[Noted added in January, 2017: I put up this post in December, 2010, while working on my novel Turing and Burroughs. You can find links for paperback, ebook, and a free webpage version of the book at the Turing & Burroughs page.]

I’m about to write a new chapter (Chapter 8: Dispatches from the Interzone) for my Turing & Burroughs in the form of letters by William Burroughs—following up on my earlier chapter, “Tangier Routines” which appeared in my zine Flurb.

By way of getting into the right frame of mind, today I copied out some of my favorite bits from a book I’ve had for nearly thirty years, William Burroughs, Letters to Allen Ginsberg 1953-1957, (Full Court Press, New York 1982). This book is out of print, but many of these letters are also in Oliver Harris (ed.), The Letters of William Burroughs 1945-1959 (Viking, New York, 1993). All of the letters I’ve excerpted below are from Tangier, and are to Allen Ginsberg.

6/24/54. I’ve been thinking about routine as an art form and what distinguishes it from other forms. One thing … it is subject to shlup over into “real” action at any time. Do you dig me? I am not sure if I dig myself. And some [poser] is going to start talking about living his art.

6/24/54. I am surrounded by curious Kafkian hostility. A number of people seem to have taken a violent, irrational dislike to me. Especially people who run bars. … This is not imagination, Allen.

8/18/54. What am I doing here, a broken eccentric, a Bowery Evangelist, reading books on Theosophy in the public library—(an old trunk full of notes in my cold water East Side flag)—imagining myself a Secret World Controller in Telepathic Contact with Tibetan Adepts … Could I ever see the merciless, cold facts on some Winter night, sitting in the operation room white glare of a cafeteria—NO SMOKING PLEASE—See the facts and myself, an old man with the wasted years, behind, and what ahead having seen the Facts?”

8/18/54. I am having serious difficulties with my novel. I tell you the novel form is completely inadequate to express what I have to say. I don’t know if I can find a form. I am very gloomy as to prospects of publication … But still I need publication for development. A writer can be ruined by too much or too little success.

10/12/54 (date uncertain). Tremendous dream. … I walk along a dry, white road. There is danger here. A dry, brown vibrating in the air, like insect wings rubbing together. I pass a village of people sleeping, living under mounds—about 2 feet high—of black cloth stitched onto wire frames. … The vibrating is everywhere now—horrible, dry, lifeless. Not a sound exactly; a frequency, a wave length. The vibrating comes from a tower-like structure. A Holy Man is causing it. … I approach [the townspeople] and ask “How much will you give me to kill the Holy Man?” We … both know money is not the point.

12/13/54. You don’t study Zen and then write a scholarly routine, for Christ’s sake! Routines are complete spontaneous and proceed from whatever fragmentary knowledge you have. In fat a routine is by nature fragmentary, inaccurate. … Sex mixed with routines and laughter, the unmalicious, unstrained, pure laughter that accompanies a good routine, laughter that gives a moment’s freedom from the cautious, nagging, aging, frightened flesh.

2/19/55. I guess all writers suffer from fear of losing their talent, because talent is something that seems to come from outside, that you have no control over.

2/19/55. The novel is taking shape. Something even more evil than atomic destruction is the theme—namely an anti-dream drug which destroys the symbolizing, myth-making, intuitive, empathizing, telepathic faculty in man, so that his behavior can be controlled and predicted … this drug eliminates the disturbing factor of spontaneous, unpredictable life from the human equation. … Novel treats of vast … malevolent telepathic broadcast stations …

4/20/55. Why do I always parody? Neither in life nor in writing can I achieve complete sincerity … except in parody and moments of profound discouragement.

5/17/55. Just back from 14-day cure in clinic. … Everything looks sharp and different like it was just washed. Sensations hit like tracer bullets. I feel a great intensity building up, and at the same time a weakness like I can only keep myself here, back now in this doughy, dead flesh I have been away from since the habit started.

