The Master Remastered
Digital Fingers Play 5-D Chess — Part 2

5,653 words

Excursus: “Nice looking young man, fairly hardworking.”

Burroughs was already conducting experiments with audio recordings with Ian Sommerville, a new boyfriend he had met while in Paris. Sommerville was an audio engineer and early computer programmer. [1] When Sommerville returned to England, Burroughs followed; and although Sommerville had a new boyfriend, they continued to collaborate on audio recordings. Burroughs’ 1965 debut LP, Call Me Burroughs, was a hit with London hipsters, and “a personal favorite of Paul McCartney.” When Sommerville “lucked into” working as an engineer for the Beatles, McCartney rented space in Ringo’s flat in London and “personally paid for the equipment” Sommerville required to set up a studio there (including smoked glass mirrors and gray silk wallpaper). From Rae’s account:

Burroughs and McCartney would chat about cut-ups and computers making the music of tomorrow, as the future Knight of the Realm listened to Burroughs’ sonic experiments.

Or as McCartney put it in 1986,

I used to sit in a basement at Montagu Square with William Burroughs and a couple of gay guys he knew from Morocco doing little tapes, crazy stuff with guitar and cello.

As Burroughs recalled later:

The three of us talked about the possibilities of the tape recorder. He’d just come in and work on his “Eleanor Rigby.” Ian recorded the rehearsals so I saw the song taking shape. Once again, not knowing much about music, I could see he knew what he was doing. He was very pleasant and prepossessing. Nice looking young man, fairly hardworking.

Rae sums up the results:

Burroughs inspired McCartney to cut in found sounds on Beatles recordings, including alarm clocks, automobile horns, and circus atmospherics. This, in turn, gave Brian Wilson… the gumption to add barking dogs and bicycle horns to his own masterpiece, Pet Sounds.[2]

Burroughs was doing all this audio experimentation in the old-fashioned way, cutting and splicing tape. Today, kids can set up audio studios in their bedrooms with the power to perform far more elaborate sleight of hand – cutting up digits, indeed — but this has only expanded the range of Burroughs’ acknowledged influences: from David Bowie, Throbbing Gristle, and Coil to hip-hop and electronic acts like Michael Franti, DJ Spooky, and Justin Warfield.

With sampling, any snippet of text, sound, image or video can be ripped from its source and altered or juxtaposed however the user sees fit. Sampling started with audio – first with tape-based experiments and later with digital devices…When the internet arrived, the floodgates opened. Borrow a lyric from a song for a Facebook post? You just sampled. Use a picture of that Game of Thrones character in a meme? You just sampled…. Such activities technically make users copyright criminals, not that it’s much of a deterrent. At least two generations have grown up remixing and sharing content on the Internet, and many of their favorite artists have built their careers by sampling.[3]

***

We seem to have strayed from our discussion of DFT, but not really. Reverberation is a familiar concept in audio engineering, but it also is used to explain the origin of consciousness; that is, how the experience of a separate consciousness arises from “reverberating brain activity, involving back-and-forth communication between different brain areas.”[4]

As Burroughs says, it is repetitions that create “new” events, and DFT “demonstrates the method” by which the dead fingers can talk. Repetition is originality. In ways Calder himself perhaps didn’t realize, it is indeed no mere “book of selections,” perhaps with “some new material”: it has mutated, like a living organism, into “a new novel.”

One result is the way it screws with your notions of a settled past and somewhat open future. Readers today will likely be familiar with at least some of this material from its subsequently published forms, but which? The “underground” Olympia Press editions, the Grove or Calder editions, the editions later revised by Burroughs, or the “restored” editions benefiting from Harris’ own tinkerings?[5]

Add to that Burroughs’ use of manuscript materials never seen publicly until recently unearthed by scholars,[6] and only then consider the re-shuffling and even re-writing of Burroughs himself, down to the level of punctuation (hundreds of Celine-style ellipses changed to em dashes, each such passage meticulously noted by Harris), and the effect is … uncanny.

