The Adding Machine: Selected Essays PDF
Preview The Adding Machine: Selected Essays
Copyright © 1985, 1986, 2011 by William S. Burroughs All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018. Arcade Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected]. Arcade Publishing® is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation. Originally published in Great Britain under the title The Adding Machine: Collected Essasy Visit our website at www.arcadepub.com. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 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.’
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