mugwumps Message Board

Hello and welcome Burroughs folk. dead fingers talk or cities of the red night?

sheesh - tumbleweed city!

sheesh - tumbleweed city!

very new to librarything, but long time WB fan.

Well well! Welcome. I was beginning to think WB had no other devotees on LT. Or maybe the name of the group is misleading. What do you think?

Welcome Procius. You certainly have a lot of Burroughs stuff!

Yes (and not quite all of it added, yet, either!)

Have you seen Reality Studio?

No - just had a look now, looks interesting. Are you collecting Burroughs in translation or just different editions?

No - just had a look now, looks interesting. Are you collecting Burroughs in translation or just different editions?

sorry about the double postings - dodgy server at work

No, no translations (except for the I think 3 items with a parallel German/English text). There's still plenty of stuff in English I don't have yet, and I can't really afford to buy any of the big-ticket items--I'll most likely never get the true 1st ed. of Naked Lunch or the original ed. of Ghost of Chance (limited ed., original issue price: $1800!).

I'm most pleased that I got "Apocalypse" cheap. It's the book version of the text that WSB reads of the Dead city radio recording (where it's slightly abridged).

To reply to your first post, I haven't read dead fingers talk, but love cities of the red night.

And I don't think the group name is misleading ;)

Welcome Biblio and Melmoth. Mugwumps are a small but growing tribe. The group zeitgeist gets a bit more revealing with each new member

Most people don't know that Dead fingers talk just consists of some of the tamer chunks of Naked lunch, Nova express, and Soft machine cut & pasted together so as to get around the British censors of the early '60s. In other words, it's not really an independent work, and has never even been published in the U.S.

Echolocator and Sagespot, welcome. I'm sure there are more than 7 Burroughs fans amonst the 65000 odd librarything users. Maybe he is starting to drift out of the canon. Or, again, maybe mugwumps is too obscure as a name. How about "The Beat Hotel"; "Dr Benway will see you now"; "Lake Huron, 1925"; "Exterminator"; or even, to follow a popular convention (Coffee! Tea! etc) "Drugs!"

"The Talking Assholes"? :)

Speaking of the talking asshole....

Arnold Weinstein in his book A scream goes through the house talks about teaching this routine to his students at Brown Univ.:

"Each time I read this passage aloud in a lecture hall (assigning and citing aloud Burroughs to Ivy League students furnishes a good argument for having--or abolishing--tenure), I encounter the same evolving response: giggles at first at the raunchiness of the topic, followed by full-throated laughter at the routines devised by both the asshole and the man in their joust, their fleshly pas de deux, and finally an increasing sense of unease that closes with utter silence. No one laughs at the end."

I'm not great at separating stuff out on the author pages - I always end up with one of those mysql(?) error messages. But, Burroughs Junior: Speed, Kentucky Ham has been lumped in with his dear old dad.

I'm not sure these books can be separated if someone has entered the wrong author. At least, I couldn't figure out how to do it. And of course, "A guide to weather" isn't by our Burroughs either.

As for WSBjr., there's supposed to a bio/anthology out soon (supposedly in Sept.) called "Cursed from Birth: The Short, Unhappy Life of William S. Burroughs Jr."

Yes - there is an image of the cover on the Billy Burroughs Wikipedia entry. I would have liked to read "our" William's take on the weather.

Here's one take on weather, in a little-known piece from 1995.

Excellent! Thanks for the link

Perhaps people think this group is for historians of the Republican Party in the 19th century, or for fans of the Mamas and the Papas.

Why? was one of the Mamas a mugwump?

The Mugwumps were a folk band containing Mama Cass & Denny Doherty who became half of the M&P's.

Ah - well I guess one of them had read the naked lunch - or else was familiar with republican party politics in the 19th century. You're going to have explain that one as well...

I had to go to Wikipedia to remind myself of who was supporting whom in the 19th century and found that there are even more uses of the word.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mugwump_%28disambiguation%29

Well, well.... thanks for the info. Any suggestions for an appropriate unambiguous alternative?

The only clear and unambiguous alternative I can think of is something like "William S. Burroughs fans."--i.e., something totally boring and unimaginative :(

Nah - we'll stick with mugwumps I think. If the digital ghosts of a few 19th century republicans join in error, we'll give them a glass of whiskey (or a sasparilla) and carry on :) - it's bedtime in London - oiche mhaith

Hmm, wonder why Place of dead roads is our top shared book. I would have expected Naked lunch.

yes, that is strange - its not even on the long list of shared books.

Welcome Jargoneer - youve decided we are not 19th century republicans then?

RE #32: Different editions throwing off the stats?

Also, my ode to Bill:

http://clockwatching.net/~nick/Burroughs.html

I waited to make sure - it could have been a trick.

As to "The Naked Lunch" phenonema - I used to have two copies of it and now have nothing, due to people 'borrowing' them. Perhaps other people's copies have gone the same way.

Seventime - welcome and thanks for the link - I enjoyed reading your fugue. I can't remember the link for it, but there is a cut-up engine on the web (did you show it to me Proclus?) You feed in your text and click, click, click...

No, I'm not sure where the cut-up engine is.

However, here's a nice site of Burroughs book covers.

it was somewhere on this site:
http://www.23degrees.net/tools/archives/54-What-the-Fuck-Are-We-Writing-For.html...

sorry - can't do links - tech dummy - but it was somewhere on this site

here is a cut-up engine: http://www.languageisavirus.com/

And below the first twelve posts to this board put through it:

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Yes. I agree, it is nonsense. But that probably says more about the words we use than the cut-up method. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, as the saying goes.

Sorry for late post, but I post my vote to keep it mugwumps :)

And the Mugwumps used to play nightclubs in Washington D.C. back when I was a teen in the 60s!

Were they any good?

like it. LIKE IT!

The cut up that is. Mutton and lamb, bwoi.

sorry let me say hello and point out that I am mor or less illiterate and just bounced in here to brouse. tourist-like. space is the place.
'Give me a life- changing book!' and boy was it.
Thankyou.

That was my mate Dave. Probably after one o' them herbal ciggies :)