Dead Fingers Talk is uncannily disorientating in precisely such ways because of the uniquely repetitous nature of the source texts…. Its rearrangements of material will make phrases that were once echoes now come uncannily first and vice versa. Connections inside individual texts and between them that we had never noticed before come to the fore, and ones that used to be there disappear.

Apart from repetition, another source of the uncanny is that “all three source texts are so discontinuous that it’s impossible to keep track of what is there or not there.”

The dismembered text teases us to re-member, but we’re bound to miss more than we get or to experience phantom phantom-limb syndrome, the doubly eerie imagining of an imaginary sensation. It’s not just that we might have false ghost memories, mistakenly feeling something’s been cut when actually nothing has, but that we’re able to miss what was never materially there in the first place.

For example, we perhaps can only now notice almost two hundred mentions of hands or fingers in the texts; seven specifically refer to the left hand – recalling Burroughs own ghostly hand, covering the cover – and always associated with shooting, either guns or heroin. The first of these, a narc holding Lee’s works in his left hand, is in the first chapter of DFT, which appears to be recognizable as the first section of NL. But the reader of NL will suddenly realize that the chapter he’s reading has now transitioned into the last section of NL. Critics had assumed Burroughs is “restoring an original continuity” but Harris shows there never was one, until Burroughs created it here.

This new-original continuity, in turn, creates new connections – “newlyweds from Sioux Falls” is now “quickly echoed” by “Chink Laundry of Sioux Falls” rather than being separated by almost two hundred pages. Speaking of “almost two hundred,” the left hand at the start now echoes four left hands in the new ending of the chapter; as a result of the editing (as well as the cover and title, of course), “the image forces itself on us like a trick card.”

One might describe Harris’s position by a paraphrase of the Academic Agent: In truth, “originality” is not and should not be seen as a criterion by which to judge elite writers, but rather the degree to which their works change reality. [7]

Excursus: Circumambulating

I think the effect that these dead fingers are pointing to is what Jung called, “circumambulation,” which Bernardo Kastrup has described thus:

Circumambulation entails multiple returns, a constant revisiting of subtopics already covered, but in a different context, a different order, from a slightly different slant. [8]

It also bears a resemblance to the methods of the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus, who, as John N. Deck said, does not so much prove his conclusions as accustom us to them by talking around them:

In many places he does not so much prove his propositions and notions as accustom his hearers and readers to their truth. The result is that it often seems that he is proving conclusions by premises and premises by conclusion, when in fact he is elaborating an intuition . . . and rendering it plausible and acceptable.[9]

***

To understand how Burroughs’ method revitalizes, Frankenstein-like, these dead fingers, thereby changing reality, we need to take a closer look at two kinds of material, routines and cut-ups.[10]

First, though, what is a “routine”?

Being, or at least perceiving himself as, homely and uninteresting, young Burroughs needed to work on what we might call today his “game,” which he called “routines.” This genre is now so well known that it even has its own TVTropes entry:

Burroughs’s “routines”, as he called them, are the literary equivalent to a depraved vaudeville act, or by modern sensibility, a raunchy sketch show. Utilizing over-the-top characterization and hilariously opaque scenarios, [routines] can change scenes at the drop of the hat, jumping from short, punchy hilarity to weird sex back to short, punchy hilarity.

