Naked Lunch

by William S. Burroughs

(1959)

   Naked Lunch is William S. Burroughs’s masterpiece and one of the most influential novels of the 20th century. It is also the most infamous novel to come out of the Beat Generation. In his dedication to Howl and otHer poems, published three years before Burroughs’s novel, allen ginsberg called Naked Lunch “an endless novel which will drive everybody mad.” jack kerouac, whom Burroughs credited with coming up with the title, had nightmares after typing part of the original manuscript. The publication of Naked Lunch inspired Norman Mailer to declare, “Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.”

   The novel first materialized as letters from Burroughs to Ginsberg, prompting Burroughs to write to his friend, “Maybe the real novel is letters to you.” lawrence ferlinghetti rejected the original manuscript, called “Interzone,” for publication by City Lights. robert creeley published the first excerpt to come from the novel in the Black Mountain Review appearing in 1958. Another chapter was published by LeRoi Jones/amiri baraka in Yugen. Two issues of the student-run Chicago Review also carried excerpts. The second issue, autumn 1958, was attacked by a Chicago newspaper columnist, which led to the faculty of the University of Chicago preventing the publication of the winter 1958 issue, which was to have another excerpt by Burroughs. Student editors started Big Table, another title credited to Kerouac, to publish the censored material. Copies of the journal were seized by the U.S. Post Office in Chicago for obscenity. The controversy surrounding Burroughs’s unpublished novel inspired Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press to publish it in Paris as The Naked Lunch in 1959. Other censorship battles prevented Barney Rosset at Grove Press from releasing a U.S. edition of Naked Lunch until 1962. Boston police arrested a man for selling the book in 1963. The case, initially lost, was appealed to the Massachusetts Supreme Court, which ruled that the book was not obscene in 1966. David Cronenberg’s film Naked Lunch (1992) starring Peter Weller and Judy Davis, is a fictional, surrealistic interpretation of how the novel was written rather than a strict adaptation of the novel itself. Most pointedly, it lacks the wild humor of the novel.

   Although randomness is the principal of organization in Naked Lunch, there is a type of narrative frame. At the beginning, William Lee (Burroughs’s persona) is being pursued by narcotics detectives (the “heat”); toward the end of the book, he is arrested by the detectives Hauser and O’Brien. The major theme of the novel is the attempted escape from various forms of control. The opening scenes in the novel come from Burroughs’s experiences as a junky in 1946. Readers familiar with junky will recognize similar scenes at the beginning of Naked Lunch in the sections “And Start West,” “The Vigilante,” and “The Rube,” but the scenes soon change into more elaborate and surrealistic “routines,” disjointed and often brutal depictions of nightmarish visions and episodes of black comedy. Also of particular note is the antiromantic tone of the novel, which is in stark contrast to Kerouac’s on tHe road. Burroughs writes, “America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.” The rapid shifting of locales is a characteristic of Naked Lunch. Scenes set in the United States, Mexico, South America, Europe, and Tangier seem to open up into each other. In this fashion the novel moves from New Orleans (“a dead museum”) and East Texas, south to the border and beyond into Mexico. In Mexico, Lupita (based on Lola “La Chata,” Burroughs’s connection in Mexico City in the early 1950s) makes the remark, “Selling [heroin] is more of a habit than buying.” This leads to the story of Bradley the Buyer. Pushers and narcotics agents who do not “use” become addicted nonetheless-to watching junkies use. Bradley needs more and more “contact” with junkies to satisfy his “yen,” a craving for “contact.” Bradley’s need is so desperate that he moves from contact to direct invasion. The story is one of many variations on forms of addiction in the novel. This section ends with visions of Mexico, circa 1953. Perhaps Joan Burroughs, the wife Burroughs accidentally shot and killed in 1951, is referenced obliquely when a character called Jane is briefly introduced. The section ends with the cryptic line: “A year later in Tangier I heard she was dead.” Thus Burroughs depicts Joan with even more obliqueness than in Junky and queer.

