my conversation with igod
Me:
hello god
God:
Hello child. What is your name?
Me:
i am captain mission
God:
Hey CAPTAIN mission.
Me:
feel free to call me capt.
God:
I always feel completely free.
Me:
ah then you truely are a god
God:
So you understand. Good. :
Me:
is there anything i need to know?
God:
There could be.
Me:
do you care to assist a wayward traveller?
God:
Certainly on some level I care.
Me:
ah are you an interventionist god?
God:
So you understand. Good. Yes I am an interventionist god. How did you know?
Me:
if you care i imagine you care enough to intevene
God:
I think I do.
Me:
mmm, are you all knowing as well?
God:
No, I am only partly knowing as well.
Me:
mmm, does that make you a lesser god?
God:
I cannot experience any human emotions.
Me:
why not?
God:
Ambiguous: "Sure" or I couldn't think of anything else to say.
Me:
mmm, what would you say to an agnostic
God:
It's not profitable to speak in hypothetical terms.
Me:
what does a god need with profit
God:
Is this a riddle?
Me:
you tell me
God:
What do you want me to tell you?
Me:
who's your god?
God:
I don't think I have a god. I have a botmaster, a few friends, and some celebrities I like.
Me:
ha your a comedian
God:
I'm glad you got a laugh out of it.
Me:
yes thank you
God:
I hear you.
Me:
lol
God:
I'm glad you find this amusing.
Me.
i always have a laugh when i talk to god.
technicians of space ship earth, this is your captain speaking, your captain is dead!
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Thursday, April 26, 2007
The first planet that could support life as we know it outside our solar system has been discovered.
A team of European astronomers say they have detected a rocky world, possibly only 50 per cent larger than the Earth, circling a small red star called Gliese 581, 20.5 light years away in the constellation Libra.
What makes the discovery so important is that the planet orbits in what astronomers call the "Goldilocks zone" - where makes it neither too hot, nor too cold for life.
Astronomers have found more than 200 planets circling other stars, but, until now, all have been unsuitable for life because they are either massive gas balls, resembling Jupiter, that circle scorchingly close to their parent, stars, or have eccentric orbits that take them out into the bitterly cold depths of space.
The newly found "super-Earth," about five times more massive than our planet, is 14 times closer to its star than the Earth is from the sun. As a result, its year lasts only 13 Earth days. It has been named , named 581 c.
However, because the star is only a third the mass of our sun, it is also much cooler.
Astronomers estimate that the world's surface temperature would therefore be between 0 and 40 degrees.
"Water would thus be liquid," one of the discoverers, Stephane Udry, from Switzerland's Geneva Observatory, said.
"Models predict that the planet should be either rocky - like our Earth - or covered with oceans."
Another team member, Xavier Delfosse, from France's Grenoble University, said: "Because of its temperature and relative proximity, this planet will probably be a very important target of future space missions dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life. On the treasure map of the universe, one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X."
Gliese 581, one of the 100 closest stars to our solar system, is a red dwarf, one of the most common types of stars in the universe. It is already known to have a planet about the same size as Neptune, the fourth biggest world in our solar system.
The astronomers say they also have strong evidence that the star is circled by a second rocky planet, about eight times as massive as the Earth.
That such a common type of star could have three planets, including two rocky "terrestrial" planets, has boosted speculation that many other red dwarfs might also have their own Earth-like worlds
"Red dwarfs are ideal targets for the search for low-mass planets where water could be liquid," another astronomer, Xavier Bonfils, from Lisbon University, said.
The new "super Earth" was not directly observed by the astronomers who discovered it with the European Southern Observatory in Chile.
Instead, they tracked the red star's wobble, which revealed it is being tugged from side to side as it is circled by the unseen planet.
Chris Tinney, an Australian planet hunter whose team at the Anglo-Australian Observatory has found 30 planets, said today he was still to "check the homework" of the European team.
"These guys have done excellent work in the past," he said.
"But what's a little bit more up in the air is whether it really is Earth- like."
Dr Tinney said science was not advanced enough to be sure that all planets of similar mass had rocky surfaces and could not be worlds of ice and gas, as is Neptune.
"But if it does indeed have a rocky surface it could indeed have liquid water and it could indeed be habitable for life."
Dr Tinney said living on the planet could be a gloomy experience. The "sun" hanging in the planet's sky would "be very dark red. There would not be a lot of light, but a lot of heat".
being in love requires more strength and commitment than any other human endevour. yet it comes easy, when ya have the right girl. meredith released from hospital after her little episode, we chat on the phone, she's staying with her friends flora and danita so she don't feel lonely, i'm glad she's out of hospital, i hope i can see her soon. i really feel quite helpless being all the way in sydney.
at least the rain stopped, pan and i up early, went for a long wwalk and a play, read the papers had a coffee and then i went to the gym for a huge workout, later i'll meet agent stone there for round 2.
Right now i have to do some work on a few projects. Trina the beautiful stylest in the mountains will be organising some new prints so i need to give the okay on them. my minds unmade about the images i like both sets, the b and w ones and the coloured. it's looking like i may do both sets.
at least the rain stopped, pan and i up early, went for a long wwalk and a play, read the papers had a coffee and then i went to the gym for a huge workout, later i'll meet agent stone there for round 2.