Rae fills in more of the theoretical and personal background, saying that routines are:

[…]a form of playacting that often featured characters and situations that would later turn up in his work. He was obsessed with capturing these routines, which he saw as a potent means of making things happen in the real world. They were a way to record his fantasies, obsessions, and animosities — the cornerstones of his work—when no other means were available. Also, they were great fun. [11]

And, he adds, Burroughs “liked to rope his friends into routines,” since, though not above making use of rent boys, he continued to obsess over men who were straight or otherwise simply not interested. Allen Ginsberg was one of the latter, and while discussing Ginsberg’s (ultimately futile) attempts to sell what would appear in 1985 as the novella Queer, his discusses the origin of two of the routines in the book:

He told Allen, “The Oil-Man and Slave Trader routines are not intended as inverted parody sketches […] but as a means to make contact with Allerton and to interest him. The Slave Trader routine came to me like dictated. It was the turning point where my partial success was assured. If I had not achieved the reckless gaiety that charges this fantasy, Marker would have refused to go with me to S.A. The point is these fantasies are a vital part of the whole set-up.”[12]

Originating as IRL seduction props, Burroughs eventually began including them in correspondence, seductive or not, and – when he began writing again, at the encouragement of his new young friends, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac – they formed the backbone of his fiction.

By the late 1950s, literary magazines were much on Burroughs’ mind. He was no longer satisfied with publishing his numerous routines in letters to Allen Ginsberg. Naked Lunch began to take shape as a novel and Burroughs sought a larger audience. [13]

Routines provide some of the funniest and most remembered sections of Naked Lunch; perhaps the most famous/infamous being the various adventures of the incompetent and irrepressible Dr. Benway,[14] and “The Talking Asshole.” An entire chapter of DFT is devoted to Benway’s antics, but the latter routine was cut, presumably out of censorship concerns, even though he described it in Naked Lunch as an example of “the sex that gets part the censors.”

Interestingly, Oliver Harris suggests that this routine is itself a meta-routine, illustrating the shamanic or Frankenstein-like dimension of Burroughs’ compositional methods: the unpredictable emergence of independent life from chance operations.

As the original epistolary context makes clear, the routine had instead to do with Burroughs’ control over his own writing. In his letter of February 7 1955 (curiously, Burroughs misdated it 1954), the routine is framed first by Burroughs’ description of how he “smokes some tea” and sits down “and out it comes all in one piece like a glob of spit” — note the echoes of Kerouac’s account in Desolation Angels — and afterwards by the commentary: “It’s almost like automatic writing produced by a hostile, independent entity.”

Excursus: Left out but still alive – Zappa and Thing-Fish

The Talking Asshole did not shut up. Years later, Frank Zappa would read it at the Nova Convention in New York City, December 2, 1978, as a last-minute replacement for Keith Richards. [15] Later, in 1984, Zappa would release Thing-Fish, a three LP set that seems, no doubt accidentally, to rhyme with DFT, in both conception and reception:

The story was constructed during the recording sessions, which included producing new overdubs for recordings which previously appeared on Zappa’s albums Zoot Allures, Tinseltown Rebellion, You Are What You Is and Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch.

[Like DFT,] Thing-Fish was initially received poorly by critics, who criticized the use of previously recorded material, but has since been reappraised for its highly satirical content…. A common thread of criticism was that many of the songs on this album derived from previously released recordings, and some detractors considered it to be nothing more than a compilation album. Barry Miles [Burroughs’ chief biographer] found it to be one of his “least substantive” works.

More recently the album has been reappraised, described by Kevin Courrier in Dangerous kitchen: the subversive world of Zappa as “a compendium of Zappa’s most explicit attacks on political and sexual hypocrisy in American culture collected together in one huge volley.” In Frank Zappa and musical theatre: ugly ugly o’phan Annie and really deep, intense, thought-provoking Broadway symbolism, Thing-Fish is described as “an extraordinary example of bricolage“. As reviewed by François Couture for the website Allmusic, Couture described Thing-Fish as Zappa’s “most controversial, misunderstood, overlooked album“, stating that it was not a masterpiece, but “more than rehashed material.”[16]

Taking up Couture’s dichotomy, I would say DFT is both: not merely more than rehashed material, but also in fact a masterpiece. [17]

***

Routines contributed to the making of NL, but for later works Burroughs utilized the cut-up method.[18] Here, the same uncanny feature arises, like the voice of the Talking Asshole.

