-up and a postmodern, metanarrative-laden universe. Thus, I am frustrated with it. Frustrated by the pointedness.

--perhaps this indicates that what is cut-up is any possible fascination with the external world.To treat frustration: Do not look to art ( Burroughs: I am not an entertainer) to fulfill but to destroy your already existing habit structure. This makes of yourself a work of art. ( Nietzsche) This includes the habit structure of viewing the external world as somehow more "real" than your "internal world." Unless you would rather just keep shopping! I like your investigation below of "who reads Burroughs?", and suggest that you think about how you would link them all to each other to help them create something, together. You seem to despair of a purpose: Let your purpose be creation, a creation of new ways of sharing the "blast of silence" --mobius

-->when you youtube \"the ticket that exploded,\" you're presented with a stunning mash-up of mostly [seemingly, right?] irrelevant videos including a review for an educational marketing database and the new ciara music video. check it outtt. also, it and other recent life experiences have inspired me to make a William S. Burroughs mix CD. DON'T WORRY i'll put it on megaupload.com so everyone can listen. yay.

My zine piece:

Why should we consider who is reading the work of William S. Burroughs? What type of person? Into what sort of demographic do these people fall? How do they live their lives? Meaning, significance, rich and meaty value that can be applied to our quotidian lives—this is what we seek in literature, something to discuss over a green tea chai at the coffee shop. In the three corners of the United States, a person of unspecified name or gender—a number, essentially—sits down at their Macbook with a certain Beat writer on the brain, trying to gain insight into the type of person he was, his history, where he came from and how he ended up a junky, where he got his drugs, how he died. Why does this matter to them? Why should it matter to us that, according to the “Google Trends” search feature, the term “william burroughs” has been queried most often Portland, Oregon; Austin, Texas; and then New York, New York in the United States? Perhaps it doesn’t matter to us. Perhaps it doesn’t matter that, in fact, the Irish appear to be more interested in the life of “william burroughs” than Americans. Or that people reading Burroughs are also purchasing Ginsberg, Kerouac, Vonnegut, buying postmodern and 1960s drug reference-laden prose (amazon.com). Having collected the data, what can we do with it?

Writes William S. Burroughs himself, “Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it ‘creative observation.’ Creative viewing.” Applying Burroughs’ principles directly, we are validating the existence of each voyeur into the life and craft of Burroughs and, in turn, the existence of the very craftsman. How empowering—we have now acknowledged geographically scattered genre-readers around the world. So is that it? We’ve done what we came to do? Initially, this article was going to claim that observation is objective, and in order to determine who really reads Burroughs, to paint a handy-dandy pocket illustration of this person rather than a cold display of facts about them, we would have to use our own personal nitty-gritty subjective worldviews as lenses. In the working and reworking of this brief, 1000ish word corpus of text, a realization occurred—observation is quite palpably and unashamedly subjective. The readers of Burroughs are a subjective people, a people who wants to feel. Now I have made an assumption or broad generalization, and I must back it up:

“She puts on a record, metallic cocaine bebop. She greases the dingus, shoves the boy’s legs over his head and works it up his ass with a series of corkscrew movements on her fluid movements of her fluid hips. She moves in a slow circle, revolving on the axis of the shaft. She rubs her hard nipples across his chest. She kisses him on the neck and chin and eyes. He runs his hands down her back to her buttocks, pulling her into his ass. She revolves faster, faster. His body jerks and writhes in convulsive spasms. ‘Hurry up, please,’ she says, ‘The milk is getting cold.’”

So we know where the Burroughs readers are concentrated, what genus of text they are perusing, their inclination toward feeling in opposition with passive ingestion. What else can we know about this group? Interest in Burroughs peaked in early 2006 and has heavily tapered off ever since. Why? In the first quarter of 2006, a dozen men were trapped in the Sago Mine in West Virginia and Chile elected its first woman president. There was also a solar eclipse. I’ll let you determine which is relevant and which correlates. Perhaps more importantly, research on Burroughs seems to have hit a standstill. Whoever was reading Burroughs has moved on. Fewer people are reading Burroughs than before. Now Burroughs readers must be the type of person willing to embrace a new minority of fans. Burroughs readers are in a transition period, now that the appeal of the Beat Generation is in the depths of its fluctuation. Is he/she who reads Burroughs the type of person who can withstand this depopularization? Or is he simply a bandwagon rider now distraught? WHY DOES THIS MATTER?

Maybe, just maybe, every Burroughs reader is person who, in some capacity, “knew the pointlessness of complaining or moving. They knew that basically no one can help anyone else. There is not key, no secret someone else has that he can give you,” a part of what Burroughs calls the “junk equation.”

