The Sex Shops of Sherman Oaks

SJXSJC The Sex Shops of Sherman Oaks (2021)
To kick off at something of a tangent, back when I was a self-involved teenager and my mother was doing a literature degree of some description at Warwick University, she often dropped me off at the university's expansive library so as to keep me occupied for an hour or so. I expect she hoped I'd discover Dickens but I usually ended up browsing the William Burroughs shelf. I'd just discovered his writing and the university kept original hardbacks of all the obscure out of print books, a few of which I hadn't seen before and have never encountered since. A couple of these were illustrated with collages by Burroughs himself, or Brion Gysin, or somebody else - stark black and white things, often jarring cut-up images very much belonging to the same lineage of juxtaposition and dissent as Steven Purtill's illustrations for The Sex Shops of Sherman Oaks, which similarly reminds me of that initial thrill of discovering Burroughs for the first time. This one comes from Amphetamine Sulphate's science-fiction imprint. As may be obvious, it's more Burroughs than Asimov and as such falls under the heading of things which approximately continue the experimental thrust of Moorcock's New Worlds.

That being said, while I presume the influence of Burroughs may figure in there somewhere, and the occasional passage suggests something of his voice, this is nevertheless something new, or at least new to me. The narrative is delivered in short, functional sentences, sometimes without verbs, and with an overpowering tendency towards what may initially seem like the sort of random digression which results from cut-up texts. There's a fairly high degree of repetition, and while some of it may indeed be derived from the cut-up technique, the whole seems quite carefully directed towards specific effects and is therefore a long way from comprising random phrases plucked out of a top hat.

Human as alien as animal as transformative substance. My gills again. My lungs left behind. The anti-intro that discusses mutations only. New genes discovered in the side streets of North Inglewood. My personal mental fitness … a direct agency to despair. Psychedelic mathematics … the double helix … organisms occur as new species … desirous selection.

It's all like this, nearly two-hundred pages, and the cumulative effect is akin to a wall of noise with little variation in tone. Nevertheless the reader will begin to notice patterns emerging from the static, not unlike images seen flickering within flames, and after a short time it feels as though you're reading something with a conventional, if not exactly traditional, narrative hidden within the information overload. Much of the content contradicts and even skewers attempts to make sense of what may or may not be happening, not least occasional half-glimpses of cyborgs and flying saucers intruding on whatever reality our narrator occupies, and yet the suggestion that we're reading something more structured persists.

I'm not sure what to make of this, but I suppose it could be viewed as narrative which gives equal emphasis to experienced reality, stray thoughts and memories, and even alternatives occurring somewhere within the many realms of possibility. Our narrator is involved with someone named Madhab, or maybe he's Madhab, but the perspectives remain fluid to the point of even gender drifting back and forth. They or he or she or whoever move around from place to place, brains fried by chemicals, engaging in auto-erotic asphyxiation amongst other pastimes. It might almost be a road movie with the first few Chrome albums on heavy rotation, but one where that which is described represents a mere fraction of the greater reality as though we experience only the sharp peaks of something otherwise too vast to operate as text in a meaningful way.

As will hopefully be clear from the above - keeping in mind that this is just my interpretation - The Sex Shops of Sherman Oaks really isn't much like Burroughs aside from the short-circuiting of consensus reality which it effects; and surprisingly, it's not even a difficult novel once the reader has dispensed with any of the usual expectations. I remain confused but am nevertheless violently impressed.

My Education

William S. Burroughs My Education (1995)
This was Burrough's last book to be published whilst he was alive, and as with 1987's Western Lands you can kind of tell he was cramming for his finals, so to speak. The text comprises descriptions of dreams Burroughs' set down immediately upon waking - presumably over a long period given the quantity - worked into something which is at least as much a novel as any of the others, if more obviously autobiographical due to the general composition of many of the dreams.

For the last couple of decades I've tended to regard dreams as excursions to an actual place, namely the Precolombian Mexican underworld as described in T.J. Knab's autobiographical and ethnological A War of Witches. Knab describes indigenous Nahua belief in our entire world existing in replica down there, and how we visit this land of the dead in dreams, even meeting other dreamers as well as those who have passed on. Here I suppose I should stress that I don't subscribe to this idea as something literal so much as a useful understanding, one which lends our dreams a more interesting narrative than the traditional combination of cheese before bedtime revealing stereotypical desires to shag your own mother or whatever.