But first, what precisely is this method? I’ve talked about it several times, most extensively here, so I thought this would be an appropriate place to make use of digital technology and just ask AI to explain it for us:

The cut-up method is a literary and artistic technique developed and popularized by writer William S. Burroughs in the 1950s and 1960s, though its roots trace back to the Dadaist movement of the 1920s. It involves cutting up written text—often prose or even entire pages—into pieces, typically with a few words or phrases on each piece, and then rearranging them randomly to create a new, often unexpected text. Burroughs described the method as a way to break free from conventional patterns of thought and expression, which he believed were controlled by societal “word and image locks”. The technique was famously developed after Brion Gysin, a painter and writer, accidentally discovered it while using layers of newspapers as a protective mat; he noticed intriguing juxtapositions when cutting through the layers, leading to the creation of the book Minutes to Go.

Burroughs and Gysin expanded the method beyond text, applying it to audio recordings, film, and mixed media, resulting in works like the films Towers Open Fire, Cut-Ups, and Bill and Tony, as well as the collaborative book The Third Mind, published in 1978. The cut-up method was also used in music, notably by David Bowie, who employed it to generate lyrics and even developed a computer program called Verbasizer to automate the process. Similarly, Thom Yorke of Radiohead used a version of the technique by drawing random lines from a hat during songwriting sessions. The method has since influenced a wide range of artists, including Bob Dylan, Kathy Acker, and members of bands like Cabaret Voltaire and Neutral Milk Hotel, demonstrating its lasting impact across creative disciplines.

The significance of the cut-up method for our current divagations lies in the way cutting up a text does not kill the text but paradoxically gives it new – and independent – life.

The intentionality is not always certain and the outcome cannot always be calculated…. Burroughs knew what he was doing, but the nature of his methods ensured that the results could not be predicted, and that was the point. [There is] an element of autonomy in his textual operations, the material’s “capacity for life” …. In evolutionary terms mistakes serve the cause of genetic diversity, so that the method in Burroughs’ remix is less about appropriation than adaptation, in the Darwinian sense.

In such situations, who is the “author” or “originator” or “responsible party” – the “original” author, Burroughs, or the cut-up itself?[19]

Talk about originality suggests control (as in Hollywood’s “creative control”), which was always Burroughs’ bugaboo; usually with a capital ‘C.’ Just as Burroughs “surrendered control” of “the life of his text,” so the cut-up method was to defeat Control and restore freedom.

Burroughs’ was not so much concerned about Control as he was obsessed with it. From adolescence on he deeply resented and rebelled against anyone or anything that prevented him from doing whatever he wanted—shoot drugs, shoot guns, buy boys for sex, etc. Burroughs travelled throughout the world, finding a country that was politically and socially chaotic enough to tolerate or ignore him, praising it to the skies for its “enlightened” hands-off atmos, then somehow falling afoul of the relatively benign social norms nonetheless – shooting his wife in Mexico, being an American in post-colonial Tangiers, even getting involved in a half-assed drug-smuggling scheme in Paris – whereupon he would denounce it and move elsewhere. In junky terms, he’d “burn it down,” as if he had used a cooperative pharmacist too often and scared him into “packing it in.”

It was less a well-thought-out political doctrine than a clever child rationalizing his whims, and, like Libertarianism, it has proved deeply appealing to intellectually precocious sixteen-year-olds.

Excursus: On the Edge of Seventeen

The effect of Burroughs on Youth has not passed unnoticed. In one of the few negative looks at Naked Lunch and its author, now generally lionized by the Establishment, [20] Stefan Beck begins thus:

Everybody remembers his first time. Nobody talks about William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, … without indulging in a dreamily solipsistic nostalgia trip. Lewis Jones, in the London Spectator: “When I first read Naked Lunch, as a teenager sleeping rough in a Greek olive grove …”; Barry Miles, the author of a hilariously credulous Burroughs biography (“El Hombre Invisible”) and co-editor of this commemorative volume, on a Columbia University panel: “I was living in this hippie commune apartment in London … The book completely knocked me out, the epitome of stoned humor and bohemian subversion.”