   In the “Benway” section, Burroughs introduces one of his most famous characters, Dr. Benway, “a manipulator and coordinator of symbol systems, an expert on all phases of interrogation, brainwashing and control.” Benway shows Lee around the reconditioning center that he has established in Freeland. With Benway as tour guide, Lee is introduced to a wide variety of modern (and future) methods of enslavement—including psychological, chemical, and sexual means. The ultimate addiction is the “control” to which the members of the emerging police state are addicted. This section highlights Benway’s misadventures in medicine, but some of Benway’s routines here are serious; for example, Benway’s theories about why junkies have a low incidence of schizophrenia is a theory that Burroughs himself had researched. In the middle of Benway’s guided tour of the Reconditioning Center, the INDs (Irreversible Neural Damage patients) are accidentally set free. These include “rampant bores,” “Rock and Roll hoodlums,” and an “intellectual avant-gardist” who thinks that scientific reports are “the only writing worth considering now.” The scenes of “over-liberated” INDs, the gentle narrator tells us, “I fain would spare you.” But nothing is spared: “A beastly young hooligan has gouged out the eye of his confrere and fuck him in the brain.” These revolting passages appear to be a reflection of the kind of writing that Burroughs often did to “free” himself of such images and obsessions (a primary motivation for his writing at this time—his “word horde” let loose). The section ends with the INDs storming the Freeland government in protest of the current “unspeakable conditions,” the moral being that in a controlled society, all who rebel must be branded “lunatics.” Benway, meanwhile, and in typical fashion, has long since made his escape. The narrative jumps to the next section, “Joselito,” where Carl watches a German doctor examine a young man named Joselito, who is diagnosed with lesions in both lungs. Carl asks if he will receive “chemical therapy,” and the words and the doctor’s manner (“seedy and furtive as an old junky”) create an intersection or digression (the major plot device in the book) with a separate storyline involving a junky. Conversations in the sanitarium take on a double meaning: a comparison is drawn between chemical cures for lung ailments versus sanitariums, and medical cures for heroin addiction versus incarceration.

   “The Black Meat” section begins with The Sailor (based on Phil White) looking to score, and it is written in the hard-boiled style of Junky. However, the setting—a Times Square cafeteria-transforms into a surreal, other-worldly setting where the addicts are “Reptiles” and “Meat Eaters,” and the pushers are creatures called Mugwumps. (Mugwump, actually an Algonquian word that literally means “great man,” was used as a term to describe those members of the Republican Party who refused to support James G. Blaine, the presidential party nominee, in 1884. The term has come to mean someone who is independent or neutral politically.) The Mugwumps produce an addictive substance that they secrete from their penis and that addicts the Reptiles by slowing their metabolism and thus prolonging life (the secret of all addictive drugs, says Burroughs). Periodically the Dream Police create a panic among the Heavy Fluid addicts, and the Mugwumps go into hibernation until the scene is clear.