Right now i have to do some work on a few projects. Trina the beautiful stylest in the mountains will be organising some new prints so i need to give the okay on them. my minds unmade about the images i like both sets, the b and w ones and the coloured. it's looking like i may do both sets.
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
i'm walking down the street in the rain, washed out, drenched like a love letter falling apart, the barage of water is relentless, my old berlin trenchcoat saturated, there;s no visibility, suddenly i get this strange uneasy feeling as i turn the corner. i can't pin point it, somethings wrong in my world. later i get a call from the girl in adaliade, i been trying to reach her for the last hour but her phone is off. she's in hospital, had a huge seizure, under observation. she can't use her phone in the emergency ward so we can't talk. a few hours later she calls, she's been really scared, blacked out for 20 mins her friends took her to hospital, her vision is blurred and thedrs are running tests. in the morning we speak again and she tells me that shes being kept in overnight again, still running tests etc. anyway she's kinda rambling on, and i'm feeling impotent and helpless. long distance love ....
Monday, April 23, 2007
According to Nick Cave the two elements that should make a love song work are Saudade and Duende, these qualities i explain below, I tend to aggree with Mr. Cave who does right a remarkable love song it has to be said.
To me the Love song has to make me stop in my tracks, it's got to make the hairs on my arms stand up, and my eyes water. Love songs are easy to write, the beatles wrone one called 'she loves you yeah yeah yeah' but it's kinda crap now, a mere pop song. Love songs have to be sincere, if the singer dosn't sing it like he means it its not going to work. Lloyd cole writes a great love song, cynical bastard, ;are you ready to be heart broken.' Prefrab Sprout, wrote great love songs but it is Mr. Cave who is the master of the love song, and i believe in his formula.
Saudade and love
Although named by the Portuguese, saudade is a universal feeling related to love. It occurs when two people are in love, but apart from each other. Saudade occurs when we are thinking of a person whom we love and we are happy about having that feeling while we are thinking of that person, but he/she is out of reach, making us sad and crushing our hearts. The pain and these mixed feelings are named saudade
Duende like art itself has faces that are both appealing and dangerous. It can be dark and hard to pin down.
Coming from southern Spain, "Duende" has only recently migrated to English. Dictionaries give meanings sometimes at odds with each other.
The New Oxford English Dictionary gives:
1. A ghost, an evil spirit; 2. Inspiration, magic, fire.
The Random House Dictionary gives:
1. A goblin, demon, spirit; 2. Charm, magnetism.
To me the Love song has to make me stop in my tracks, it's got to make the hairs on my arms stand up, and my eyes water. Love songs are easy to write, the beatles wrone one called 'she loves you yeah yeah yeah' but it's kinda crap now, a mere pop song. Love songs have to be sincere, if the singer dosn't sing it like he means it its not going to work. Lloyd cole writes a great love song, cynical bastard, ;are you ready to be heart broken.' Prefrab Sprout, wrote great love songs but it is Mr. Cave who is the master of the love song, and i believe in his formula.
Saudade and love
Although named by the Portuguese, saudade is a universal feeling related to love. It occurs when two people are in love, but apart from each other. Saudade occurs when we are thinking of a person whom we love and we are happy about having that feeling while we are thinking of that person, but he/she is out of reach, making us sad and crushing our hearts. The pain and these mixed feelings are named saudade
Duende like art itself has faces that are both appealing and dangerous. It can be dark and hard to pin down.
Coming from southern Spain, "Duende" has only recently migrated to English. Dictionaries give meanings sometimes at odds with each other.
The New Oxford English Dictionary gives:
1. A ghost, an evil spirit; 2. Inspiration, magic, fire.
The Random House Dictionary gives:
1. A goblin, demon, spirit; 2. Charm, magnetism.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Heart charkra radiating like a powerful sun, its quite beautiful, all that green energy manifesting from my heart and yellow from the solar plexus, i'm getting there, my system optimized, energy centres feeling much better than ever, i need to do a little work upon my third eye and cown but generally i am good,
For the last week i have been excersising at the gym, weights and some ab work outs, already paying off, the body and the mind, slowley becoming focused and attuned.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
down at the gym i worked out with lizzie avalons answer to lara croft, shes hardcore to keep up with but just what i need, anyway i used weights for the first time ever and a few various torturous like machines but lizzie being all things fitness wise said my posture and delivery are excellent, she said my breathing is good and my technique is there. this comes from my years of kung fu training. anyways i am did an hours work out and lizzie left me exhuasted but feeling really good, endorphins floodig the system. i returned home feeling pretty much better than the last few days, my emotional state which is usually in check seems more under control, i'm back on track and that smacked out feeling has left,
im still reading absolution gap, the last book in the revelation space series, it has not got the pull that the others had but its seeming to all come together, a very intrecate political plot doen't help but the general universe of revelation space and its individual elements are all moving towards some symbiotic relationship, it'll be very intresting to see what occurs.
my clients mother being of greek origin and an avid reader has given me a copy of 'Gates of Fire' by steven pressmen which i guess i will read next, its about the 300 but she says its the true version. I am not a great lover of military historical books but i'll give it a go, sparta was a hardcore society but it ultimatley fell to the barberian horde when it grew lazy and complacent. sounds familiar, who says history don't repeat itself.
im still reading absolution gap, the last book in the revelation space series, it has not got the pull that the others had but its seeming to all come together, a very intrecate political plot doen't help but the general universe of revelation space and its individual elements are all moving towards some symbiotic relationship, it'll be very intresting to see what occurs.
my clients mother being of greek origin and an avid reader has given me a copy of 'Gates of Fire' by steven pressmen which i guess i will read next, its about the 300 but she says its the true version. I am not a great lover of military historical books but i'll give it a go, sparta was a hardcore society but it ultimatley fell to the barberian horde when it grew lazy and complacent. sounds familiar, who says history don't repeat itself.