Anyway, with this in mind, My Education is both fascinating and surprisingly touching as autobiography. Whilst there's always a lot of the man in his writing, this time we additionally meet the people and things which I guess must have meant something to Burroughs, at least beyond the more familiar subjects of guns and bumholes. We meet Ian Somerville, Brion Gysin, and - oddly - Mick Jagger several times, and even Burroughs' parents; and we are taken to the places he lived, over and over, and are left with a feeling that it all adds up to something, even if what that might be eludes conventional description. My Education feels somewhat akin to setting a house in order prior to departure, as I suppose it possibly was, although this could simply be my reading of it. Whatever the case, the narrative reveals a gentle, likeable Burroughs in a way that his previous works have tended not to, without necessarily appearing out of character.

Very good.

The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises (1926)
William Burroughs said of the cut-up technique he introduced to literature - as formalised by himself and Brion Gysin - something along the lines of the novel being some twenty or so years behind painting, the art world having dispensed with the purely representational in the wake of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907, roughly speaking. Artists had begun to screw around with form, to create bold new images beyond that which existed in nature. Burroughs therefore likened his own reorganisation of existing texts to Dadaist collage. All well and good, but the premise of one form necessarily needing to catch up with the other was a bit of a straw man argument, given that both the Dadaists and Futurists had already applied collage technique to the written word and, as I'm beginning to appreciate, for most of the twentieth century literature has remained very much in step with the times as represented by whatever cultural swerves were taken in painting and sculpture. Hemingway is a case in point. The narrative unfolds in a straight line for sure, but the means by which that narrative is communicated is as much stripped down to pure form and rhythm as anything painted in the decades leading up to the big post-war freak out of abstract expressionism.

The taxi went up the hill, passed the lighted square, then on into the dark, still climbing, then levelled out onto a dark street behind St. Etienne du Mont, went smoothly down the asphalt, passed the trees and the standing bus at the Place de la Contrescarpe, then turned onto the cobbles of the Rue Mouffetard. There were lighted bars and late open shops on each side of the street. We were sitting apart and we jolted close together going down the old street. Brett's hat was off. Her head was back. I saw her face in the lights from the open shops, then it was dark, then I saw her face clearly as we came out on the Avenue de Gobelins. The street was torn up and men were working on the car-tracks by the light of acetylene flares. Brett's face was white and the long line of her neck showed in the bright light of the flares. The street was dark again and I kissed her. Our lips were tight together and then she turned away and pressed against the corner of the seat, as far away as she could get. Her head was down.

The rhythm may be erratic, picked out in the division of sentences into component statements and the repetition of certain words, but it is nevertheless as much a rhythm as anything painted by, for one example, Max Weber - whom I name specifically because Hemingway's above quoted opening to chapter four brought Weber's Rush Hour, New York of 1915 immediately to mind.

Anyway, The Sun Also Rises concerns itself with what Gertrude Stein identified as the Lost Generation, those left wandering and lacking purpose in the wake of the first world war, a war which - it might be argued - left existing ideas of morality looking somewhat ineffectual. The roughly autobiographical protagonists of The Sun Also Rises are rich kids who spend a lot of time talking about things of no real consequence, dining, travelling, having unsatisfactory affairs, eventually ending up in a small town in Spain having a bit of a wheeze during all the gore of the bull running. The gang have their emotional ups and downs but appear to remain unaffected by their environment. In chapter thirteen, Mike reduces military medals to a decorative feature of his dress, which may possibly have had more resonance between the wars than it does at present; and then there's the blood and innards all over the streets of Pamplona reduced to spectator sport, and in a way which I'm tempted to suggest may have been intended to echo the class divide painfully emphasised by the war. Carlos Baker as quoted on Wikipedia reckons that in The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway presents his notion that the Lost Generation, considered to have been decadent, dissolute and irretrievably damaged by World War I, was resilient and strong, but personally I don't really see it. I found them feckless and slightly irritating, and I was reminded of the counterpart bullfight in D.H. Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent also published in 1926 which could almost have been a direct response but for the timing. Naturally Lawrence's version entails more heaving and thrusting with brows furrowing darkly left right and centre, which seems to me a more natural response to such gruesome spectacle; and in the same novel we find:

She thought again of going back to Europe. But what was the good? She knew it! It was all politics or jazzing or slushy mysticism or sordid spiritualism. And the magic had gone. The younger generation, so smart and interesting, but so without any mystery, any background. The younger the generation, the flatter and more jazzy, more and more devoid of wonder.

