dr. benway is my hero.

e lavatory has been locked for three hours solid…. I think they are using it for an operating room…. NURSE: “I can’t find her pulse, doctor.”
DR. BENWAY: “Maybe she got it up her snatch in a finger stall.”
NURSE: “Adrenalin, doctor?”
DR. BENWAY: “The night porter shot it all up for kicks.” He looks around and picks up one of those rubber vacuum cups at the end of a stick they use to unstop toilets…. He advances on the patient…. “Make an incision, Doctor Limpf,” he says to his appalled assistant…. “I’m going to massage the heart.”
Dr. Limpf shrugs and begins the incision. Dr. Benway washes the suction cup by swishing it around in the toilet-bowl….
NURSE: “Shouldn’t it be sterilized, doctor?”
DR. BENWAY: “Very likely but there’s no time.” He sits on the suction cup like a cane seat watching his assistant make the incision…. “You young squirts couldn’t lance a pimple without an electric vibrating scalpel with automatic drain and suture…. Soon we’ll be operating by remote control on patients we never see…. We’ll be nothing but button pushers. All the skill is going out of surgery…. All the know-how and make-do… Did I ever tell you about the time I performed an appendectomy with a rusty sardine can? And once I was caught short without instrument one and removed a uterine tumor with my teeth. That was in the Upper Effendi, and besides…”
DR. LIMPF: “The incision is ready, doctor.”
Dr. Benway forces the cup into the incision and works it up and down. Blood spurts all over the doctors, the nurse and the wall…. The cup makes a horrible sucking sound.
NURSE: “I think she’s gone, doctor.”
DR. BENWAY: “Well, it’s all in the day’s work.” He walks across the room to a medicine cabinet…. “Some fucking drug addict has cut my cocaine with Saniflush! Nurse! Send the boy out to fill this RX on the double!”
Dr. Benway is operating in an auditorium filled with students: “Now, boys, you won’t see this operation performed very often and there’s a reason for that…. You see it has absolutely no medical value. No one knows what the purpose of it originally was or if it had a purpose at all. Personally I think it was a pure artistic creation from the beginning.
“Just as a bull fighter with his skill and knowledge extricates himself from danger he has himself invoked, so in this operation the surgeon deliberately endangers his patient, and then, with incredible speed and celerity, rescues him from death at the last possible split second…. Did any of you ever see Dr. Tetrazzini perform? I say perform advisedly because his operations were performances. He would start by throwing a scalpel across the room into the patient and then make his entrance like a ballet dancer. His speed was incredible: ‘I don’t give them time to die,’ he would say. Tumors put him in a frenzy of rage. ‘Fucking undisciplined cells!’ he would snarl, advancing on the tumor like a knife-fighter.”
A young man leaps down into the operating theatre and, whipping out a scalpel, advances on the patient.
DR. BENWAY: “An espontaneo! Stop him before he guts my patient!”
(Espontaneo is a bull-fighting term for a member of the audience who leaps down into the ring, pulls out a concealed cape and attempts a few passes with the bull before he is dragged out of the ring.)
The orderlies scuffle with the espontaneo, who is finally ejected from the hall. The anesthetist takes advantage of the confusion to pry a large gold filling from the patient’s mouth….

I think I've read that part alone a good 20 times.

But didn't Ginsberg and Kerouac show up in Tangier and find pages of the text just strewn around WSB's flat, stained with blood, even floating around outside, and they assembled the text from all these various pages...its not like there was a linear process behind this work.

There is a WSB exhibit here in NYC for another week at "his" gallery on 24th st.

I bought this book a couple months ago... Kind of been backed up though

yeah that's true. but the cut up thing is specific to taking a page and cutting up words and phrases and reassebling them. so i guess you could say it was a precursor to the cut up technique that brion gysin came up with and burroughs then began to use. i think it was the books that burroughs wrote in the 60s that used this method.

at the beginning it made me feel vomity all the time before i started understanding its brilliance.

... i've been trying to read the soft machine but there's a passage that keeps frustrating me where burroughs writes from the point of view of some kind of anti-homosexual agent looking to bust some queers. much more disturbing than when he writes from the point of view of a narcotics agent...

... i also found it mildly disturbing when, in on the road, kerouac writes about pulling a gun on a fag in the bathroom of some bar... (i've only ever read the "original scoll," i don't know if this incident made it into the version where all the names are changed...)

... i understand that burroughs means to shock, but kerouac is simply writing about about his own life as honestly as he can while hopped up on speed in front of a typewriter in his mom's house in long island city...

and he says he did it just to see what it was like to pull a gun on somebody....

why is that so disturbing, when burroughs was homosexual himself and etc.

can someone e-book junky please?

I've read Naked Lunch and begun The Ticket that Exploded. Is it too late to turn back and read some of his more traditional novels like Queer and Junky? Are they boring in comparison? Or different. Different is Ok...I like different.

No, read his traditional novels. I'm glad I did after reading his more fucked-up stuff. Because then you'll probably wanna re-read his more fucked-up stuff, and you'l see it in a new light. He really was a fantastic writer, one of the best ever.

junky ebook
http://www.sendspace.com/file/opyle9

thanks thanks

love bill burroughs. read junky and i loved it so i read everything else as well but naked lunch and junky are my favourites right now.

when art spiegelman writes about the holocaust, it doesn't suddenly become a sunny picnic just because the author is jewish. likewise, when burroughs describes the raids on bathhouses and clubs that took place when homosexuality was basically criminalized... and these types of raids really happened, not merely figments of burroughs' admittedly paranoid imagination... the types of raids that eventually led to the uprising at the Stonewall Inn...




... honestly, if you fail to see why this is heavy stuff, i can't help you...

Great book, one of my favorites. Very funny in many places.

I don't fail to see how one COULD see it that way but...

Art is not disturbing, reality is.

The candid way Burroughs could describe these taboo things people in general tend to try so hard to ignore strikes me as more exciting than disturbing. I personally find more disturbing and counter productive the way people in general would prefer to shelter themselves from facts. But I am not talking about you or anyone in specific.

Personally, I would find it way more disturbing NOT to read about such things.


Your patronising tone was cute, but unnecesary.