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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!don
From: don@allegra.UUCP (D. Mitchell)
Newsgroups: net.books
Subject: William Burroughs
Message-ID: <2592@allegra.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 11-Jul-84 01:55:59 EDT
Article-I.D.: allegra.2592
Posted: Wed Jul 11 01:55:59 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 11-Jul-84 07:17:44 EDT
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill
Lines: 47


	Since William Burroughs has come up, I thought I would collect
	a few amusing samples of his prose that I had marked.  These
	are collected from Naked Lunch, Exterminator, Cities of the Red
	Night, and The Wild Boys.

And now Tia Maria, retired fat lady from a traveling carnival, comes
out onto the lower balcony supporting her vast weight on two canes.
She looks up at Fernandez and her sad brown eyes pelt him with chocolates.
------------------------
He has discovered the simple and basic Discipline of DE.  DO EASY.
Knives forks and spoons flash through his fingers and tinkle into
drawers.  He moves through the sitting room a puff of air form his
cupped hand delicately lifts a cigarette ash from the table and wafts
it into a wastebasket.

Don't try for speed at first it will come his fingers will rustle
through the wallet with a touch light as dead leaves and crinkle
discreetly the note that will bribe a South American customs official
into overlooking a shrunk-down head.
------------------------
People hang from balconies, trees, and poles.  Even horses are hauled into
the air, kicking and farting, while boys prance around them, showing their
teeth in mimicry.
------------------------
...'Come back, kid! Come back!' and follows his boy right into the East
River, down through condoms and orange peels, mosaic of floating
newspapers, down into the silent black ooze with gangsters in concrete
------------------------
"We friends, yes?"

The shoe shine boy put on his hustling smile and looked into the Sailor's
dead, cold, undersea eyes, eyes without a trace of warmth or lust or
hate or any feeling the boy had experienced in himself or seen in another,
at once cold and intense, impersonal and predatory.

The Sailor leaned forward and put a finger on the boy's inner arm at the
elbow.  He spoke in his dead junky whisper.

"With veins like that, Kid, I'd have myself a time!"
------------------------
Nurse: "Adrenaline doctor?"

Benway: "The night porter shot it all up for kicks."  He looks around and
picks up one of those rubber vacuum cups on the end of a stick they use
to unstop toilets. . . .He advances on the patient.. . . ."Make an
incision, Doctor Limpf," he says to his appalled assistant. . . . "I'm
going to massage the heart."