Which quite adequately describes Hemingway's bunch, for my money, regardless of at least one of the two authors under discussion being something of a nutter who may not actually know what he's talking about all of the time.

So in lieu of a coherent summary, the short version of the review is that it was okay, but failed to deliver the life-changing experience I had been promised. I can see why The Sun Also Rises is regarded so highly, and much of it is beautifully put together, but it wasn't quite  my bag.

Exterminator!

William S. Burroughs Exterminator! (1973)
This might count as the first book I ever read by criteria I can't quite define - neither a children's book nor a chuffin' Doctor Who book nor something read for school - not that there's anything wrong with any of those, excepting possibly the second category; but I was fifteen or thereabouts, and Burroughs was getting namechecked left, right and centre by all my favourite industrial grimsters in Sounds music paper, so I headed directly to my local library in Stratford-upon-Avon and found this on the shelf. It was the first time, so far as I recall, that I had picked up a book specifically because I had no fucking clue as to what I would find within, which was somehow immeasurably more exciting than knowing it would be some guy having scrapes and adventures. Despite the fact that my first copy was borrowed from a local library, Exterminator! felt like something inherently dangerous which I probably wasn't supposed to read.

Contrary to claims made of this edition, it was never a novel, but rather a selection of short pieces - one would hesitate to term them stories as that was never really quite what Burroughs did. As such, Exterminator! was, with hindsight, a good place to start. Swearin' Willy's novels were not noticeably any less disjointed, but tended to be held together by recurrent themes, thus potentially leaving the novice never quite sure whether it was all random, or whether it was entirely coherent - as suggested by the aforementioned recurrent themes - just way above his or her head.

Exterminator! dates from a period of Burroughs being particularly interested in writing by means of Brion Gysin's cut-up technique, so much so that even the seemingly regular prose tends to be peppered with extragrammatical interjections of alien text unfettered by much in the way of punctuation. In case it requires explanation, the cut-up technique entails variant texts blended at random in the manner of phrases or even sentences selected from a hat, the creative process being the choice of which resulting narrative collage seems the most appropriate or interesting in terms of whatever the author is trying to achieve. Burroughs regarded this as literature catching up with painting, specifically the collages and juxtaposed images of the Dadaists - a written equivalent of divination by which the mechanism of the universe might be revealed in random patterns. One might argue that anyone could produce a meaningful cut-up, but as with abstract painting and dance music, this is of course bollocks, as Burroughs' visionary texts herein demonstrate, falling somewhere between free poetry and a series of photographs mashed together and forced to make sense. As a whole, the collection feels more like a stroll around an exhibition than a book of short stories, such is the diversity of ideas; of which, by the way, one of my favourites is:

Somewhat reluctantly I put down the magazine and followed her down the hall. Quite an idea. Story of someone reading a story. I had the odd sensation that I myself would wind up in the story and that someone would read about me reading the story in a waiting room somewhere.

Of course, it isn't all self-referential jokes. This being Burroughs, it's also firearms, nude teenage boys on rollerskates, exploding pimples, alcoholism, drugs, corruption, violence, disaster, bottoms, and the inevitable mandrill elected to a prominent governmental position - a veritable circus designed to short circuit common sense, assumptions, and power structures in general. This is where the nature of Burroughs' art becomes clear, that this barrage of apparent nonsense can still make such a bold and obvious statement about society both then and now without having to spell it out; even though he actually does spell it out on one occasion:

The youth rebellion is a worldwide phenomenon that has not been seen before in history. I don't believe they will calm down and be ad execs at thirty as the establishment would like to believe. Millions of young people all over the world are fed up with shallow unworthy authority running on a platform of bullshit.

Sadly this was all before Richard Branson and his ilk, and it is with hindsight slightly depressing to realise that Burroughs was, if anything, an optimist; but even if he overestimated humanity with our general willingness to pull the wool over our own eyes, his targets were at least chosen with sadly timeless accuracy:

What is happening in America today is something that has never happened before in recorded history: Total confrontation. The lies are obvious. The machinery is laid bare. All Americans are being shoved by the deadweight of a broken control machine right in front of each other's faces.

I think this may be why I recall Exterminator! as my first proper book, it being the first thing I read which presented possibilities beyond any I had been led to expect, the first to seriously inspire thought on subjects other than those directly described within its pages. Not only has it stood the test of time, but it has improved with age.