   The “Hospital” section is mostly made up of the letters that Burroughs wrote to Ginsberg under the title “Selections from Lee’s Letters and Journals.” In late 1955 Burroughs checked into a hospital in Tangier, and began a two-month junk “cure.” He intended the letters that he wrote about the experience to be part of “Interzone,” an early draft of Naked Lunch. Burroughs wrote to Ginsberg, “The ‘Selection’ chapters form a sort of mosaic with the cryptic significance of juxtaposition, like objects abandoned in a hotel drawer, a form of still life.” This description fits not only this section but the book as a whole. The hospital stay inspired a further chapter in Dr. Benway’s career, also. Here surgery is compared to bullfighting, hilariously. In the following paragraphs, Lee’s musings on “bedpans full of blood” and monstrous births covered up by the State Department turn into a “routine” in which a U.S. diplomat’s denials are cut in with a technician’s attempts to stop a “swish fart” from mangling his performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” A subsection of “Hospital” called Habit Notes is based on Burroughs’s off-and-on addiction for three years to a synthetic drug called Eukodol. Lazarus, the title character of the “Lazarus Go Home” section, is a young man who has kicked junk (thus has come back to life), but Lee gets him addicted again with a snort of heroin off a nail file. The section introduces the concept of Bang-utot (literally “attempting to get up and groaning”), nightmares that are so intense that they have killed a number of Southeast Asians. The concept strengthens Burroughs’s theme of the ways in which the dream world can break into the real world. In a November 1, 1955, letter to Kerouac and Ginsberg, Burroughs says, “The meaning of Interzone, its space-time location is at a point where three-dimensional fact merges into dream, and dream erupt into the real world. . . . The very exaggeration of routines is intended to create this feeling. In Interzone dreams can kill—like Bangutot—and solid objects and persons can be unreal as dreams.” “Hassan’s Rumpus Room” is one of two notorious pornographic sections in the book. Burroughs agreed to publish Naked Lunch with Olympia Press in part because he knew Girodias would keep these sections in the book: They were unpublishable practically anywhere else. The Rumpus Room features a show in which a Mugwump first hangs and then has sex with a boy, to the delight of the crowd. In his introduction to Naked Lunch, Burroughs disingenuously tried to pass off these scenes as a satire on capital punishment in the style of Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” Yet the graphic sex that labeled the section as pornographic should not overshadow the weird, beautiful poetry of many passages: “Satyr and naked Greek lad in aqualungs trace a ballet of pursuit in a monster vase of transparent alabaster. The Satyr catches the boy from in front and whirls him around. They move in fish jerks. The boy releases a silver stream of bubbles from his mouth. White sperm ejaculates into green water and floats lazily around the twisting bodies.” The party at the Rumpus Room is broken up by an invasion of “lustmad American women.” Hassan blames A. J. for the disaster. A. J. screams, “Guard me from these she-foxes!” and defends himself with a cutlass, decapitating the American women. A fear of American women and matriarchal power (as it threatens homosexual expression) runs throughout this novel and other works by Burroughs. The Interzone University of the “Campus of Interzone University” section is apparently based on Mexico City College where Burroughs studied the Mayan religion and language. The Professor has a “nostalgia fit,” and instead of lecturing on “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge tells the students Ma Lottie stories from East Texas, where Burroughs lived from 1949 to 1950. In the Professor’s analysis of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the Mariner is the analyst, the Wedding Guest the analysand. Paradoxically, the analyst does all of the talking: “You can find out more about someone by talking than by listening.”

   The second “pornographic” section of the novel is called “A.J.’s Annual Party.” A. J. introduces the “Blue Movie” director Slashtubitch. He screens a film that stars Johnny and Mary: “Clothes and hair-do suggest existentialist bar of all the world cities.” In the film, Mary “rims” Johnny and sodomizes him with a strap-on dildo. Mark watches from a doorway and then joins in, sodomizing Johnny. Johnny’s orgasm releases a flood of images, many taken from Burroughs’s South American trips, ending in a scene that takes place in deserted midwestern farmhouse where “rats run over the floor and boys jack off in the dark musty bedroom.” The point-of-view changes to that of an old junky, who has found a vein and hallucinates the farm scene from his past. As the “old queer” stares at adolescents who walk by him in Chapultepec Park in Mexico City, the scene returns to Johnny and Mark. Repeating the earlier scene in “Hassan’s Rumpus Room,” Mark and Mary hang Johnny; Mary has sex with the hanged body, biting off parts of Johnny’s face in her ecstasy. Mark next hangs Mary, and he turns back into Johnny as her neck snaps. Johnny then douses Mary with gasoline; they roll under a great magnifying glass and burst into flames. The burlesque repeats a variation on the hanging, with Johnny being hanged by a county sheriff who promises that onlookers will see a “young boy come three times at least . . . completely against his will.” The movie ends, and Mary, Johnny, and Mark take a bow, looking older than they do in the film. Several “blue movie” projects inspired by Naked Lunch have been considered over the years, but none (understandably) has been produced. The “Meeting on International Conference of Technological Psychiatry” section is a “routine” with Doctor “Fingers” Schaefer, the Lobotomy Kid. Schaefer has created “The Complete All American Deanxietized Man,” a monstrous black centipede. Centipede imagery, first seen by Burroughs in Chimu pottery, occurs throughout his work and signifies for Burroughs the most debased form of life—the horror at the root of what went wrong with human beings.

