{"id":496,"date":"2008-03-11T21:25:18","date_gmt":"2008-03-12T05:25:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2008\/03\/11\/tangier-routines-1\/"},"modified":"2009-04-17T08:15:13","modified_gmt":"2009-04-17T16:15:13","slug":"tangier-routines-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2008\/03\/11\/tangier-routines-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Starting “Tangier Routines”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been rereading The Letters of William Burroughs 1945-1959<\/em>, edited by Oliver Harris <\/a>(Viking 1993). I\u2019m focusing on the letters from Tangiers, Tangier, Tanger, Tangers as it\u2019s variously spelt\u2014these run from 1954 to 1958, and a lot of them are to Allen Ginsberg. This particular edition came out in 1993, and I read in it then. It\u2019s a nostalgia trip for me, reading this stuff, fitting as spring itself is a nostalgic season. The return of youth. The drifting blossoms. I’ve been into Burroughs for almost fifty years, I first read him in my brother’s copies of Evergreen Review <\/em>when I was 12 or 13. See also my blog entry on Burroughs and his Yage Letters<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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I also read a lot of his letters in an earlier collection, Letters to Allen Ginsberg,<\/em> edited by Ron Padgett and Anne Waldman (Full Court Press, 1982), I remember reading that in my office on Church St. in Lynchburg, Virginia\u2014I\u2019d set up as a freelance writer there in fall of 1982, and was greatly heartened by Bill\u2019s depression, frenzy, and hysterically funny turns of phrase.<\/p>\n

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In October, 2006, I wrote a story, \u201cThe Imitation Game,\u201d\u009d in which Alan Turing escapes being murdered by the British secret service <\/a>on June 8, 1954, and makes his way to Tangier, disguised as his Greek boyfriend Zeno. Turing has actually grown a copy of Zeno\u2019s face which he\u2019s glued to his face\u2014and he left behind a copy of his face glued to the cop-poisoned Zeno\u2019s face so that the Pig thinks they\u2019ve offed Turing himself. That story is supposed to come out in Interzone <\/em>magazine next month, the editor meant to put it out sooner, but lost track. You can, however, hear me reading “The Imitation Game” via Rudy Rucker Podcasts.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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In his letters, Burroughs talks about his work in progress as being called Interzone<\/em>, a phrase he probably coined because Tangier was at that time an International Zone, governed by France, Spain, Britain and Italy. This amalgam of \u201croutines\u201d\u009d became Naked Lunch<\/em>.<\/p>\n

By a routine, Burroughs means something like what we\u2019d now call a rap or a rant. It\u2019s kind of a vaudeville term. He starts talking about routines in his early 1950s novel, Queer<\/em>. In a letter from June 24, 1954, he says a routine \u201cis not completely symbolic, that is, it is subject to shlup over into \u201d\u02dcreal\u2019 action at any time (like cutting off finger joint [which Burroughs once did to impress a lover] and so forth).\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

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The routines are compressed short stories, long on affront, very in-your-face, often very funny. If you\u2019ve read Burroughs you know what I mean. \u201cLike snap, wow<\/em>.\u201d\u009d A phrase he uses a couple of times\u2014a bit ironically of course\u2014in one of his happiest and longest letters, written Oct 29, 1956, when he\u2019s temporarily off junk and swinging with Miss Green. Even the threat of jihadist attackers amuses him. \u201cIt\u2019s 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 open and feed on the wonderful soft stuff that will ooze out.\u201d\u009d Like snap, wow<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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On Nov 1, 1955, once again after kicking junk and having a few words with Miss Green: \u201cWatching a glass of mint tea on a bamboo mat in the sun, the steam blown back into the glass top like smoke from a chimney. It seemed to have some special significance like an object spotted in a movie. I was thinking like a book you read which also has pictures and accompanying music. Of course couldn\u2019t approximate life itself which is seen, heard, felt, experienced on many different levels and dimensions…\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

This dovetails synchronistically with the recent posts on RR vs. VR<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

On Feb 18, 1955. He writes about an SF theme he hopes to weave into Naked Lunch<\/em>. \u201c…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 by the scientific methods that have proved so useful in the physical sciences.\u201d\u009d <\/p>\n

Der Meister’s words hitting me like tracer bullets.<\/p>\n

Synchronistically again, this is a theme in Hylozoic<\/em>, where I write about the Peng birds siphoning off the world\u2019s computational gnarl. I push it a little further, in that I don’t see a big distinction between the deep creativity of humans and the computationally irreducibility of matter. In Burroughs\u2019s time, people didn\u2019t yet realize that the physical sciences can\u2019t in fact predict jack in terms of actual details, like which sand grain goes where in a slide.<\/p>\n

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In a letter of April 22, 1954, Burroughs mentions knowing Brian Howard, a dissipated graduate of Christ Church, Oxford, who might have known Alan Turing. Howard is in town for a cure of his (perhaps imaginary) TB. Howard in turn mentioned Burroughs in a letter, see Brian Howard: Portrait of a Failure,<\/em> edited by MJ Lancaster, 1968, in particular this page online<\/a>, from Howard’s letter to his friend John Banting, in March, 1954: \u201ca nice, if slightly long-winded, ex-Harvard creature of forty who is endeavoring to cure himself of morphinomania by taking this new medicine which the Germans invented during the war. There are several trade names for it. He uses two. Eukodal and Heptenal.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

If I fudge the dates a bit, I can suppose that Howard was still in Tangier in mid-summer of 1954, when Alan Turing hit the town. I want to write a story about him meeting Burroughs. I think I might write it in the format of \u201clost\u201d\u009d letters from Burroughs. I\u2019ll call the story \u201cTangier Routines\u201d\u009d and publish it in Flurb<\/a><\/em>. Flurb <\/em>will print it for sure\u2014I sleep with the editor (me).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It could be significant for the end of my story that Burroughs\u2019s grandfather founded the Burroughs Adding Machine Company, later Burroughs Corporation<\/a>, which was just beginning to get into computers in the mid-1950s.<\/p>\n

To really emulate Burroughs in the composition of \u201cTangiers Routines,\u201d\u009d I need to be pasting the thing together from scraps in letters. Or scraps in blog posts.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Perhaps Alan finds a way to form himself into something like a slug. He crawls across the room and schlup, he assimilates Burroughs. Or rather merges with him. In any case, the process ends with only one eccentric forty-year-old in the room. Feeling very full, Alan\/Bill went into the outhouse in back and took a seventy kilogram dump \u2014 eliminating redundant parts. Like a corporation that\u2019s \u201cright-sizing\u201d\u009d after a merger. And then home to re-organize the Burroughs Corporation!<\/p>\n

Or maybe they’ll be wearing ruffs of shelf-mushrooms on their necks. And I want a Happy Cloak routine (more on that later). If it’s routines, then I don’t have to choose. It can all come down.<\/p>\n

Dear Allen…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been rereading The Letters of William Burroughs 1945-1959, edited by Oliver Harris (Viking 1993). I\u2019m focusing on the letters from Tangiers, Tangier, Tanger, Tangers as it\u2019s variously spelt\u2014these run from 1954 to 1958, and a lot of them are to Allen Ginsberg. This particular edition came out in 1993, and I read in it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}