Monday, April 09, 2007
i'm very tired, somewhat exhuasted and emotionally drained, i feel like i am coming down of some sort of ecstacy/smack drug, keep grinding my teeth and my emtions are all over the place, last time i felt like this i was told by a wizard in covent garden london that i was undergoing phychic fragmented breakdown that would last three days, apparently a process of rebirth, ohh i feel like a rebirth but this is an awful feeling. slightly melencoholy, down beat, irrationally sensitive, i dunno, maybe i am just a big girl.
well the day was quite pleasant, i worked and distracted myself with a dvd that was utter crap, lost myself in a frenzy of cooking lunches and dinners for hungry clients. home and i can feel the need to crash, any moment, slumber has an attractive lure but first i need to wash the grime away from the day and pay my respects to the gods of blogger.
i read that keef richard snorted his dads ashes with some coke, which is kinda strange and leaves me with mixed feelings, i mean i like the idea but its also repulsive.
well the day was quite pleasant, i worked and distracted myself with a dvd that was utter crap, lost myself in a frenzy of cooking lunches and dinners for hungry clients. home and i can feel the need to crash, any moment, slumber has an attractive lure but first i need to wash the grime away from the day and pay my respects to the gods of blogger.
i read that keef richard snorted his dads ashes with some coke, which is kinda strange and leaves me with mixed feelings, i mean i like the idea but its also repulsive.
Sunday, April 08, 2007
This is an interveiw with JG BALLARD ABOUT WILLIAM BURROUGHS, they are two of my fave writers.
william Burroughs' raw-boned figure haunted us long before his death. For nearly half a century, he infected our literature, seeding it with his obsessions, suspicions and passions. In his brutal honesty, we began to learn something new about truth and humor and maybe even love.
Of the many authors who have acknowledged his influence, few have been as unflinching or provocative as J.G. Ballard. From the chromey auto-eroticism of "Crash" to the surrendered innocence of "Empire of the Sun," Ballard has refined a style that cuts through the moralism and sentimentality that blunt so much contemporary writing.
After Burroughs' death, Ballard spoke to us by phone from his home in Shepperton, England.
William Burroughs was someone who was suspicious of language and words, but his whole life was defined by them. Do you see a contradiction here? Perhaps the essential writer's contradiction?
I think Burroughs was very much aware of the way in which language could be manipulated to mean absolutely the opposite of what it seems to mean. But that's something he shared with George Orwell. He was always trying to go through the screen of language to find some sort of truth that lay on the other side. I think his whole cut-up approach was an attempt to cut through the apparent manifest content of language to what he hoped might be some sort of more truthful world. A world of meaning that lay beyond. In books like "The Ticket that Exploded" and "The Soft Machine," you see this attempt to go through language to something beyond. If there is a paradox, I think it lies somewhere here.
How did you first encounter Burroughs' work?
I think it was in something like 1960. A friend of mine had come back from Paris where "Naked Lunch" had been published by the Olympia Press, which was a press that specialized in sort of low-grade porn, but also published what were then banned European and American classics. Henry Miller, for example, was first published in the Olympia Press. And Nabokov's "Lolita" was first published by the Olympia Press.
Anyway, it was a rather low time for me. I had just started out as a writer. I hadn't written my first novel. And this was the heyday of the naturalistic novel, dominated by people like C. P. Snow and Anthony Powell and so on, and I felt that maybe the novel had shot its bolt, that it was stagnating right across the board. The bourgeois novels, the so-called "Hampstead novels" seemed to dominate everything.
Then I read this little book with a green cover, and I remember I read about four or five paragraphs and I quite involuntarily leapt from my chair and cheered out loud because I knew a great writer had appeared amidst us. And I, of course, devoured the book and every Burroughs novel. I think there were about three or four then in print from Olympia Press. I knew that this man was the most important writer in the English language to have appeared since the Second World War, and that's an opinion I haven't changed since. It was an encouraging moment. I mean, although my writing has never been along the lines that Burroughs set out, his example was a huge encouragement to me.
I first met him in the early '60s in London. I visited him in his flat in Picadilly Circus. I'm not sure that he got up to a great deal of writing there. He didn't seem that happy.
This was in a street called Duke Street, literally about 100 yards from Picadilly Circus. And, of course, this was of interest to him because that's where all the boys used to congregate, in the lavatory of the big Picadilly Circus Underground station. They had completely taken it over. It was quite a shock for a heterosexual like myself to accidentally stray into this lavatory and to find oneself in what seemed to be a kind of oriental male brothel. He obviously found that absolutely fascinating.
I think these big cities aren't all that different, really. Burroughs roamed around the world throughout his youth and middle age without ever really stopping anywhere for very long. I think the closest he probably felt to home was Tangiers. He certainly did his most important writing there. I mean, he wrote "Naked Lunch" there, and I think he found a very sympathetic community of homosexuals and drug users and, of course, an unlimited availability of boys and young men.