   The city of Interzone in “The Market” section is based on Tangier, and the market is based on the soco chico (“little market”) that is the center of life in Tangier. Burroughs felt more at home there primarily because he was free to do there as he pleased. It is also a pleasantly disorienting city, where dreams and reality fade into one another (a key to the technique of the book), and a place where there is potential for change, evolution, and accidents. Although this picture of Tangier is fairly close to that in his nonfictional account the narrator claims that it was written under the influence of yage. In fact, the passage comes from a letter to Ginsberg in which Burroughs described hallucinations that he had while under the influence of the vine. The connection between yage visions and Tangier is that yage facilitates “space–time travel,” and Tangier, Burroughs believed, existed in such space–time. The yage section segues into a very funny skit in which Indian medicine men talk about drugs, using the lexicon of the American underworld: “Let’s hope Old Xiuptutol don’t wig and name one of the boys.” “The Prophet’s Hour” subsection comes from a letter to Ginsberg and needs to be seen in the context of Burroughs’s views on Kerouac’s Buddhism, neal cassady discovering the mystical teachings of Edgar Cayce, and the emergence of a school of Buddhist-inspired poetry on the West Coast. The major world religions here are all portrayed as carnival sideshow attractions, as cons used on the gullible.

   The “Ordinary Men and Women” section addresses the political unrest in Tangier while Burroughs lived there (Morocco was taking control of the former International Zone). Burroughs maintained that there was much less dissatisfaction than the papers published. (In letters from the time period, he tries to allay the fears of Kerouac, who is planning a trip to Tangier.) A selfcontained story recounts how Brad, a jeweler with a gambling problem, uses fake jewels to cover his losses and ends up in prison, where he meets and falls in love with Jim. Brad and Jim are released at the same time, but Lucy Bradshinkle—an “old moth-eaten tigress”—tries to lure Brad back with her money. The “happy ending” shows Brad and Jim sitting down to eat dinner; the main course is Lucy’s “cunt.”

   The “talking asshole” “routine,” performed by Dr. Benway in this section, is perhaps the most famous routine in the novel for its outrageous humor. Such irreverence and invention opened up the field for later American humorists such as Robert Coover, Don Delillo, Ishmael Reed, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, kathy acker and hunter s. thompson. This routine runs into a critique of American bureaucracy as cancer. The reader who looks for a connection between the talking asshole and this critique of bureaucracies may find that they are both examples of the disruption of the “evolutionary direction of infinite potential”: The asshole evolves and takes over the host. Burroughs felt that government bureaucracies were malignant because they discouraged change and spontaneity, essentials for continued human evolution (the goal being to evolve beyond the body and into “space”). In “Dr. Berger’s Mental Health Hour” Berger specializes in reconditioning people—psychopaths, homosexuals, writers. The psychoanalyst who offers to “cure” homosexuality is a parody of doctors who tried to cure Burroughs and Ginsberg of their homosexuality. The writer is cured by Buddhism, a reference to Burroughs’s objections to Kerouac’s newfound Buddhist lifestyle and philosophy. The model for the reconditioned person is the “Latah,” who is defined by Burroughs in a letter to Ginsberg: “Latah is condition occurring in S.E. Asia. Otherwise normal, the Latah can not help doing what anyone tells him to do once his attention has been attracted by calling his name or touching him.” The following scene shows the Party Leader creating a riot: “goes off like a football play. We have imported a thousand bone fed, blue ribbon Latahs from Indochina. All we need is one riot leader for the whole unit.” In “Islam Incorporated and the Parties of the Interzone,” the narrator says that he is working for Islam, Inc., an outfit financed by A. J., who, the narrator says, “is an agent like me, but for whom or for what no one has ever been able to discover.” A. J.’s cover is that of an “international playboy.” This section includes scenes of Arab violence about which Burroughs had read in the Tangier newspaper. A. J. pulls all kinds of pranks on the stuffy members of the upper classes around the world—ordering ketchup in a fine restaurant; releasing grasshoppers that emit an aphrodisiac on the opening night of the New York Metropolitan Opera. A cinematic fade-out moves the scene to Venice. A. J., in admiral’s uniform, sails a preposterous gondola that crashes and sinks in the canals. This section is a series of absurd skits whose humor comes from A. J.’s outrageously overblown homosexual mannerisms. Involved with A. J. in Islam, Inc. is Salvador Hassan O’Leary, who reaps profits from misery all over the world. He “hit the jackpot” with “slunks” (miscarried cattle fetuses) during World War II. He also profited from the sale of such items as condemned parachutes and leaking lifeboats. Clem and Jody, two more of the cast, are Russians impersonating Americans to make Americans look bad around the world. This routine—in which they kidnap a sacred black stone—is one that Burroughs developed with Kells Elvins. Islam, Inc. comes to resemble the complex trading, bartering, and bribing that Burroughs observed in the International Zone of Tangier.

