(This is just an oldie rescued from the dustbin of history. Was written just before I went off into a few-years-long Burroughs obsession. Truly a strange occurrence. Subconscious resistance is futile. Put the sentences into numerical order, and they make a sort of linear sense. Which is more than you can say for the cut-ups. Has refs to drugs in it, and expletives. Mental as fuck rebellious chaos, maaan.)
William S Burroughs. Every waster who’s
ever laboured under the illusion that they could put pen to paper and create
‘alternative’ literature wants to be just like William Seward bloody Burroughs,
master of cu(n)t-ups. No matter that his stuff doesn’t
make any sense and that reading it is about as hard to handle as the fact that Mick
Hucknall still has a career (and a pulse), he’s still the dead junkie ‘genius’
that every wannabe-weird writer wants to emulate.
Ask any student and they’ll you that they’ve read at least one of his books,
half the bastards probably not even being aware that he’s ‘written’ (and I use
the word loosely) more than one. Naked
Lunch, that’s the one everybody knows (and pretends they’ve read without
putting it down in bewilderment after a couple of pages and going ‘whit the
fuck wis that shite aw aboot?’), the one that this
‘true genius and first mythographer of the mid-twentieth century’ (to quote
J.G. Ballard from the back of the paperback) will be remembered for. Maybe.
So here’s the deal, all you would-be wanky writers out there: you too can write
just like Billy boy in one easy lesson the ‘Writeshite’ way…or your money back!
Yes, that’s right, all you lazy literary geniuses-of-the-future, you too can be
an underground ‘literary outlaw’ and cult hero/ine with the ‘Cut-Up Copycat
Kit!’ This allows you to recreate the innovative (or stupid) cut-up technique
invented by El Hombre Invisible without the tiresome and time-consuming tasks
of having to cut up newspapers, books and magazines and then gluing them back
together for what may be less-than-spectacular results.
The ‘Writeshite’ method also allows you to avoid potentially bothersome
encounters with unscrupulous drug dealers or, indeed, law enforcement
authorities. By not having to take drugs to ‘enhance creativity’ (read: get
fucked out of yer box) like Willie did, you get all the benefits of his work
with none of the dangers. After all, we all know that drugs are boring and
stupid and potentially fatal – not to mention expensive.
The bottom line: you don’t want to have to take risks or do hard work, do you?
You just want to write a bestselling work of ‘great beauty and maniacally
exquisite delight’ (to quote Norman Mailer from the back of the Naked Lunch paperback again) and
modestly accept the fame, fortune and offers of casual sex from complete
strangers that will come your way, right?
Right.
So what do you have to do to produce deep, pure, nonsensical – and yet still
critically lauded – work? Well, it’s very simple. The following sentences have
been jumbled about, but can be re-arranged to create a masterpiece merely by
writing them down and re-sorting them into the correct numerical order. So get
to it…and remember your friends at ‘Writeshite’ when you’re rich and famous!
After all, we won’t forget you…
(53)
Bastard. (18) Into Interzone. (12) Goddam the pusher man. (37) Then I realised
I didn’t know anybody named Cronenberg. (28) The sexy endomorph wanted to
inject me with groovy bugpowder. (63) Time to quite while I’m ahead. (22)
Reaming and ramming and rimming, yum yum yum. (4) The technicolour fuckblob
crawled up my leg and pissed in my mouth. (32) A real kick in the cojones from the political pendejos. (48) Can’t wait to work with
Kurt Cobain. (23) Women bad, men good. (5) It didn’t taste very good. (52) The
exterminator was on the soft machine going to the port of saints, the place
where dead fingers talk, then onwards to the place of dead roads in the cities
of the red night. (9) The heat was after me. (19) Outerzone. (1) I smoked some
opium in Tangiers, watching the smoke curl in fantastic phantasmal fantasy
patterns above my head like the coils of some mythical beast. (30) Nothing like
this in 50s America. (44) That wasn’t a nice thing to do, even if she was a
woman. (25) Jack and Allen and Neal and Gregory – with friends like them, who
needs enemas? (64) Hope they get Chevy Chase for the Naked Lunch film, whoever he might be. (3) I stank of shit, seeing
as how I hadn’t bathed for a year. (59) Holy sheepshit, what a stroke of
fucking genius! (2) I shot some morphine in between my toes. (15) I realised I
had just invented it. (33) A guy walking by changed into some sort of big slimy
beetle and ran off down the street. (49) Another fucking anachronism, shit.
(60) What a scam! (20) Shakeitallabouterzone. (35) Crawling leaping erotic erratic
mugwumps. (50) Back to the writing. (14) The typewriter was a better
breakdancer than any I’d ever seen before, because breakdancing in the 50s was
an anachronism. (31) Can’t smoke kif there, damn DuPont and their
disinformation-spreading asses. (6) Fuckblob piss never does. (45) William Tell
act my hairy ass. (21) A chorus line of cocks and tails and cocks in tails and
cocktails and erect female genitalia spraying semen everywhere. (42) Merde,
melonfarmer. (51) The queer junkie wild boys from the western lands got onto
the nova express with the ticket that exploded. (54) I have just realised that
what I write makes no fucking sense whatsoever. (13) I sat down at the
typewriter and watched it fart and fuck and breakdance while I smoked some tea.
(34) Too big for me to squish without getting my favourite tartan slippers
covered in ugly buggoop. (24) The thought of pussy disgusted me. (10) Ahmed the
Hemmorhoid Chomper had sold me some dodgy junk. (26) Shady translucent spectres
from my prurient past assailing my junksick body in ethereal waves. (7) Retinal
advances projected onto a cinematic sky. (55) Shouldn’t have stayed wrecked at
the typewriter for so long. (16) And promptly forgot it. (38) Another
anachronism. (65) If I’m lucky I can parlay this nonsensical non-sequitur crap
into a literary career. (11) A chest of drawers with a wonky leg and a broken
yo-yo; very dodgy junk. (36) Hmmm, I
thought, Cronenberg could make a great film out of that kind of psychotic
imagery. (61) But you wouldn’t expect anything less from a ‘mythographer of the
mid-twentieth century’, whatever the hell that means. (17) I was sweating warm
ectoplasm. (39) I was getting messages from the future as I sat in my orgone
box. (29) Swimming down a river with gorgeous young men with various fruits and
vegetables stuck up their asses. (41) Shit, no, wait, that was plagiarised
Lovecraft. (56) Hey, I know what I can do! (27) I needed more cats to strangle
in the bath for a laugh. (66) But would the public out there be so fucking
gullible as to buy it? (43) Wish I hadn’t shot Joan. (67) Only one way to find
out… (47) Hope daddy sends me a cheque from the adding machine company soon to
keep me in smack. (57) I’ll cut it all up and re-arrange it randomly just to
confuse things even further and cover my tracks – and I don’t mean the ones in
my arms. (8) I was being chased by a gas fire. (40) Radio receiver of the Elder
Ones. (46) Repressed pathological misogyny let loose under alcoholic stimuli.
(62) Wait, I haven’t been called it yet, it’s another anachronism! (58) That
way if anybody accuses me of talking incoherent crap, I can say I meant it that
way!
OTHER WORKS
IN THE ‘WRITESHITE’ SERIES INCLUDE: WHINE
BY ALLEN GINSBERG AND DRUNKEN BUDDHA BORE
MOTHERFUCKER BY JACK KEROUAC.
AVAILABLE AT A GOOD BOOKSHOP NEAR YOU NOW!
THE END
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