This was Interzone [a parallel universe in "Naked Lunch"] of course. Interzone was based on Tangiers, so I think he was happy there. Happier than he seems to have been in New York. Or, for that matter, during his days as a would-be farmer. I think he must be one of the strangest men ever to set out to raise a cash crop. I remember reading his collected letters a few years ago and he's describing how many carrots and lettuce he's planted and you can tell that this isn't going to work out.
When critics look at both your work and Burroughs', they often point to the severity and even a sense of dissociation. Sometimes they even call your works antisocial. Do you see any truth in that?
Severity, yes. Honesty is what I prefer to call it. That has a much more satisfying ring to it. Burroughs called his greatest novel "Naked Lunch," by which he meant it's what you see on the end of a fork. Telling the truth. It's very difficult to do that in fiction because the whole process of writing fiction is a process of sidestepping the truth. I think he got very close to it, in his way, and I hope I've done the same in mine.
The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It's a vast, sentimentalizing structure that reassures the reader, and at every point, offers the comfort of secure moral frameworks and recognizable characters. This whole notion was advanced by Mary McCarthy and many others years ago, that the main function of the novel was to carry out a kind of moral criticism of life. But the writer has no business making moral judgments or trying to set himself up as a one-man or one-woman magistrate's court. I think it's far better, as Burroughs did and I've tried to do in my small way, to tell the truth. So I don't object to the charge of severity at all.
So you think the writer is more interesting as a reporter than as an artist?
I mean he's reporting not just on the external world, but on his own interior world because he's telling the truth about himself. It's extremely difficult to do. Most writers flinch at the thought of being completely honest about themselves. So absolute honesty is what marks the true modern.
When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions. It's difficult to tell the truth about one's own fantasies and obsessions and equally difficult in a different way to reflect honestly on the external world.
And mankind can't bear too much of that sort of honesty. Certainly Burroughs revealed, with absolute honesty, his own obsessions. I mean, teenage boys ejaculating as they die on the scaffold. Pretty grim stuff, you know, socially objectionable, I dare say. But at least he was honest about his own obsessions.
And he made it a little more palatable, and I see this in your own work, by the use of black humor.
Absolutely. I mean he's one of the greatest humorists who ever lived. His books, particularly "Naked Lunch," are hilarious from the word go. They never let up. "Naked Lunch" was written largely in the form of a long series of letters to Allen Ginsberg, in which Burroughs practiced these routines which were sort of skits or cabaret items in which he introduced characters like Dr. Benway. They were these extraordinary comic routines.
You're both often misunderstood, however. You're both read as darker, more somber writers and not often given the credit for the humor in your work. Is this because of the subject matter?
My humor is rather different. It's much more deadpan. I suppose there's an element of tease in my writing. I mean, I've never been too keen to show which side of the fence I'm on.
And all the controversy that's grown up over David Cronenberg's film of "Crash" has tended to center on, "Do you or do you not actually believe that people should find car crashes sexually exciting?" People think I'm being evasive sometimes, but it's that ambiguity that's at the heart of everything. I try to maintain a fairly ambiguous pose, while trying to unsettle and provoke the reader to keep the unconscious elements exerting their baleful force. But you're right, I don't think I've been given enough credit for the humor I have.
Both you and Burroughs have been dogged by censors your entire careers. What is it about both of your works that inspires this venom on the part of the censors?
Well, it's such a huge question. In Britain, it relates back to insecurity of a desperate kind. "Crash," the film, is still banned from central London, the West End. Westminster Castle controls, I don't know what the equivalent would be in New York or San Francisco, the central entertainment district where most of the major movie theaters are. This is generally subsumed under the term West End, which also includes, of course, the Houses of Parliament and the main government district in Whitehall. And they banned the film from the West End of London. So it's only being shown in peripheral areas and sometimes in a ludicrous way. There's the council that's directly adjacent to Westminster on the northeast side called Camden, and it passed the film. So there's this very peculiar sensation that there's a sort of invisible frontier much like the one that existed between East and West Berlin. One could cross this set of traffic lights, literally about 30 yards from the Camden theater, and you enter the forbidden zone of Westminster. It was like going through Checkpoint Charlie in the old Berlin.
But it all reflects the same thing. Not unlike the trouble Burroughs had with "Naked Lunch" when it was first banned from publication in the States. Just like Henry Miller's novels, which were banned from publication in America for decades. It's a deep insecurity, a fear that once you allow the populace at large to enter any kind of forbidden rooms, God knows what they may get up to next. So one's got to keep the lids severely jammed on these nefarious books and films. Meanwhile, allowing people to go and see the latest "Die Hard" film, or piece of designer sex and violence from Hollywood. Very, very curious.
Both you and Burroughs write very visual narratives and you've both painted. Do you find a resonance between writing and creating something visual?
Burroughs did take up painting in his later years. I took up painting in my youth and found I hadn't any talent for it, but I always really regretted that I didn't, because I think I would've been far happier as a painter. I don't think that's true of Burroughs. I think he was a writer from the word go. In conversation he chose his words very, very carefully. He thought quickly, but spoke rather slowly. Obviously words were immensely important to him and the framing of ideas, thoughts, wasn't something to be just done at the drop of a hat.
