Writing, Word Viruses, Burroughs, Vincenzi

I have finally summoned the courage to start reading William S. Burroughs. Perhaps it sounds silly, but Burroughs was one of those writers who distinctly intrigued and frightened me. I have this image of Naked Lunch in my head that is some sort of horror story about highly detailed intravenous drug use. Without a doubt does Burroughs go into some pretty stalwart detail about drug use--he claims to have written Naked Lunch while he was going through withdrawal from junk/opium derivatives--but taking the work as simple some drug-laden chronicle is a pretty shallow interpretation.

I have read a few excerpts from Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader from his other work (Junky, Nova Trilogy, and letters), not to mention a few excellent essays on him. Admittedly, Burroughs is not a writer I would have gone to without some background to encourage and define his particular style for me. This may have, in the end, provided me with too many other ideas before exploring his work, but his endeavor to redefine narrative and develop an alternative imagery takes center-stage whatever I pick up of his, regardless of whatever assumptions I have of the work itself. The reader title itself, "Word Virus," has this rich, creative, fluid identity in his work. In The Nova Trilogy in particular, the spread of (pseudo-)sentient memes (called nova criminals) through the population, their criminal-epidemic characteristic, and the usurpation of others' bodies or behaviors functions as a sort of accurate metaphor for powerful sociocultural memes today. (For those who have read Naked Lunch, the shoggoth-esque entity of the "buyer" as himself a user of junkies is a sort of early form of the nova criminal's victim; the nova criminal itself being the ritualistic obsession the buyer has with being around junkies.)

I have been working diligently if not regularly on my Lorenzo Vincenzi detective story. Working on it is rather steady, but I prefer to write it once it is dark, but with closing shifts at Ivanna Cone, I mostly lose the opportunity. During the daytime I have little problem developing in greater detail and scope the lives of the characters and the plots and subplots at stake. Getting it onto paper is just a sort of exercise I need a certain setting to do. More and more I feel that the ideas Burroughs deals with--possessive memes, complicated and tyrannical language games, subverted persons, voluntary and involuntary participation with maniacal non-human entities--are exactly where I want to go with Vincenzi and his participation in the Cthulhu Mythos. Later work and style I think will hinge increasingly on my own deep reading of The Nova Trilogy because of its direct confrontation (nova police and nova criminals) between more or less human persons with non-human intelligent infections.

Oddly, this doesn't feel the least confusing to me. Burroughs himself is heavily influenced by pulp literature (both horror/weird fiction and hard-boiled) in his work. His skill with slang and vernacular is incredible and often--at least in Naked Lunch--beyond me. Most of his references, I understand, are to drugs, sex, and sex industry, so I can easily get the gist of them. Nonetheless, I also notice I miss more than a little. Naked Lunch is rapidly finding is place among books I will reread and refer to often in the future. In a way, it has just exploded in its fiery liveliness, humor, sincerity, and criticism directly in front of me. Reading it, you cannot help but have it seep into more and more of your life.

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Note: This entry connects strongly to my previous post concerning the notion of underworld, that is, of reality being more richly textured than by the well-accepted physical laws/expectations. I don't think of science as wrong, but as incomplete and inadequate. Anyway, look those up if you're interested.