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Ah Burroughs is here

In The Quietus, Darran Anderson on William Burroughs’ centenary.

William S. Burroughs was a high modernist and a writer of complete trash; the two are by no means mutually exclusive. He was a genius and a bullshit artist. If his books prove anything, it’s that profundity and inanity can skip along merrily arm in arm. Sometimes his work was heavyweight, sometimes dumb. To borrow a Freudian analogy, sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar and sometimes a man who taught his asshole to talk really is just a man who taught his asshole how to talk (what it’s saying and why is a different story). The paradox of the freest writer being a lifelong junky is really no paradox at all. As a user and pedlar, he understood the mechanics of how it all worked and kindly pointed it out to us, even as he was picking our pockets. He was a stiff morose patrician figure in a suit (so much so his friend Herbert Huncke initially took him for an undercover agent) with books and a history full of debauchery and depravity. If there seems a contradiction there, it’s in the eye of the beholder. What makes Burroughs’ work seem prophetic is that he was perceptive enough to see that people don’t change, the secret to all successful prophecies. We’re still continually re-enacting Greek myths on a daily basis and always will. Psychosis may mirror the zeitgeist (whether it’s paranoia of witches, Jews, communists, drug fiends, Islamists or whoever next) but its essential character doesn’t alter. The bugs and the feds are always with us and there’s only so much one man can do, calling door to door with an extermination kit.

Say hello to gorse

It’s here! Pre-orders are heading out to you lovely people this weekend. We’d love to hear what you think, so please do get in touch. We’re selling copies through the website for now, but can be spotted in Chapters Bookstore, Dublin, from February onwards. We’re talking to some other wonderful bookshops about selling us too, so watch the skies.

Superfluous men

Narcissus and Ego: Poets Try the Novel, interesting look at Dan Beachy-Quick‘s An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky and Ben Lerner‘s Leaving the Atocha Station.

Ruthlessly autobiographical and dialectical on the role of art, we might think we’re witnessing a new form: a shrewd arbitrage of the Confessional Poem smuggled into the Novel. But, of course, the novelists have been here before. [Lerner’s narrator] Adam Gordon calls to mind André Gide’s marvelously puckish 1894 novella Marshlands, whose unnamed narrator never misses an opportunity to announce the writing of his own novel “Marshlands” (the story of a “man who lies down”). He carefully crafts empty maxims to deploy while mocking and being mocked by literary society, models himself (at least in his selection of breakfast) after the Lake-Poets much as Daniel would Melville or Adam would Ashbery, and all the way throughout . . . accomplishes very little writing of “Marshlands.”

Above all to wander

We’re looking for essays – like this and this and these – to publish in gorse, both online and in print. Here are some essays elsewhere that we like:

Echoes of Mondrian

Sean O’Hagan reviews The Americans are Coming, Warhol, Burroughs and Lynch at the Photographers’ Gallery.

In this triumvirate of maverick American talents, David Lynch emerges as the most old-fashioned, that is to say, formally consistent photographer. In The Factory Photographs he is represented by his pictures of the single subject of the title – deserted industrial spaces. (He also photographs nudes and forlorn snowmen.) His black-and-white photographs of decaying buildings are really black and grey. Taken as a whole they make a kind of elegy to industrialism and, in their ominous darkness, possess a unified aesthetic that sets him apart from the other two artists.