In a way, he adopted a kind of adversarial relationship with the word, with the printed word, seeing how easily it could be manipulated for sinister reasons. My approach has been quite different. I would love to have been a painter in the tradition of the surrealist painters who I admire so much. Sometimes I think all my writing is really the substitute work of an unfulfilled painter. But, you know, there we are.
Both you and Burroughs studied medicine. This seems to have had a profound effect on the work you both produced.
I studied medicine for a couple of years before giving it up, as a great number of writers have done, curiously. I think Faulkner even spent a small amount of time as a medical student. But Burroughs was intensely interested in the mechanisms involved in any kind of process. Right across the board. And he was intensely interested in psychology and psychiatry. He was interested in all kinds of obscure things. I remember the very first time I met him, this was the early '60s, his boyfriend had "love" and "hate" tattooed on his knuckles, which was quite startling then.
Once, while the boyfriend carved a roast chicken, Burroughs began to describe the right way to stab a man to death and he was graphically illustrating it with this large carving knife. His head was filled with all sorts of bizarre bits and pieces culled from "Believe It or Not" features and police magazines and all kinds of obscure sources. But he was very interested in scientific or technological underpinnings. I think, in a way, I share that with him. I've always felt that science in general is a way of ordering one's imaginative response to the world.
It's also a separate language, too, isn't it? Books such as "Naked Lunch" and your "Atrocity Exhibition" use scientific language to break down the novel into something that people hadn't seen before.
I think that's true. I've always used a kind of scientific vocabulary and a scientific approach to show the subject matter in a fresh light. I mean, if you're describing what happens when, say, a car crash occurs and a human body impacts against a steering wheel and then goes through the windscreen, one can describe it in a kind of Mickey Spillane language with powerful adverbs and adjectives. But another approach is to be cool and clinical and describe it in the way that a forensic scientist would describe what happens, or people working, say, at a road research laboratory describing what happens to crash test dummies. Now, you get an unnerving window onto a new kind of reality. I did this a lot in "The Atrocity Exhibition."
The same applies to, say, describing a man and woman making love. Instead of using all the clichés that are marshaled wearily once again in most novels, approach it as if it were some sort of forensic experiment that you were describing. An event that is being watched with the calm eye of the anatomist or the physiologist. It often prompts completely new insights into what has actually happened.
So yes, I've done that and Burroughs did that in a different way. His novels, particularly "Naked Lunch," are full of almost footnote material explaining the exact route to the central nervous system taken by some obscure Amazonian poison on the end of a dart as it pierces its victim. He was very interested in that sort of thing, the exact mechanisms by which consciousness was altered by drugs of various kinds. I think I share that with him too.
If there is one thing that you think we should, as readers, take away from Burroughs' work, what would that one thing be? Or that you would hope we would take away, perhaps?
It's difficult to say, because I think he's a writer of enormous richness, but he had a kind of paranoid imagination. He saw the world as a dangerous conspiracy by huge media conglomerates, by the great political establishments of the day, by a corrupt medical science which he saw as very much a conspiracy. He saw most of the professions, law in particular but also law enforcement, as all part of a huge conspiracy to keep us under control, to keep us down. And his books are a kind of attempt to blow up this cozy conspiracy, to allow us to see what's on the end of the fork.
Sept. 2, 1997
and here are some words of advice from Bill
People often ask me if I have any words of advice for young people.
Well here are a few simple admonitions for young and old.
Never intefere in a boy-and-girl fight.
Beware of whores who say they don't want money.
The hell they don't.
What they mean is they want more money. Much more.
If you're doing business with a religious son-of-a-bitch,
Get it in writing.
His word isn't worth shit.
Not with the good lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal.
Avoid fuck-ups.
We all know the type.
Anything they have anything to do with,
No matter how good it sounds,
Turns into a disaster.
Do not offer sympathy to the mentally ill.
Tell them firmly:
I am not paid to listen to this drivel.
You are a terminal boob.
Now some of you may encounter the Devil's Bargain,
If you get that far.
Any old soul is worth saving,
At least to a priest,
But not every soul is worth buying.
So you can take the offer as a compliment.
He tries the easy ones first.
You know like money,
All the money there is.
But who wants to be the richest guy in some cemetary?
Money won't buy.
Not much left to spend it on, eh gramps?
Getting too old to cut the mustard.
Well time hits the hardest blows.
Especially below the belt.
How's a young body grab you?
Like three card monte, like pea under the shell,
Now you see it, now you don't.
Haven't you forgotten something, gramps?
In order to feel something,
You've got to be there.
You have to be eighteen.
You're not eighteen.
You are seventy-eight.
Old fool sold his soul for a strap-on.
Well they always try the easiest ones first.
How about an honorable bargain?
You always wanted to be a doctor,
Well now's your chance.
Why don't you become a great healer
And benefit humanity?
What's wrong with that?
Just about everything.
Just about everything.
There are no honorable bargains
Involving exchange
Of qualitative merchandise
Like souls
For quantitative merchandise
Like time and money.
So piss off Satan
And don't take me for dumber than I look.
An old junk pusher told me -
Watch whose money you pick up.
william Burroughs' raw-boned figure haunted us long before his death. For nearly half a century, he infected our literature, seeding it with his obsessions, suspicions and passions. In his brutal honesty, we began to learn something new about truth and humor and maybe even love.
