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Urban Messthetics

John Mullan: Black and Asian writers in London, 18 November 2004

London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City 
by Sukhdev Sandhu.
Harper Perennial, 498 pp., £9.99, November 2004, 0 00 653214 4
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... are pictured with their white, establishment collaborators T.S. Eliot, George Orwell and William Empson. It’s no wonder that Portland Place seemed the world’s omphalos. Sandhu also describes less bookish figures. There is his sketch, for instance, of the odd career of Michael de Freitas, aka Michael X, one of the great London rogues of the ...

Aberdeen rocks

Jenny Turner: Stewart Home, 9 May 2002

69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess 
by Stewart Home.
Canongate, 182 pp., £9.99, March 2002, 9781841951829
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... He wasn’t going to pick up a hard-core following or sell over the long term like Guy Debord or William Burroughs. He had no devoted readership and little chance of remaining in print for long, let alone being republished in thirty or forty years’ time. In short, a typical midlist author. Is this sour grapes talking? Who knows? It is certainly true ...

His v. Hers

Mark Ford, 9 March 1995

In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles 
edited by Jeffrey Miller.
HarperCollins, 604 pp., £25, October 1994, 0 00 255535 2
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... early. In his autobiography Without Stopping (1972) – a self-portrait so unrevealing that William Burroughs renamed it Without Telling – Bowles describes some of the ruses and deceits he evolved so as to avoid the wrath of his near-psychotic father, Claude Bowles, whose methods of child-rearing seem to have derived from ancient ...

The Irish Savant’s Problem

Julian Bell: Diderot on Blindness, 21 June 2012

Blindness and Enlightenment: An Essay 
by Kate Tunstall.
Continuum, 238 pp., £17.99, August 2011, 978 1 4411 1932 2
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... nicks the jelly, it’s all commandingly impersonal. The servicing of ‘the soft machine’ (as William Burroughs called the body) proceeds to anaesthetising muzak, and tomorrow or the next day my mother, only a little sore, will start to see the world again through her new synthetic lens. For me, there will just be a faint twinge, thinking how this ...

Diary

Will Self: Cocaine, 5 November 2015

... been understood by those who use and abuse them. In his introduction to The Naked Lunch (1959), William Burroughs tickertapes: ‘Junk is the ideal product … the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy … The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to ...

Writing Machines

Tom McCarthy: On Realism and the Real, 18 December 2014

... course, exactly how events and memory both proceed: associatively, digressing, jolting, looping. William Burroughs makes the same point when discussing his cut-up technique: ‘Take a walk down a city street … You have seen a person cut in two by a car, bits and pieces of street signs and advertisements, reflections from shop windows – a montage of ...

Look over your shoulder

Christopher Hitchens, 25 May 1995

... about animal rights, the purity of hunting and the wide open spaces. Indeed he does resemble, as William Burroughs once wrote of his own visage, ‘one of them sheep-killing dogs’. He and his kind hate the cities and the city-dwellers, especially those cities that have become sinks of immigration and race-mixing and alien religions.Clinton’s second ...

Absolutely Bleedin’ Obvious

Ian Sansom: Will Self, 6 July 2006

The Book of Dave 
by Will Self.
Viking, 496 pp., £17.99, June 2006, 0 670 91443 6
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... Also like his namesake, Dave is a verbal genius. Reading Self is often reminiscent not of William Burroughs, as Self himself might wish, or of J.G. Ballard, whom Self obviously admires and seeks to emulate (clear echoes in The Book of Dave of The Drowned World), but rather of Norman Mailer, particularly the vainglorious, dick-swinging Mailer of ...

Fanfaronade

Will Self: James Ellroy, 2 December 2010

The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women 
by James Ellroy.
Heinemann, 203 pp., £16.99, September 2010, 978 0 434 02064 5
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... to that of You Can’t Win, Jack Black’s crim chapbook from 1926, which introduced the jejune William Burroughs to the outlaw lifestyle. The Badge is a breathlessly ingenuous account of Los Angeles’s competitive and notoriously corrupt law enforcement agencies in the 1940s and 1950s. Describing the last hours of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short – the ...

After-Time

Christopher Hitchens, 19 October 1995

Palimpsest: A Memoir 
by Gore Vidal.
Deutsch, 432 pp., £17.99, October 1995, 0 233 98891 2
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... between himself and Mailer, himself and Capote, himself and Tennessee Williams, or himself and William Buckley. Rather, we learn, not without preceding markers but in many ways for the first time, about Vidal’s family and about the Kennedy branch of it. We come to understand how divided a self he is; not just as between love and death but as between ...

His Galactic Centrifuge

Edmund Gordon: Ballard’s Enthusiasms, 23 May 2024

Selected Non-Fiction: 1962-2007 
by J.G. Ballard, edited by Mark Blacklock.
MIT, 386 pp., £30, October 2023, 978 0 262 04832 3
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... that he seems to have defined in contrast to science fiction, on the one hand, and the work of William Burroughs, on the other. There are several (scornful) references in this volume to the likes of Kingsley Amis and C.P. Snow, but only a single passing mention of Beckett (who had his own concept of inner space), and nothing at all about ...

Quantum Influencers

Adam Mars-Jones, 7 April 2022

When We Cease to Understand the World 
by Benjamin Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West.
Pushkin, 192 pp., £8.99, May 2021, 978 1 78227 614 2
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... his addiction to dihydrocodeine, an analgesic of which he took more than one hundred pills a day. William Burroughs described it as similar to heroin, twice as strong as codeine, but with a wired coke-like edge, so the North American doctors felt obliged to cure Göring of his dependency before allowing him to stand before the court.The phrasing makes it ...

I ♥ Cthulhu

Paul Grimstad, 21 September 2017

The Night Ocean 
by Paul La Farge.
Penguin, 389 pp., £19.99, March 2017, 978 1 101 98108 5
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... says looked like ‘the filthiest junior partner in a law firm’ and whose name is Bill – i.e. William S. Burroughs. After hundreds of pages of fictional interpolation, it’s dizzying to find out that all of this is true: Barlow did become a professor of anthropology at Mexico City College, ...

Lawrence Festival

Dan Jacobson, 18 September 1980

... there were moments of the kind of unintentional comedy that always arises on such occasions. When William Burroughs – wearing a grey suit, a grey tie, and an expression like that of the pastor of a back-street spiritualist chapel who has no misgivings about the world to come, but a few about making ends meet in this one – was asked about ...

Religion, grrrr

Rachel Aviv: The Scientology Mythos, 26 January 2012

The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion 
by Hugh Urban.
Princeton, 268 pp., £19.95, September 2011, 978 0 691 14608 9
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... Peaches Geldof – who serve as evidence that the religion makes the ‘able more able’. Even William Burroughs, during his brief stint in the church, was featured in Freedom bragging that he’d become a more imaginative writer and dismissing the notion that artists healed of their neuroses and compulsions would be bereft of inspiration. (He later ...

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