8/10/55. [Describing a crazy man who keeps accosting him on the street.] In fact there is something curiously sweet about him, a strange, sinister jocularity, as if we knew each other from somewhere, and his words referred to private jokes from this period of intimacy. On Monday, August 1, he ran amok with a razor-sharp butcher knife in the main drag, killed 5 people and wounded four, was finally cornered by the police, shot in the stomach and captured. … I wonder if he would have attacked me? I missed him by 10 minutes. The whole town is still hysterical.

9/21/55. [He gets very high on opiates and makes a scene at his rooming house.] I could only remember snatches of what had happened, but I do remember wondering why people were looking at me so strangely and talking in such tiresome, soothing voices.

10/21/55. [He’s working on the novel he calls Interzone, and which will become Naked Lunch.] This writing is more painful than anything I ever did. Parentheses pounce on me and tear me apart. I have no control over what I write, which is as it should be.

10/23/55. I am progressing towards complete lack of caution and restraint. Nothing must be allowed to dilute my routines. I know I used to be shy about approaching boys, for example, but I cannot remember why exactly. The centers of inhibition are atrophied, occluded like an eel’s ass on The Way to Sargasso—good book title. You know about eels?

10/23/55. Yesterday I took a walk on the outskirts of town. Environs of the Zone are wildly beautiful. Low hills with great variety of trees, flowering vines and shrubs, great, red sandstone cliffs topped with curiously stylized, Japanese-looking pine trees, fall to the sea. … The knife fight potential was … one facet of that moment, sitting in the café, looking out at the hill opposite, stylized pine trees on top arranged with the economy of a Chinese print against blue sky in the tingling, clear, classic Mediterranean air … I was completely alive in the moment, not saving myself, not waiting for anything or anybody … This is it right now … Actually I am so independent, so fucking far out I am subject fo float away like a balloon …

11/13/55. Arab Café: Sit down and had three words … just three long words, with Miss Green … Watching a glass of mint tea on a bamboo mat in the sun, the steam blow back into the glass top like smoke from a chimney … Some Arabs at a table .. It is unthinkable they should molest me … Suppose they do? And suddenly they have seized me, and are preparing to castrate me? It can’t happen … must be a dream .. In Interzone it might or might not be a dream, and which way it falls might be in the balance while I watch this tea glass in the sun … The meaning of Interzone, its pace time location is at a point where three-dimensional fact merges into dream, and dreams erupt into the real world.

2/26/56. When I was a child I thought you saw with your mouth. I remember distinctly my brother telling me no, with the eyes, and I closed my eyes and found out it was true and my theory was wrong.

9/13/56. [Describing a boy who wants to spend the night at his apartment after sex.] I indicate as tactfully as such a concept can be effectively indicated that I considered this project inconvenient in the widest sense. … So come along to Europe, Allen, and have a good time with the boys. I can wait. But just remember I’ll always be there if you want me … creak, creak, creak … [sound of a rocking chair]

9/13/56. And you recall my dream (described in letter of 10/12/54) about the Holy man who was making with a Malignant Telepathic Broadcast? … I am developing Holy Man concept in [my novel] Interzone. Latest Control Concepts: Anyone using telepathy as means of coercion must cut himself off form all protoplasmic contacts. He must always send, but never receive … He becomes an automaton, a ventriloquist dummy, withers in orgoneless limbo.

9/16/56. I find my eyes straying towards the fair sex. (It’s the new frisson dearie … Women are downright piquant.) You hear about these old characters find out they are queer at fifty, maybe I’m about to make with the old switcheroo. What are those strange feelings that come over me when I look at a young [woman], little tits sticking out so cute? Could it be that?? No! No! He thrust the thought from him in horror … He stumbled out into the street with the girl’s mocking laughter lingering in his ears, laughter that seemed to say “Who you think you’re kidding with the queer act? I know you, baby.”