We could do further trendspotting, seeking gender and age of the average Burroughs reader. We could perform the legwork necessary to establish what people in Ireland, Portland, Austin, and New York have in common. We could cite the diversity of Burroughs work, the multiplicity of writing modes employed,—epistolary, poetic, denotative, narrative—analyzing a segment of each mode in hopes finding buried treasure. But sadly, this is all I have room for. A collection of musings interspersed with semi-reliable facts and interweb recordings. Might this be substantial enough meaning to go on with our lives?

I just noticed Newsweek's review on the rear of our restored edition paperback: "A cry from hell, a brutal, terrifying, and savagely funny book..." Using the term 'smut' most often in recent discussion and writing about __Naked Lunch__, the phrase "a cry from hell" startled me. A cry from hell? Really? I would interpret the disgusting factor of this Burroughs work as pornographic, sort of masturbatory, rather than violent in a way that excludes the audience, the way "brutal," a brutality of literature might imply. The distinction here is fine but still existent, I think.

Another thing this review got me thinking about: who reads Burroughs? What demographic would be interested in this type of work? Who are we catering to in this zine?

So, paper/project idea. I definitely want to do something involving art and Burroughs and cut-ups and the interelation. Yup, that's all I have thus far. EDIT: My project thing revolves around the above question, but I'm not sure how accurate my research is. Anyway, it will hopefully be posted sometime this evening or tomorrow afternoon. I think it's kind of an unanswerable question though, both in terms of demographic and in terms of... the abstract definition we were coming to in class on Tuesday that I can't articulate. I hope that doesn't mean I didn't understand it--

I'll continue the previous post later--I have no idea where it was going. OK so happy World Nutella Day. Probs endorsing commercialistic consumption on a Burroughs blog is sacrilege, huh? I'm still not really sure of what Burroughs thoughts are on the "market." But anyway, I've been thinking a lot about cut-up, as seen below, but especially cut-up in modern day art. Lately, I've been privy to a lot of amateur art, which in my experience tends to be fresher and consciously attempts to be more experimental, focusing on shaking up conventions. So, for example, let's look at the image below (source-www.ffffound.com):

I would argue that this piece makes excellent use of Burrough's cut-up method. However, when the medium is almost completely visual as opposed to verbal/literary, the effect is completely different. This piece, presented as a whole, is much less jarring (I would argue) than reading an exceprt of Burroughs. So in perhaps trying to do the same thing--"tamper with the pre-recorded universe"--I feel as though in art, the cut-up method might serve to represent the universe as more fluid, whereas in writing with the nature of logos (logos in the ancient Greek sense), the method necessarily serves to scatter the universe into little meta-narratives. How postmodern. Re-reading that, I'm seeing what I just wrote as a broad, sweeping statement that probably isn't true. Just a head's up.

On another note, I remember reading Naked Lunch my freshman year of highschool because I thought the Beats were so, so boss and, subsequently, having a lot of trouble getting through it. I forced myself to because, even though I didn't like it, I assumed I should be writing like Burroughs did in order to beat the system. Or something. Now, seven years later, I'm having the same trouble forcing myself to get through it and, unfortunately, can't recall any of it. Would you call this a notable novel? Certainly, it's notable in shock value. I have yet to figure out what the value beyond that is... but I have a feeling it's lurking somewhere.

so, thoughts on The Yage Letters. god my literary prowess is really coming through on this blog thus far. anyway:

I think a lot of what comes through here is the way Burroughs sees the world through his junk-tinted eyes--ugly, cold, not to be trusted.

p. 14 "The higher you get the uglier the citizens."

...to be continued

OK so it won't let me log in as myself, but whatever. LOOK WHAT I FOUND:

cut-up fun and games

i don't know how to post it as a legit youtube video, but anyway, it's a clip from a documentary about Burroughs, and he's explaining a bit about the cut-up method--essentially, why and how.

"Every particle of this universe contains the whole of the universe. You in yourself have the whole of the universe. I cut you up in a certain way, and I cut up the universe." -Burroughs

He goes on to say that he mostly just wants to fuck with the "pre-recorded universe," but my question is what is gained from his self-proclaimed "successful" endeavor? What is this success? Is it simply a newness? I suppose there is a certain inherent value in newness, but the cut-up method sort of makes me think of mash-up DJs, basically putting a fresh spin on what is old hat, making reshaping ideologies through layering. Is cutting up the universe a worthwhile venture? Productive? Maybe Burrough's is saying that that's all we can do? Up to this point in this posting, I didn't agree, but I think I might now. Do you agree?

In Philip Roth's novel __Ghost Writer__, character E.I. Lonoff is (as I interpret) thoroughly exhausted with his life as writer of fiction, saying he spends all day every day simply turning words and sentences around. Isn't this sort of a willful version of the cut-up method?

i just realized that none of my posts we actually posting because i didn't actually have a page. maybe. this is just a test.