The not-so-dull Dutchman.

Jones and Ginsberg chat in a photo likely taken between '57-'62.

In Jones’ Dutchman, a female character named Lula plays the antagonist to Clay, the protagonist. This was a difficult play to crack open, but our class discussion helped decipher the author’s broader message of the assimilation of black men into mainstream American culture.  Lula starts insulting Clay on page eight, saying “God, you’re dull.” The word “dull” has multiple connotations. In this instance, she infers he mostly that he is boring. But “dull” also refers to intellect. If one is not sharp or bright then one is slow or foolish or stupid. She continues by mocking his appearance on the same page, accusing him of appealing to the white middle class bourgeoisie aesthetic: “You look like you been trying to grow a beard. That’s exactly what you look like. You look like you live in New Jersey with your parents and are trying to grow a beard. That’s what. You look like you’ve been reading Chinese poetry and drinking lukewarm sugarless tea.” When I read this, I immediately pictured the now-all-too-average hipster sitting outside of Starbucks or Mojo or Felicitous as he strokes his beard and reads and waits for his friends to arrive so they may sit and intellectually masturbate one another for hour upon caffeinated hour. “Chinese poetry” immediately brought Mao to my mind, which is fitting as he was kicked out of the military for Communist sympathies and later came to be a Marxist. Page 36 reads like a warning against white people who overstep boundaries (globally, politically, socially) in claiming what is the right or true way to think and live and dream: “Don’t make the mistake of talking too much about the advantages of Western rationalism, or the great intellectual legacy of the white man, or maybe they’ll begin to listen. And then maybe one day you’ll find out they actually do know what you’re talking about…these blues people. With no more blues…all those ex-coons will be stand-up Western men, with eyes for clean hard useful lives, sober, pious and sane, and they’ll murder you. They’ll murder you, and have rational explanations. Very much like your own.” The Encyclopedia Brittanica describes Rationalism as the process “by which fundamental truths are intuitively apprehended. These fundamental truths are the causes or “reasons” of all derivative facts.” Clay is implying that someday black people will reject sensation, feeling, emotion (the antithesis of rationalism) and utilize against them the same methods of "logic" white men have historically to oppress others in the forms of colonialism and imperialism.  

Movies in the Margins

The animated short of Burroughs’ Junky Christmas was entertaining and I appreciated Burroughs’ narration of the film as I am always interested in hearing an author reading their own work. Where they pause or what they emphasize can potentially help readers unpack meaning, but here the omissions from the original poem should be focused on.

An important section Burroughs omits in his narration is

“Don’t live here,” the boy said, his voice muffled. “They say I’m not entitled.”

“Yeah, I know how they are, the bureaucrat bastards. I had a friend once, died of snakebite right in the waiting room. They wouldn’t even listen when he tried to explain a snake bit him…”

 The paragraph is embarrassing to read; it is a fumbling attempt to connect with one even more marginalized than himself.  The boy is brown, one important detail the deletion of the previous paragraph undermines. Danny, though marginalized in society because of his addiction, still retains some privilege over other members. He was given drugs by a kindly doctor, something that the brown boy would never have experienced. He is presumably an immigrant because he does not “live here” and “not entitled” to receive medical services he cannot afford to pay even though he is legitimately ill. Conversely, Danny experiences saving grace from a physician though he is only in need of a fix. Privilege is invisible to those possessing it, and middle-class Burroughs’ omission of this important section underscores this. 

 In the opening scene the camera floats above a deserted table and chairs. I interpreted this as a nod to Neel’s declaration that the closest thing to a self-portrait she had ever created was a painting of an empty chair. I was disappointed in her role in the film. I was surprised to see such an important person in a marginal supportive role. Alice Neel, the woman who played the Bishop’s mother, was a painter in real life. Milo’s wife is too, though we never see her paint. Perhaps this movie is a tale of what could’ve been Neel’s life: domestic servitude under the whims of men. In any case, it is and was most women’s unfortunate reality. The narrator mockingly refers to the wife as the Queen of Sheba with a tub full of dishes. She battles her husband for domain over the kingdom, the household. As a homemaker, the house is all she possesses; it is her world. The women depicted in this film are given typical second-class treatment, serving only as shrieking banshees that get in the way of fun or are demure and shy. However, Neel’s character seems to have no opinion or reaction to any of the absurdities abounding.

"I'm not depressed; I'm just a nihilist."

 -actual quote from an actual interview with Burroughs I held within my mind

Bill Burroughs claims he did “not have strong motivations in any other direction… I tried it as a matter of curiosity.”(Junky 49) However, these are two different  Burroughs sounds as if he were bored and in need of a hobby. He sees no meaning in anything, only chaos. He was diagnosed with depression and paranoid-schizophrenia, but is also a self-titled “chronic malingerer” on page 48 of Junky.  

Burroughs is an unreliable narrator, contradicting himself from the beginning of the Junky excerpt.  His first paragraph recounts a pleasant and secure childhood filled with middle class niceties. The following two paragraphs delve into fears, nightmares, and hallucinations. He is afraid of being alone (Junky 47.) He speaks of intense fear of sleep and dreams “where a supernatural horror seemed always on the point of taking shape” (Junky 47.) How terribly and utterly ironic it is that the pain he purposely chooses to inflict upon himself produces the same effect as the affliction he is trying to escape.  Borroughs’ description of his first shot of morphine reveals a reaction that is similar to that of when he describes falling asleep in the second paragraph. “I experienced a strong feeling of fear. I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision (54).”

Fear, death, and hopelessness punctuate the pages. “They knew that basically no one can help anyone else. He is “cured” from junk for a time, but this is a generous term to describe his off-period of morphine use. He merely replaces one addiction with another, that of alcohol. In addition to his aforementioned depression and paranoid-schizophrenia, it sounds as though he could easily switch substance dependance due to obsessive-compulsive disorder, which physical addiction is often correlated with. In this case, habits and urges cannot simply be “given up.” If junk is indeed “a way of life (50),” what is more addictive than the junk itself is the process, the routine, that addicts come to love and rely on.  

The autobiography by Jack Black titled “You Can’t Win”* mentioned on page 48 recounts the journeys of a criminal as he navigates life stealing, gambling, cavorting with prostitutes, landing in and escaping from jail, alcoholism, and opium addiction seemed to have inspired Burroughs to reject his comfortable and solidly middle class upbringing. (Freud would probably argue Burroughs' feelings of alienation are due to his boyhood love interest and the breaking up of the group, destroying his trust in others and fueling his paranoia and insistent fears.) This book title simultaneously terrifies and intrigues me. It sounds dismal and hopeless, “You can’t win” means to give up, which means ceasing to care, which Burroughs interprets as freedom. (The freedom “from,” as opposed to the freedom “to.”) He wishes for freedom from morality, exemption from standards and rules. 

*I could not find the full text online, but I reserved the library's hard copy.
**Here is a link to purchase an illustrated version of "You Can't Win"for 2 bucks!
http://www.epubbooks.com/books/2lzx/you-can-t-win-the-autobiography-of-jack-back