I’ll join in the fun. I first encountered Naked Lunch in eighth grade, in the backseat of my parents’ car; a clear-cut case of child abuse by neglect. I’d purchased it on a family outing to Waldenbooks, a store that, it’s interesting to note, mostly traffics in kitten calendars and “Cathy” bookmarks. “Please,” I thought, “don’t let Mom ask to see this.”

Rae adds more examples of the effect of Burroughs on many young musicians:

The discovery of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch at the back of W. H. Smith’s one rainy Saturday afternoon had been a revelation to the 13-year-old boy. . .. It changed my life!” —Peter Christopherson of Throbbing Gristle and Coil.

That guy messed me up when I first started reading him in the late ‘60s, and I’ve never gotten over it. —David Bowie

As well as “the cyberpunk genre, whose progenitor, William Gibson, encountered Burroughs at thirteen, in a Beat anthology he hid from his mother ‘because of bad words and the excerpts from Naked Lunch.’”[21]

Matthew Levi Stevens writes that his “ongoing research”:

Had its first beginnings over 35 years ago, when I first encountered the literary work of Burroughs as a 13 year old schoolboy, and was doubtless then confirmed when I first met the author in the flesh less than 3 years later, barely a month shy of my 16^th birthday, and found myself suddenly in the middle of a conversation about the occult.[22]

Given all this, I think it’s reasonable for Beck to ask:

Why is “Where were you when …,” a question for assassinations and catastrophes, so often asked with respect to this book? Maybe because reading Naked Lunch is an act of violence to one’s psyche[ …] There is something gratingly adolescent about those who insist on the essential humor of a work replete with violent interspecies pornography… fetishistic descriptions of putrefaction and disease … and general nastiness (“Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk?”).[23]

It’s unclear whether Beck’s complaint is that the books are themselves adolescent or that they pervert otherwise pure adolescents. Perhaps they have the effect of confirming adolescents in their already manifest tendencies, which would otherwise be outgrown or subject to social stigma; James Greuerholz, Burroughs late-life caretaker and literary executor, recalled the shock of discovering at fourteen that he wasn’t the only teenager dreaming of sex with aliens. [24]

Burroughs himself was quite aware of his effects; he frequently humble-bragged about merely writing the kind of pornography he would have wanted to find as a youth, and, as the New York Times noted in their obituary,

When Mr. Burroughs was a teen-ager, he read ”You Can’t Win,” an autobiography of Jack Black, a drifter who took drugs and pilfered his way through a sordid, predatory life. “The book made a considerable impression on him and became grist for his own books years later.”

Still, Beck finds a kind of cynical value in the experience:

Naked Lunch serves a very valuable and reliable purpose. Get to it early enough, somewhere between the Hardy Boys and Holden Caulfield, and the fatigue and tedium will inoculate you against all sorts of intellectual malfeasance. You’ll never swallow the line that obscenity is a hallmark of genius, [25] or that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom (usually it leads to the palace of excess, except when it leads to the hovel of incomprehensibility). Dismiss Burroughs as a pull-my-finger bore and you’re ready to dismiss Matthew Barney, Damien Hirst, the Chapman Brothers, Jonathan Littell and a host of others too dull to mention.

***

For Burroughs, Control is manifested by bits of word or image, which implant themselves in our consciousness like viruses. Cutting up words and images breaks lines of control, and “the future leaks out.” [26] Even punctuation was targeted, because “like a virus” even the smallest parts are significant.

Speaking of viruses, and getting back to Harris’ analogy to evolution, it’s unsurprising, then, that Burroughs is always contemporary, ahead of the curve; he’s all over the fabric of internet culture:

When a “small unit of information” captures our collective attention – however briefly – we say it ‘went viral’: Burroughs parlance has become everyday slang.

