The Adding Machine: Selected Essays

203 Pages·2011·1.16 MB·English

by  Burroughs William S

Copyright © 1985, 1986, 2011 by William S. Burroughs
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Originally published in Great Britain under the title The Adding Machine:
Collected Essasy
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-61145-581-6
Contents
The Name Is Burroughs
My Own Business
Les Voleurs
Beauty and the Bestseller
A Word to the Wise Guy
Technology of Writing
Creative Reading
Ten Years and a Billion Dollars
It Belongs to the Cucumbers
The Fall of Art
Hemingway
The Great Gatsby
The Johnson Family
Civilian Defence
Sexual Conditioning
On Freud and the Unconscious
On Coincidence
Paris Please Stay the Same
God’s Own Medicine
The Last Junky
The Limits of Control
The Hundred Year Plan
Women: A Biological Mistake?
Immortality
It Is Necessary to Travel...
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
The Great Glut
Pop and the Heroids
Mind War
In the Interests of National Security
Notes from Class Transcript
Who Did What Where and When?
An Epitaph
My Experiences with Wilhelm Reich’s Orgone Box
How You Stop Smoking
The Maugham Curse
Remembering Jack Kerouac
Beekett and Proust
Graham Greene
Cutting Up Characters
A Review of the Reviewers
Light Reading
Bugger the Queen

The Name Is Burroughs
The name is Bill Burroughs. I am a writer. Let me tell you a few things about my
job, what an assignment is like.
You hit Interzone with that grey anonymously ill-intentioned look all writers
have.
‘You crazy or something walk around alone? Me good guide. What you want
Meester?’
‘Well uh, I would like to write a bestseller that would be a good book, a book
about real people and places .. .’
The Guide stopped me. ‘That’s enough Mister. I don’t want to read your
stinking book. That’s a job for the White Reader.’ The guide’s face was a grey
screen, hustler faces moved across it. ‘Your case is difficult frankly. If we put it
through channels they will want a big piece in advance. Now I happen to know
the best continuity man in the industry, only handles boys he likes. He’ll want a
piece of you too but he’s willing to take it on spec’.
People ask what would lead me to write a book like Naked Lunch. One is slowly
led along to write a book and this looked good, no trouble with the cast at all and
that’s half the battle when you can find your characters. The more far-out sex
pieces I was just writing for my own amusement. I would put them away in an
old attic trunk and leave them for a distant boy to find...’ Why Ma this stuff is
terrific — and I thought he was just an old book-of-the-month-club corn ball’.
Yes I was writing my bestseller... I finished it with a flourish, fading streets a
distant sky, handed it to the publisher and stood there expectantly.
He averted his face ... ‘I’ll let you know later, come around, in fact. Always
like to see a writer’s digs.’ He coughed, as if he found my presence suffocating.
A few nights later he visited me in my attic room, leaded glass windows under
the slate roof. He did not remove his long black coat or his bowler hat. He
dropped my manuscript on a table.
‘What are you, a wise guy? We don’t have a license on this. The license alone
costs more than we could clear.’ His eyes darted around the room. ‘What’s that
over there?’ he demanded, pointing to a sea chest.
‘It’s a sea chest.’