10/13/56. Germs got no class to them. And the evilest of them all are the virus … So bone lazy they aren’t even hardly alive yet

10/29/56. My disregard of social forms is approaching psychosis. … It’s like the sight of someone about to flip or someone full of paranoid hate excites me. I want to see what will happen if they really wig. I want to crack them wide open and feed on the wonderful soft stuff that will ooze out. … Kicks, man, kicks.

We were at the Los Gatos Christmas parade once again on Saturday. We’ve been attending it off and on for twenty-four years.

The Stanford band is always a highlight, playing like crazy, dressed to kill. What energy! They’re probably all A students, crazy though they look. The saxes were playing with one hand behind their back…

We always have a platoon of squash-growing Italians, as if airlifted in from the East Coast or Chicago, rough and tough, phallically thrusting their vegetables. A beauty queen rides in their Cadillac, chauffeured by a presumably venal official in a top hat.

The high-school drill teams are universal, lovely to see. I can vaguely remember being that age. The marching isn’t the center of your life, it’s just something you do.

I like this kid, he looks so cool. A horn man.

Back to the parade, there’s these three or four older men who show up every year in a giant self-powered shiny metal duck. They’re fans of the University of Oregon, who’s mascot is the most famous duck of all, Donald D. I bet they work on refining the duck-car all year. It’s great.

The tumblers are awesome. My autofocus has a slight delay, so I caught this young woman further into her flip than I’d expected, but this is in fact pretty cool. Gravity-defying.

There’s this corner-store market on Los Gatos Boulevard, the Jiffy Mart, with a full line of liquor as well. Every year they sponsor a crew of freestyle bicyclists; they drive a pickup along the parade route with curved ramps on the front and back of the pickup, and every few dozen yards they stop, and the eager biker-boys do insane high-air flips. Very California.

And now I’m back at my desk, pecking away at Turing & Burroughs—I’m going to write a riff off a Charlie Parker reverie I saw, I’ll use it for the stream of thought for Alan Turing who’s disguised as a black woman inside the Sunset Lounge in 1955 West Palm Springs, Florida. I’ve been reading the lives of some jazz players, recently Miles Davis, and last year Charlie Parker. And here’s the quote I’m eyeing, from Bird Lives, The Life of Charlie Parker, by Ross Russell (Charterhouse 1973), pl 55.

If he looked across the beams of the spotlights that shone toward the bandstand, he could see a lavender haze, shimmering like air over a street on a hot summer day. He watched the heavy smoke that curled and wreathed, floating lazily upward, borne along by the waves of music. It had a sharp, pungent, odor and made a biting sensation in the nose. It was smoke from sticks of tea that were being passed from one man to another on the bandstand below. After twenty minutes of the set Charlie would feel himself borne along in the pleasant lavender haze. Then the long narrow interior of the Reno Club would grow deeper. The bar, the polished glassware in front of the mirror, the waitresses poised like blackbirds, ready to fly to their customers—the tables, booths, dancers, musicians, orchestra, everything in the Reno Club seemed to be exactly where it belonged, as if it had been there forever and would never change, fixed in time and space, and time itself stopped. He was getting high. Now he could hear the things that he had missed, the miniature sound—Basie’s little blue comments, a silvery skein of notes played by Prof as a counter line to Herschel, muted chortling of screened brass under the saxophone choir, a light scurrying of sticks across the head of the snare drum as Jesse marked off a bar section, wispy little phrases that entered somebody’s mind because of something just played.

Love those sounds, Ross.

Get a painting for the holidays! I’ve slashed the prices by across the board at my Paintings Site.

The sale runs through December 31, 2010.

You can see the sale prices here.

We were in San Francisco today, taking down the paintings from my show at Borderlands Café. They still have some high-quality signed prints of my paintings on sale at Borderlands Books next door. In the photo below, note “Turing and the Skugs” on the wall.