 Or virtual sex:

Put your sex images on a film screen talking to you while you jack off—Just about the same as the so-called “real thing” isn’t it? —Why hasn’t it been tried?” [DFT p173]

And then there’s that media virus known as memes.[27]

***

For all his avant-garde and degenerate characteristics, Burroughs chief method, the cut-up, is his claim to being a Man of the Dissident Right avant le lettre. Burroughs was concerned with, or obsessed with, cutting lines of association, and developing a primarily pictorial mode of thought (hence, treating pages of prose like canvas of montaged images). And what is that, other than a meme, the Dissident Right’s tool of choice?

[A listener asks] why do uncomfortable societal truths tend to manifest themselves memetically in rightwing circles? Well I would say that the online right, if it has any advantage at all, it is the ability to tell the truth quickly about something, right, and a meme basically short circuits a lot of intellectual, you know, that was always the thing that “the Left can’t meme” because they’re trying to write an essay whereas the right can short circuit that logical brain and get to some perennial truth quickly.

But that is why the Right has had a monopoly on memes over the past few years because they’re just true a lot of the time and a lot of the time they’re getting at things that even if you have an intellectual argument goes into the lizard brain, right, whether it’s to do with race or sex or any other topic. That was the effectiveness of memes.[28]

***

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”[29]

Through a process that combines the minute examination of documents (books, letters, manuscripts) scattered throughout the Western world, with the intuitive grasp of connections that Aristotle defined as “genius,” ^[30] Harris makes the not-so-dead fingers of Burroughs’ earliest books talk to a new audience that has already and largely unknowingly been prepared, by the vast cultural influence of Burroughs himself, to listen with new eyes and ears.

Notes

[1] Sommerville appears in Burroughs’ works as “The Subliminal Kid,” a tag later appropriated by DJ Spooky.

[2] Rae doesn’t make the point – but I will here – that, perhaps due to his marriage to “avant garde” artist Yoko Ono, John Lennon seems to be remembered as the “sophisticated” Beatle, whereas in actuality it was  Paul who, despite his reputation as a writer of, as he parodied himself, “silly love songs,” was truly interested in and involved in the musical avant garde.

[3] Rae, pp.244, 267.

[4] Bernardo Kastrup, Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture (Iff Books, 2015), p.43; referencing Paller and Suzuki, “The Source of Consciousness” (Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18(8), pp.387-88).

[5] Harris carefully records the variations among Burroughs DFT manuscript, the first published editions, editions later revised by Burroughs (TSM in particular was largely re-written after Burroughs’ experience creating DFT), and his own “restored” texts, as well as mistakes in the first edition of DFT. The point being, that Burroughs worked from both his manuscripts and the printed editions; changes Burroughs made when incorporating something into DFT may not be reflected in the later editions and may have been rejected by Harris for the “restored” editions. A given variation might be Burroughs preferring his manuscript, or his later revision, or an error by Burroughs or a printer, or Harris preferring a reading from an earlier manuscript, etc. All of this is apart from Burroughs’ deliberate recombining of the texts themselves.

[6] “To read Dead Fingers Talk is to find yourself reading texts that no longer exist, and rereading texts that did not yet exist at the time it was written.” Man, that’s some quantum level shit there, bro!

[7] “In truth, ‘originality’ is not and should not be seen as a criteria[sic] by which to judge elite Theorists, but rather the degree to which their works describe reality. The Populist Delusion, (Perth: Imperium Press, 2022), p38.

[8] Bernardo Kastrup, Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell (London: Iff Books, 2024), p124

[9] John N. Deck, Nature, Contemplation, and the One: A Study in the Philosophy of Plotinus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969; Toronto Heritage series, 2017).

[10] “[Burroughs] understood what it meant to create new life from old body parts – to make dead fingers talk: that was the novelty of the book, which therefore did not depend on anything so banal as whether or not he added some new material.” – Harris.

