William S. Burroughs

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

The must-have novelties nobody needed

From our UK edition

Many reviewers start work with a peek at the book’s index. Here you find Gladys Goose Lamp, Choo Choo Chain and Dynamite Candles – novelty gifts (the ‘executive toys’ of the title) that made a small fortune for their creators. You might therefore think this a very slight book – so slight that its value could be dispersed by the mildest of zephyrs. But no. With unhesitating commitment it reveals the frailty and vanity of the long-gone culture it describes. Thus, fascinating.  Can anything better illustrate the sense of doom gathering in the 1980s than an executive toy created for bored Concorde passengers? They say an era is at its end when its illusions are exhausted: BA001 LHR-JFK, playing with a fluid puzzle after several glasses of the Chateau Palmer ’70 at Mach 2.

Deborah Ross

Guadagnino is a true master of erotic desire

From our UK edition

Queer, which is based on the novella by William S. Burroughs, is the latest film directed by Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name, Challengers) and stars Daniel Craig as an American expat who is gay, horny, sweaty, drug-addled and becomes infatuated with a younger man. It’s not exactly Christmassy, but it is very Burroughsy, and it may be the best performance of Craig’s career. I can’t think of any other actor who could have shaken off Bond in such a sexually daring way, not even Roger Moore. I can’t think of any other actor who could have shaken off Bond in such a sexually daring way – even Moore Queer is Burroughs’s follow-up to his better-known Junkie and it’s a sad tale that is highly autobiographical, which makes it sadder yet.

Thursday

Bill Kauffman

Who was the most right-wing member of the Beat Generation?

Who was the most right-wing member of the Beat Generation? The gentle Catholic-Buddhist Jack Kerouac, spontaneous-bop prosody prince of the Old Right, has the strongest claim. In 1952, shortly after finishing the novel that would be published five years later as On the Road, he argued for Robert Taft, “Mr. Republican,” for president, while his pal Allen Ginsberg was puffing up Cold Warrior and son of a robber baron Averell Harriman. (As usual in American politics, left was right and up was down, and those who see only blue and red were utterly befuddled.) But William S. Burroughs, gun fancier and cadaverous grandson of the adding-machine inventor, gave Saint Jack a run for it.

beat

Saturday

Ben Sixsmith

When child abuse was avant-garde

Last month the New Yorker published an essay about a grotesque experiment that took place in West Germany in the 1970s, in which young boys who had been taken from, or abandoned by, their parents were placed with known pedophiles. It was no accident. It was quite deliberate. The powerful sexologist Helmet Kentler believed that pedophilic guardianship would foster an open and unashamed attitude towards sex that would preclude the development of fascistic attitudes. As the New Yorker says: ’Kentler’s goal was to develop a child-rearing philosophy for a new kind of German man. Sexual liberation, he wrote, was the best way to “prevent another Auschwitz.”’ A sensible reader could guess what happened to the boys.

pedophilia child abuse
john giorno great demon kings
Michael Millner

Last of the red-hot lovers

John Giorno’s breakthrough work, he explains in his richly salacious telltale memoir of the Sixties New York art scene, was ‘Pornographic Poem’. In 1964, Giorno took phrases from mimeographed erotica and reconstituted them as homosexual lyric poetry: ‘I shivered/ looking up / at these erect pricks/ all different/ lengths/ and widths/ and knowing/ that each one/ was going up/ my ass hole.’ ‘Pornographic Poem’ is a ‘readymade’ or ‘cut-up’ that follows Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and William S. Burroughs — all of them artistic appropriators, and all of them Giorno’s lovers. These revolutionary artists are Giorno’s ‘great demon kings’.