It was nice to be in the city for the day, on the loose. We went to see a great print show at the Legion of Honor Art Museum out on the cliffs near the Golden Gate Bridge. The show was called Japanesque—it’s about Japanese prints in the time of French Impressionism. (The French used the word “Japonisme.”)

The big show-stopper is a nearly complete set of Katsushika Hokusai’s series of woodcuts, each in about eight colors, 36 Views of Mount Fuji , completed in the 1830s. The most famous of these is The Great Wave, but I’ve posted a picture of Asakusa Temple in Edo. Actually you can see rather good images of all 36 prints on Wikipedia! The show also has an “answer” series by French artist Henri Riviere, 36 Views of the Eiffel Tower.

I wandered into the porcelain gallery and saw this plate with Adam and Eve. Eve looks like the Headless Horseman carrying her head. Porcelain galleries are kind of interesting, so brittle and polychrome, quite unlike painting galleries.

Outside the wintry sky looked like…a Japanese woodcut, with printed areas of pink among the blues, framed by the the Art Nouveau curves of the Monterey pines.

Naturally, Sylvia and I pondered creating a series, 36 Views of the Golden Gate Bridge. In this vein I should mention the wonderful California artist Tom Killion, and his series of prints, 28 Views of Mount Tamalpais, views of and on a mountain just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. Killion’s also published a related book with the poet Gary Snyder.

On the writing front, I keep rewriting a long journal note called, “What’s the Plot Again?” about my plans for Turing & Burroughs. This material is a little too detailed and preliminary to put up in a blog post—I’ll only quote the start:

I’m getting close to being a third of the way through Turing & Burroughs, and I need to think about the plot some more. Once again I’ve reached what the writer Robert Sheckley used to call a “black point.” I’m not at all sure where to go.

So, okay, fall back on craft. Around the end of the first third, a book needs a conflict, a bump, an unforeseen development. So far it’s been pretty straight-ahead. Turing learns to tweak biocomputations, he creates a skug, the skug can convert humans into shapeshifting skuggers. Now the plot thickens. Somehow.

I have picked out a car for Alan and his companions to drive, heading from Palm Beach to Los Alamos, New Mexico. It’s a 1955 Pontiac Catalina that I found for sale online.

It goes almost without saying that the skugs are, being 1950s mutants, really into nukes, and therefore into visiting the Los Alamos National Laboratories. They plan to get some kind of boost from nuclear power or from a nuclear bomb. Alan takes advantage of his new friend Ned Strunk’s Los Alamos connections—Ned underwent training there to be a nuclear-reactor tech for the Nautilus submarine.

I think Alan, posing as a woman, gets hired to work at Los Alamos as, get this, a programmer. Stanislaw Ulam, mathematician and co-inventor of the hydrogen bomb, had a woman assistant who coded up his nonlinear wave equation simulation for him. “We wish to thank Miss Mary Tsingou for efficient coding of the problems and for running the computations on the Los Alamos MANIAC machine,” reads a footnote in E. Fermi, J. Pasta, and S. Ulam, “Studies of Nonlinear Problems”, published in 1955, and based on work done in 1952.

This paper is dear to my heart, I spent a number of years creating the cellular automata package Capow (still free online for Windows), for viewing Ulam’s creations. See also my own paper on this topic, “Continuous Valued Cellular Automata for Nonlinear Wave Equations,” co-authored with the mathematician Daniel N. Ostrov.

Alan becomes Ulam’s programmer, and works on nonlinear wave equations for use in creating, I dunno, small hydrogen bombs that fit inside lightbulbs for illuminating the home? Perhaps, along the way, Alan so improves his skug technology that skugs can be inhabited not only by human minds but by aethereal, invisible beings. And maybe in a Pied Piper ending, Alan creates some bomb-that’s-not-a-bomb that lures all the skugs to their demise like moths to aflame, like the children of Hameln into the cave beneath the mountain.

“Getting a little skuggy in here, isn’t it?”