[11] Routines would, in a Naked Lunch– kinda way, mutate into Hunter Thompson’s “Gonzo” journalism. Wills writes about Thompson: “Although he seldom mentioned Burroughs, one can easily see the influence of Naked Lunch in his writing from the sixties onwards. Burroughs’ disturbing ‘routines’ morphed into Thompson’s oddball flights of fancy — sudden rushes of violent but hilarious action and dialogue that went very much over the heads of most readers.” And again: “Like William S. Burroughs, he could concoct almost unimaginable scenes and present the grisliest details with a dry, black humor.” See Part Two of my review, here.

[12] Barry Miles, Call Me Burroughs: A Life (Twelve, 2015).

[13] Jed Birmingham Reports on Burroughs Collecting.

[14] It seems likely Benway was based on a number of Nazi doctors Burroughs encountered as professors during his abortive year at the University of Vienna medical school; see Thomas Antonic, Among Nazis: William S. Burroughs in Vienna, 1936/37 (Moloko Print, 2020), a bilingual (English and German) study based on an expanded version of his 2018 lecture “Dr. Benway meets Dr. Pernkopf: Burroughs and the Nazi Doctors in Vienna 1936/37” presented at the European Beat Studies Network conference.

[15] FZ’s contribution can be found online and was issued on LP an2d reissued on CD. here’s Steve Buscemi doing it in 2014.

[16] A critic at ProgArchives says: There is little here that is musically new, but all of the older material is reworked and rearranged in wonderful, clever, pleasing ways – my favorite being the reversed version of ‘No not now’ off Ship Arriving… Part of the pleasure is spotting the quoting: a truly Post-Modern work!

[17]  Burroughs’ method – accident/repeat/accident – also led to Alan Moore’s Watchmen novel: “Moore named William S. Burroughs as one of his main influences during the conception of Watchmen. He admired Burroughs’ use of “repeated symbols that would become laden with meaning” in Burroughs’ only comic strip, “The Unspeakable Mr. Hart“, which appeared in the British underground magazine Cyclops. Not every intertextual link in the series was planned by Moore, who remarked that “there’s stuff in there Dave had put in that even I only noticed on the sixth or seventh read”, while other “things […] turned up in there by accident.” (“Vincent Eno and El Csawza Meet Comics Megastar Alan Moore”).

[18] The only “chance” features of NL arise from the haphazard way that Burroughs’ friends assisted in editing, re-writing, and arranging sections of his huge manuscript, right down to the last minute. Chance methods were used to produce the so-called “Nova Trilogy”—SM, TTE, and Nova Express – but due to the aforementioned back-and-forth production of these texts, the tendency has arisen to speak of a non-existent “Cut-up Trilogy” comprising NL, SM and TTE; what really might correspond to that is the book under discussion, DFT.

[19] Reflecting on what Burroughs dubbed “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin,” Harris muses that “giving credit for cut-up methods was itself profoundly paradoxical” by “attaching a name to a creative process supposedly transcending to possessive ego of individual identity” (Oliver Harris, Two Assassins: William Burroughs/Hassan Sabbah (Moloko, 2023),p, 225).

[20] Burroughs was buried with the rosettes of the Commandeur des Artes et des Lettres and the American Academy of Arts and Letters on his lapel (Miles, p626).

[21] Rae, op. cit., pp.173, 112, 242.

[22] Stevens, op. cit., Kindle location 98. In my review, I quote a slightly different account he gives online: “I was a 14-year-old schoolboy, and already a huge fan of William S. Burroughs, when I first made contact with Industrial Music pioneers Throbbing Gristle. [Later, in] September, 1982, William S. Burroughs is in town for The Final Academy. Psychic TV are prime movers, and thanks to Genesis P-Orridge I have a ringside seat. Everybody wants to get their books signed, or have their photo taken with ‘Uncle Bill’ as he is affectionately known. I choose to do neither, deliberately. As well as the PTV connection, I am in touch with J. G. Ballard, Eric Mottram, Jeff Nuttall, and know Bill’s old pal Alex Trocchi; I am also a skinny, pale, intense, bookish young boy of nearly 16. I’m sure none of any of these details hurt. Eventually I am in just the right place at just the right time.”

