Salad Days? Well, What Kind of Salad?
I moved to Hollywood and told people I was a writer.
I told people I was a writer because I was a writer.
I self-published a TERRIBLE novel.
Oh my gosh, it was bad.
I didn’t want it to be a good book.
(Yeah, yeah, I know …)
It was highly experimental. The idea was:
1. Create a performance with it
2. Turn it into a cult artifact
3. See what I can do with bad writing
From aged 17 until my early 20s, I was OBSESSED with a writer named William S. Burroughs.
· I am not an expert on Burroughs
· I cannot finish many of his books
· But I was FASCINATED with him
Why Is He Important?
William S. Burroughs is associated with the Beat Generation of writers. My two favorites of the movement are Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.
His subject matter had some similarities with Kerouac and Ginsberg. He co-wrote a book with Kerouac called And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (2008; written 1945). He dealt with the seedy underworld, same as Kerouac and Ginsberg.
But Burroughs was out there.
Messes
Many of his books are catastrophes. They’re just not good as traditional novels.
Burroughs employed a technique called the Cut-Up Method, pioneered by Brion Gyson.
I practiced using the Cut-Up Method myself, but I haven’t ventured into this arena for a long time. I’m no longer interested in it.
Burroughs interested me for 3 basic reasons:
1. The underworld. (His first published novel is called Junky.)
2. Performance. He has spoken-word material that exists in a strange land between comedy, literary readings, poetry, and dare I say hip-hop. Burroughs appeared on SNL (1981).
3. He has pieces called “Spare-Ass Annie” and “The Talking Asshole.”
Burroughs was a pioneer in expression.
His comedy has timeless one-liners:
· As one judge said to the other, be just. If you can’t be just, be arbitrary (Naked Lunch, 1959).
Francis Ford Coppola produced a short work called The Junky’s Christmas, narrated by Burroughs.
Kurt Cobain praised him.
He was one of the characters on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Bob Dylan’s liner notes were said to have the style of Burroughs’s writing. (That’s what prompted me to pick up one of his books.)
He graduated Harvard. He accidentally killed his wife. He became addicted to heroin, and battled this addiction for quite some time.
The man was a vessel for experimentation and radical humor.
Hard-Boiled
His debut novel Junky reads like a hard-boiled detective story. I happened to like the voice of a hard-boiled detective novel. It’s a straight-forward read about a man’s descent into heroin and criminality. Junky is about junk.
His sophomore novel, Naked Lunch, is nonlinear. It’s Surrealist science fiction. Naked Lunch, although it is nonlinear, is easy to follow. It’s accessible. You can chew it up. It’s a fun read, for something being so experimental.
His other books are less and less fun. (Not all of them, but many.)
They have glorious poetic phrases. They have deadpan philosophies.
But I can’t finish them.
I would pick them up, read them, and I always came away with the same feeling:
Don’t read these before bed.
They’ll make your brain hurt.
My Introduction
The first book I bought from Burroughs was called The Wild Boys.
I don’t know what it’s about.
I carried that copy for a long time. I loaned it to friends to see what they thought about it. But I don’t fucking know.
I liked the imagery and the evocation of his phrasing.
I liked how unapologetically weird it is.
I liked how plot was … ruined? Destroyed? Turned on its head?
Plot … is there even a plot in some of these works?
Maybe.
Always in the Back of My Mind
Burroughs often repeated something Brion Gyson said: “Writing is 50 years behind painting.” And Burroughs set out to change that.
Looking at Naked Lunch, I think it does have a plot — more so than whatever I pulled from novels like The Ticket That Exploded.
The way I viewed Burroughs’s relationship with plot is that he challenged it. He forced new categories into existence.
It is Post-Modernist in practice, and much of it seems fueled by repressions he personally had, demons he carried and confronted as an individual.
What I Did with My Bad Book
I took these ideas, smashed them together with concepts and narratives I found in art-rock and jazz (specifically Miles Davis), and made a book that was, uh, bananas.
You could follow along for a few pages and then shit got weird.
Real weird.
And that was the point.
At the Time
At the time I liked transgressive literature. I fell in with JT LeRoy (Laura Albert), Ronald Sukenik, and Genichiro Takahashi.
At the time I thought if I wrote about fucking, transformation, and crazy people, I might get a weird novel out of the deal.
And it was weird.
But it was bad.
Naturally, I Moved to Hollywood
I moved to Hollywood and told people I was a writer.
I told people I was a writer because I was.
It was an ebook.
I recorded a sound track. I had photo albums and artwork. And when I was in Hollywood I shopped around, looking for people to turn this into a performance.
But it was … loose.
I wanted people to bring their own ideas into it and make it their own. I wanted something like Exploding Plastic Inevitable.
Eventually, I stopped the project.
My interests have long since moved on from extreme Surrealism. They have moved on from transgressive fiction and transgressive comedy.
My appreciation for and relationship with PLOT has changed dramatically since then.
But these things live in my background.
And I am thankful to have given myself permission to explore these areas when I did.