   A major subsection of “Islam Incorporated” details “the parties of Interzone,” referred to throughout the book and defined here. Because the book was randomly arranged, the information casts new lights on the preceding two-thirds of the book (which then takes on a slightly more coherent meaning). Ginsberg calls this “the political meat of the book,” although Burroughs would later call his political classifications “tentative.” The Divisionists are paranoid, homosexual “moderates.” The Factualists, the party to which Burroughs himself can be said to belong, see the world as it is, not as they believe it to be. Factualists are conservatives who oppose the spread of both government bureaucracy and the police state. Burroughs first used the term in letters to Ginsberg in the late 1940s to distinguish his own political philosophy from “liberal” thinkers. Factualists, as opposed to the FDR New Dealers whom Burroughs considered to be “communists,” support total freedom from all control and believe that only difference, variety, and accident can save the human race in the process of the continuing evolution of the species. The “human virus,” a “degraded” version of humanity, threatens to do the opposite by producing copies of degraded humans and thus cuts off the ability of the species to evolve. To the far left on this political spectrum are the Liquefactionists, who are the opposite of the Factualists in that “except for one man,” they are “entirely composed of dupes.” Senders, another group, are the “most dangerous, evil men in the world,” who threaten to control the thoughts and actions of others (such as Benway or the Mayan priests who use the religious calendar to control their subjects completely).

   In “The County Clerk” section Burroughs creates a routine about a Southern racist from his experiences on his farm in New Waverly, Texas, as well as from his arrest by a sheriff in Beeville, Texas. His time spent as a cotton farmer in the valley of South Texas is also an influence here. In this routine, Lee has to file an affidavit to keep from being evicted from his property, and the only man who can help him is the County Clerk, who tells endless, racist stories. Ginsberg argued during the Naked Lunch trial that a major redeeming feature of the book was its forward-looking attack on racists. Lee convinces the Clerk he is a “good old boy” by telling him an anti-Semitic joke. Andrew Keif in the “Interzone” section is based on paul bowles, and the jokes about Bowles’s chauffeur are related in Burroughs’s Tangier letters. Keif is a young writer who is a resident of The Zone. The rest of this section describes the unlucky adventures of Leif and Marvie, who run Interzone Imports Unlimited. Leif the Unlucky is based on an acquaintance of Burroughs who was always down on his luck. Burroughs suggested he repatriate to Denmark, and the ship that he took home sank en route.

   Burroughs’s trip to see his friend Kells Elvins in Denmark inspired the section “The Examination,” which takes place in Freeland, a socialist state. Dr. Benway is in charge of controlling the citizens, reconditioning them if necessary. Benway calls in a young man named Carl and examines him for signs of homosexuality, which is compared to a disease such as tuberculosis. At his second interview, Carl is apparently drugged by Benway, and the narrative intersects with that of The Fag, a junky being interrogated by two cops who offer him an Old Gold Cigarette (a detail connecting the scene to the Hauser and O’Brien episodes at the beginning and end of the novel). Carl reawakens, and it is apparent that Benway is attempting to condition him as a homosexual by locating (or planting) latent homosexual behavior. The chapter reflects the then-current methods of psychologists (such as Ginsberg’s) who tried to cure homosexuals. By implication, if you can cure them, you can also “create” them along the line of infection—transmission of a disease. The section is also a more general attack on communistic governments that seek to control people physically and mentally for their own purposes.