[23] In the interest of Full Disclosure, your Gentle Author himself encountered Burroughs at the age of 16, in the pages of Rolling Stone. While I had long thought this was the famous Burroughs interviews Bowie piece (Craig Copetas, “Beat Godfather Meets Glitter Mainman,” Rolling Stone, February 28, 1974, transcribed by Nick a.k.a. EuropeanCanon here), the date doesn’t line up with my trip to London in July 1972, where I was already hip enough to pick up Burroughs’ books in Corgi paperbacks; it must have been Robert Palmer, “Rolling Stone Interviews William Burroughs,” Rolling Stone, May 11, 1972 (reprinted in Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960-1997 (ed. Sylvère Lotringer; New York: Zone Books, 2001, pp. 163-91).

[24] See the interview in Howard Brookner’s 1983 documentary film Burroughs.

[25] As we saw above, Burroughs himself seems to have included the pornography for shock value, or his own amusement, and was quite willing to delete it so as to make a nicer impression on the British literary establishment.

[26] Control, responsibility, lifeforms out of control; it’s no surprise Burroughs – who tried to join the wartime OSS but supposedly was, like Tucker Carlson, rejected — was a great fan of global and even intergalactic conspiracies. Consider: “The CIA and the Mafia worked together for years trying to whack out the beard. …Government, Pentagon stuff. They’re in charge. But who pulls whose chain? Who knows? … Who did the President? Fuck! It’s a mystery. It’s a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma! The shooters don’t even know! Don’t you get it?” David Ferrie, JFK (Oliver Stone, 1990). As for rejection, consider what Hannibal Lecter might make of our Billy:

LECTER: Billy is not a real transsexual, but he thinks he is. He tries to be. He’s tried to be a lot of things I expect. […] There are three major centers for transsexual surgery: Johns Hopkins, the University of Minnesota, and Columbus Medical Center. I wouldn’t be surprised if Billy had applied for sex reassignment at one or all of them and been rejected.

CLARICE: On what basis would they reject him?

LECTER: Look for severe childhood disturbances associated with violence. Our Billy wasn’t born a criminal, Clarice. He was made one through years of systematic abuse. Billy hates his own identity, you see, and he thinks that makes him a transsexual.

[27] One of the things Burroughs impressed on [Genesis P-Orridge] was the importance of using cutting-edge technology to maximize creative and or magical results. P-orridge suggests sampling is more than just a production technique; it is an occult action straight from the Burroughs grimoire,” which has “helped unleash the ‘media virus’ known as memes.”  Rae, p. 168.

[28] Academic Agent, “Office Hours: The Truth About Wifejak / Gregg Wallace Hitjob,” streamed December 3, 2024, at 1:03:34 to 1:04

[29] Beckett and Calder, again, of course. Worstword Ho (London: John Calder, 1983).

[30] Explaining why he had failed to notice the “ugly tirades” against women and Jews in a Burroughs recording from 1960, Harris observes that “… my capacity for close scrutiny—the scholarly quality I prized above all others—had been disarmed.” The “rhythmic repetitions” of the voice “made it easy to overlook the need to scrutinize the test. And yet the opening line… invites our closest scrutiny by itself scrutinizing the key word in its title…It begins by cutting up the name of Hassan Sabbah’s citadel [Alamout] to reveal a message in English seemingly hidden within plain view within the Persian word: ‘ALL AM OUT’.” Oliver Harris, Two Assassins: William Burroughs/Hassan Sabbah (Moloko Print, 2023), pp. 202-03.