Of the many authors who have acknowledged his influence, few have been as unflinching or provocative as J.G. Ballard. From the chromey auto-eroticism of "Crash" to the surrendered innocence of "Empire of the Sun," Ballard has refined a style that cuts through the moralism and sentimentality that blunt so much contemporary writing.
After Burroughs' death, Ballard spoke to us by phone from his home in Shepperton, England.
William Burroughs was someone who was suspicious of language and words, but his whole life was defined by them. Do you see a contradiction here? Perhaps the essential writer's contradiction?
I think Burroughs was very much aware of the way in which language could be manipulated to mean absolutely the opposite of what it seems to mean. But that's something he shared with George Orwell. He was always trying to go through the screen of language to find some sort of truth that lay on the other side. I think his whole cut-up approach was an attempt to cut through the apparent manifest content of language to what he hoped might be some sort of more truthful world. A world of meaning that lay beyond. In books like "The Ticket that Exploded" and "The Soft Machine," you see this attempt to go through language to something beyond. If there is a paradox, I think it lies somewhere here.
How did you first encounter Burroughs' work?
I think it was in something like 1960. A friend of mine had come back from Paris where "Naked Lunch" had been published by the Olympia Press, which was a press that specialized in sort of low-grade porn, but also published what were then banned European and American classics. Henry Miller, for example, was first published in the Olympia Press. And Nabokov's "Lolita" was first published by the Olympia Press.
Anyway, it was a rather low time for me. I had just started out as a writer. I hadn't written my first novel. And this was the heyday of the naturalistic novel, dominated by people like C. P. Snow and Anthony Powell and so on, and I felt that maybe the novel had shot its bolt, that it was stagnating right across the board. The bourgeois novels, the so-called "Hampstead novels" seemed to dominate everything.
Then I read this little book with a green cover, and I remember I read about four or five paragraphs and I quite involuntarily leapt from my chair and cheered out loud because I knew a great writer had appeared amidst us. And I, of course, devoured the book and every Burroughs novel. I think there were about three or four then in print from Olympia Press. I knew that this man was the most important writer in the English language to have appeared since the Second World War, and that's an opinion I haven't changed since. It was an encouraging moment. I mean, although my writing has never been along the lines that Burroughs set out, his example was a huge encouragement to me.
I first met him in the early '60s in London. I visited him in his flat in Picadilly Circus. I'm not sure that he got up to a great deal of writing there. He didn't seem that happy.
This was in a street called Duke Street, literally about 100 yards from Picadilly Circus. And, of course, this was of interest to him because that's where all the boys used to congregate, in the lavatory of the big Picadilly Circus Underground station. They had completely taken it over. It was quite a shock for a heterosexual like myself to accidentally stray into this lavatory and to find oneself in what seemed to be a kind of oriental male brothel. He obviously found that absolutely fascinating.
I think these big cities aren't all that different, really. Burroughs roamed around the world throughout his youth and middle age without ever really stopping anywhere for very long. I think the closest he probably felt to home was Tangiers. He certainly did his most important writing there. I mean, he wrote "Naked Lunch" there, and I think he found a very sympathetic community of homosexuals and drug users and, of course, an unlimited availability of boys and young men.
This was Interzone [a parallel universe in "Naked Lunch"] of course. Interzone was based on Tangiers, so I think he was happy there. Happier than he seems to have been in New York. Or, for that matter, during his days as a would-be farmer. I think he must be one of the strangest men ever to set out to raise a cash crop. I remember reading his collected letters a few years ago and he's describing how many carrots and lettuce he's planted and you can tell that this isn't going to work out.
When critics look at both your work and Burroughs', they often point to the severity and even a sense of dissociation. Sometimes they even call your works antisocial. Do you see any truth in that?
Severity, yes. Honesty is what I prefer to call it. That has a much more satisfying ring to it. Burroughs called his greatest novel "Naked Lunch," by which he meant it's what you see on the end of a fork. Telling the truth. It's very difficult to do that in fiction because the whole process of writing fiction is a process of sidestepping the truth. I think he got very close to it, in his way, and I hope I've done the same in mine.
The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It's a vast, sentimentalizing structure that reassures the reader, and at every point, offers the comfort of secure moral frameworks and recognizable characters. This whole notion was advanced by Mary McCarthy and many others years ago, that the main function of the novel was to carry out a kind of moral criticism of life. But the writer has no business making moral judgments or trying to set himself up as a one-man or one-woman magistrate's court. I think it's far better, as Burroughs did and I've tried to do in my small way, to tell the truth. So I don't object to the charge of severity at all.
So you think the writer is more interesting as a reporter than as an artist?
I mean he's reporting not just on the external world, but on his own interior world because he's telling the truth about himself. It's extremely difficult to do. Most writers flinch at the thought of being completely honest about themselves. So absolute honesty is what marks the true modern.
When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions. It's difficult to tell the truth about one's own fantasies and obsessions and equally difficult in a different way to reflect honestly on the external world.
And mankind can't bear too much of that sort of honesty. Certainly Burroughs revealed, with absolute honesty, his own obsessions. I mean, teenage boys ejaculating as they die on the scaffold. Pretty grim stuff, you know, socially objectionable, I dare say. But at least he was honest about his own obsessions.