   The sections “Have You Seen Pantopon Rose,” “Coke Bugs,” and “The Exterminator Does a Good Job” are interconnected and seem to anticipate in style, if not in method, the cut-ups trilogy. The section ties in with the opening scenes of the novel. The Sailor connects for a boy who approaches him in a cafeteria. He wants the boy’s time (literally), not his money. In Burroughs, one of the biggest “highs” that characters are after is immortality. Burroughs defines the title of the next section, “The Algebra of Need,” in his “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness,” a type of foreword for some editions of Naked Lunch: “Junk yields a basic formula of ‘evil’ virus: The Algebra of Need. The face of ‘evil’ is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope.” In respect to the “need” it creates, “Junk is the ideal product,” says Burroughs. “Fats” lives by learning the “The Algebra of Need” and grows into a substance that drains all of the addicts of the world back into him. Burroughs believed that there could be drugs that were powerful enough to enslave all of humanity, with one man doling out the supply and thus controlling everyone else. This section seems to be based on such a scenario. It is followed by a prose poem about this worldwide “network of junkies.”

   The “Hauser and O’Brien” section is a Mickey Spillane-style story of Lee getting busted in his apartment by two cops. The two show up in several of Burroughs’s books. This section continues the opening lines of the book: “I can feel the heat closing in. . . .” Lee manages to distract the cops as they avert their eyes while he fixes. He grabs a gun and kills them both. Lee is an “agent,” it turns out, and a key to the book is a something Kerouac told Burroughs—that he felt like an agent from another planet who did not know his mission. With a sufficient supply of heroin, Lee makes plans to flee the city. When he tries to confirm Hauser and O’Brien’s death, Lee realizes they are not simply dead, they no longer exist, as is true of him, too: “I had been occluded from space-timed. . . . Never again would I have a key, a point-of-intersection.” This particular version of Lee is now stuck in a “landlocked junk past”—perhaps a dramatization of Burroughs’s sincere desire to leave junk behind at this point in his life.

   The book ends with the penultimate section “Atrophied Preface,” an explanation of how to read the novel, which is appropriate for a book that has little or no chronology or linearity, and a small section called “Quick. . . .” Burroughs writes cryptically, “Naked Lunch is a blueprint, a How-To Book.” Representing a bridge to the next three “cut-up” novels, the cut-up method appears to be used here, and ominously so: “raw peeled winds of hate and mischance / blew the shot.” Burroughs thought this cut-up (one of the first he created) was in reference to a blown shot of morphine, but Brion Gysin interpreted it as a reference to Joan Burroughs’s death. Much of the “Atrophied Preface” does in fact decode the novel for the reader, even if it is a bit late. Most revealing to the lost reader is the admission by the writer that all of his characters are basically the same character and are, of course, the author. This explains why one character is “subject to say the same thing in the same words to occupy, at that intersection point, the same position in space-time.” As to the method used in Naked Lunch, Burroughs says, “There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing. . . . I am a recording instrumental. . . . I do not presume to impose ‘story’ ‘plot’ ‘continuity.’. . . Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function. . . . I am not an entertainer.”

   Years later, Burroughs would argue that in fact there was a great deal of craft used in the construction of Naked Lunch. Today, reading these pages, the expert reader cannot help but be aware of the ways in which Burroughs’s methods—so incomprehensible at the time to many readers—now address our central, critical concerns about language and culture. The novel lends itself to poststructuralist readings popularized in the academies during the 1970s and 1980s, and to many critics, Burroughs can now be seen as a pioneer of postmodernism. Certainly Burroughs opened up an entirely new form of the novel as well as a vast field of previously untouchable subjects for future writers. Burroughs set out as a writer to write anything but something literary. Ultimately, Naked Lunch is an antinovel that thwarts nearly every expectation the reader has of what a “novel” should be. Presently, there are more than a million copies in circulation throughout the world.

 Bibliography

■ Burroughs, William S. The Letters of William S. Burroughs: 1945-1959. Edited by Oliver Harris. New York: Viking Penguin, 1993.

■ Goodman, Michael Barry. Contemporary Literary Censorship: The Case History of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1981.

■ Lydenberg, Robin. Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs’ Fiction. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

■ Miles, Barry, and James Grauerholz. Editors’ Note. Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, by William S. Burroughs. New York: Grove Press, 2001, 233–247.

■ Murphy, Timothy S. Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

   Rob Johnson and Kurt Hemmer