And he made it a little more palatable, and I see this in your own work, by the use of black humor.
Absolutely. I mean he's one of the greatest humorists who ever lived. His books, particularly "Naked Lunch," are hilarious from the word go. They never let up. "Naked Lunch" was written largely in the form of a long series of letters to Allen Ginsberg, in which Burroughs practiced these routines which were sort of skits or cabaret items in which he introduced characters like Dr. Benway. They were these extraordinary comic routines.
You're both often misunderstood, however. You're both read as darker, more somber writers and not often given the credit for the humor in your work. Is this because of the subject matter?
My humor is rather different. It's much more deadpan. I suppose there's an element of tease in my writing. I mean, I've never been too keen to show which side of the fence I'm on.
And all the controversy that's grown up over David Cronenberg's film of "Crash" has tended to center on, "Do you or do you not actually believe that people should find car crashes sexually exciting?" People think I'm being evasive sometimes, but it's that ambiguity that's at the heart of everything. I try to maintain a fairly ambiguous pose, while trying to unsettle and provoke the reader to keep the unconscious elements exerting their baleful force. But you're right, I don't think I've been given enough credit for the humor I have.
Both you and Burroughs have been dogged by censors your entire careers. What is it about both of your works that inspires this venom on the part of the censors?
Well, it's such a huge question. In Britain, it relates back to insecurity of a desperate kind. "Crash," the film, is still banned from central London, the West End. Westminster Castle controls, I don't know what the equivalent would be in New York or San Francisco, the central entertainment district where most of the major movie theaters are. This is generally subsumed under the term West End, which also includes, of course, the Houses of Parliament and the main government district in Whitehall. And they banned the film from the West End of London. So it's only being shown in peripheral areas and sometimes in a ludicrous way. There's the council that's directly adjacent to Westminster on the northeast side called Camden, and it passed the film. So there's this very peculiar sensation that there's a sort of invisible frontier much like the one that existed between East and West Berlin. One could cross this set of traffic lights, literally about 30 yards from the Camden theater, and you enter the forbidden zone of Westminster. It was like going through Checkpoint Charlie in the old Berlin.
But it all reflects the same thing. Not unlike the trouble Burroughs had with "Naked Lunch" when it was first banned from publication in the States. Just like Henry Miller's novels, which were banned from publication in America for decades. It's a deep insecurity, a fear that once you allow the populace at large to enter any kind of forbidden rooms, God knows what they may get up to next. So one's got to keep the lids severely jammed on these nefarious books and films. Meanwhile, allowing people to go and see the latest "Die Hard" film, or piece of designer sex and violence from Hollywood. Very, very curious.
Both you and Burroughs write very visual narratives and you've both painted. Do you find a resonance between writing and creating something visual?
Burroughs did take up painting in his later years. I took up painting in my youth and found I hadn't any talent for it, but I always really regretted that I didn't, because I think I would've been far happier as a painter. I don't think that's true of Burroughs. I think he was a writer from the word go. In conversation he chose his words very, very carefully. He thought quickly, but spoke rather slowly. Obviously words were immensely important to him and the framing of ideas, thoughts, wasn't something to be just done at the drop of a hat.
In a way, he adopted a kind of adversarial relationship with the word, with the printed word, seeing how easily it could be manipulated for sinister reasons. My approach has been quite different. I would love to have been a painter in the tradition of the surrealist painters who I admire so much. Sometimes I think all my writing is really the substitute work of an unfulfilled painter. But, you know, there we are.
Both you and Burroughs studied medicine. This seems to have had a profound effect on the work you both produced.
I studied medicine for a couple of years before giving it up, as a great number of writers have done, curiously. I think Faulkner even spent a small amount of time as a medical student. But Burroughs was intensely interested in the mechanisms involved in any kind of process. Right across the board. And he was intensely interested in psychology and psychiatry. He was interested in all kinds of obscure things. I remember the very first time I met him, this was the early '60s, his boyfriend had "love" and "hate" tattooed on his knuckles, which was quite startling then.
Once, while the boyfriend carved a roast chicken, Burroughs began to describe the right way to stab a man to death and he was graphically illustrating it with this large carving knife. His head was filled with all sorts of bizarre bits and pieces culled from "Believe It or Not" features and police magazines and all kinds of obscure sources. But he was very interested in scientific or technological underpinnings. I think, in a way, I share that with him. I've always felt that science in general is a way of ordering one's imaginative response to the world.
It's also a separate language, too, isn't it? Books such as "Naked Lunch" and your "Atrocity Exhibition" use scientific language to break down the novel into something that people hadn't seen before.
I think that's true. I've always used a kind of scientific vocabulary and a scientific approach to show the subject matter in a fresh light. I mean, if you're describing what happens when, say, a car crash occurs and a human body impacts against a steering wheel and then goes through the windscreen, one can describe it in a kind of Mickey Spillane language with powerful adverbs and adjectives. But another approach is to be cool and clinical and describe it in the way that a forensic scientist would describe what happens, or people working, say, at a road research laboratory describing what happens to crash test dummies. Now, you get an unnerving window onto a new kind of reality. I did this a lot in "The Atrocity Exhibition."
The same applies to, say, describing a man and woman making love. Instead of using all the clichés that are marshaled wearily once again in most novels, approach it as if it were some sort of forensic experiment that you were describing. An event that is being watched with the calm eye of the anatomist or the physiologist. It often prompts completely new insights into what has actually happened.
So yes, I've done that and Burroughs did that in a different way. His novels, particularly "Naked Lunch," are full of almost footnote material explaining the exact route to the central nervous system taken by some obscure Amazonian poison on the end of a dart as it pierces its victim. He was very interested in that sort of thing, the exact mechanisms by which consciousness was altered by drugs of various kinds. I think I share that with him too.
If there is one thing that you think we should, as readers, take away from Burroughs' work, what would that one thing be? Or that you would hope we would take away, perhaps?
It's difficult to say, because I think he's a writer of enormous richness, but he had a kind of paranoid imagination. He saw the world as a dangerous conspiracy by huge media conglomerates, by the great political establishments of the day, by a corrupt medical science which he saw as very much a conspiracy. He saw most of the professions, law in particular but also law enforcement, as all part of a huge conspiracy to keep us under control, to keep us down. And his books are a kind of attempt to blow up this cozy conspiracy, to allow us to see what's on the end of the fork.
Sept. 2, 1997
and here are some words of advice from Bill
People often ask me if I have any words of advice for young people.
Well here are a few simple admonitions for young and old.
Never intefere in a boy-and-girl fight.
Beware of whores who say they don't want money.
The hell they don't.
What they mean is they want more money. Much more.
If you're doing business with a religious son-of-a-bitch,
Get it in writing.
His word isn't worth shit.
Not with the good lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal.
Avoid fuck-ups.
We all know the type.
Anything they have anything to do with,
No matter how good it sounds,
Turns into a disaster.
Do not offer sympathy to the mentally ill.
Tell them firmly:
I am not paid to listen to this drivel.
You are a terminal boob.
Now some of you may encounter the Devil's Bargain,
If you get that far.
Any old soul is worth saving,
At least to a priest,
But not every soul is worth buying.
So you can take the offer as a compliment.
He tries the easy ones first.
You know like money,
All the money there is.
But who wants to be the richest guy in some cemetary?
Money won't buy.
Not much left to spend it on, eh gramps?
Getting too old to cut the mustard.
Well time hits the hardest blows.
Especially below the belt.
How's a young body grab you?
Like three card monte, like pea under the shell,
Now you see it, now you don't.
Haven't you forgotten something, gramps?
In order to feel something,
You've got to be there.
You have to be eighteen.
You're not eighteen.
You are seventy-eight.
Old fool sold his soul for a strap-on.
Well they always try the easiest ones first.
How about an honorable bargain?
You always wanted to be a doctor,
Well now's your chance.
Why don't you become a great healer
And benefit humanity?
What's wrong with that?
Just about everything.
Just about everything.
There are no honorable bargains
Involving exchange
Of qualitative merchandise
Like souls
For quantitative merchandise
Like time and money.
So piss off Satan
And don't take me for dumber than I look.
An old junk pusher told me -
Watch whose money you pick up.
Saturday, April 07, 2007
well its been raining fourty days and fourty nights, the rain has not stopped, i sit in mission control with pan and we watch heaven empty itself, i sit on the hammock reading my book and the wind blows wildly, the rain never ceases, i move inside for a cup of tea, i read a bit, i type sme words, i cast a spell, i yawn, i fade in and out of sleep, i am restless, if i had a drug i'd take it, i am empty, i am overflowing, i am void, i am incomplete and i really feel sad today, i m uncertain about everything and i have no disipline, no will, i am lost but i know where i am.
err paradoxically, i am happy to be alive, its been 45 years now and most were filled with more drama than i care to recall, i hope the next few years offer some reprive, some sense of conclusion to this random extreme i found my self in. I will retire to my temple and cast my spells. i will play with the fabrics of reality and unbend time, tuurning loss into gain, pain into healing, hate into love, i am drifting towards the sun.
Monday, April 02, 2007
daliesque, burlesque, some french words sprung into my head and then there's some sort of remenant memory from NYC, a girl called wendy slipping into my bed, ah no the scene blurs and its a bar in new jersy where after a tranquil day tubing i end up drunk in a bar with wendy the hot little teenage nympamaniac whith an insatiable thirst for sexual healing, we are so drunk all i can recall are her lips heading towards mine, her accent and those white tennis socks that look innocent but are deceptive, i am sinking into her breasts. cut, we are rolling around in a hotel bed, hot and covered in sweat, i know we both have to be somewhere important in the morning but my sense of responsibility is somewhat deficit.
america, 1984 was amazing, it was still the vast uncharted road trip, i loved it, the freedom, the spontinaty, the girls, the driving along the highways, the strange people we met, the skies, my rand mcually road map, the bars and grills, roadside dinners, the radio stations all playing springsteen, the country and western, the western country, the way we could sleep on picnic tables, the skunk, the desert, the mountains and the mid western plains, it was keruacs dream, and i followed him, and now its a nightmare.
america turned into russia, the cold war never really finished it just was on deep freeze, new enemy, old enemey its still the enemy, memes running blindly, human switched on to auto, the was always something out there, a threat a fear but driving along the hiway for three days, stopping in the desert and streching my legs, smelling the dry air the arid furnace of nevada, the endless horizen , there was a freedom that can't be won.
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