SHIFT OF OUTLINES

“Burroughs has written no novels, no one has read them, we all lay claim to them. And I’m only half joking. If the Burroughs enigma exists in a parallel universe to that of his work, what, then, is the key to its appeal? (…) Yet somehow William Burroughs endures, side-stepping tragic bohemia on the one hand and self-parody on the other (…) As Paul Bowles said of him, ‘When I got to know him, I realized that the legend existed in spite of him, not because of him: he didn’t give a damn about it’”(…) “The paternalist spills over into the pedophile, the junky blends easily into the gentleman” (…) what Burroughs offers is a figure who embodies pop’s repertoire of identitites”

From Gentleman Junky by Graham Caveny

Last year in New York I had a glimpse into the life of intellectual spend driftness. Don’t get me wrong, I stayed in the cheapest hotel in Manhattan and ate fast or Turkey food sold in the streets for a whole month, which on the other hand came to be the best way to try Arab food and enjoy a substantious and sometimes quite hot meal for a couple of dollars. A week before I left, I decided to buy some books as a means to keep on feeding the stimuli and reaction circuit of consummerism that engages modern individuals into the practice of making so called projects to “imagine oneself as other”-wasn’t it, after all, via Naked Lunch that I started fancying about visitting NY? God knows what I will do when a novel where the main charcater is a shark in the seas of Thailand start haunting me like NL has-.I went three times to Strand and Barnes and Noble and finally ended up buying more than 40 books. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore, Kevin O’neil, Ben Dimagmaliw and Bill Oakley, was one of the three comic books I bought. Though in a way enticing in terms of plot it seems to me The League lacks a lot in charcater development. Anyway I enjoyed it because of the idea of this group of heroes with a ninteenth centrury mind set of ideals and prejudices with which I sometimes sympathize.

Today, as I was reading the New York Times edition on line, I came across with a curious article in the Fashion & Style section about a subculture named steampunk. According to this article, steampunks read the work of people such as William Gibson, H.G. Wells and watch films like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Following the Victorian aversion to nudity, steampunks design not only their own clothings, but aso their computer’s. They made me think that the 40 books I bought last year are peccata minuta in comparison to their extravagant genious and abilty to delude themeselves into the gimmick of the “make it yourself punk ethos”. If I were rich I would surely spend my money on stupid things, but definitely not in becoming a steampunk. Keep it down man, I talk to myself, there’s no need for so much paraphernalia. Like the undeniable Mexican hijo de la chingada que soy, like the no one who I am, I erase myself by leaving the “indie” maddening crowd behind; or like Sting sang, “at night a candle’s brighter than the sun”. Chesire cat-like smile vanishing in the blue dark sky.

“It is also the vision of steampunk, a subculture that is the aesthetic expression of a time-traveling fantasy world, one that embraces music, film, design and now fashion, all inspired by the extravagantly inventive age of dirigibles and steam locomotives, brass diving bells and jar-shaped protosubmarines. First appearing in the late 1980s and early ’90s, steampunk has picked up momentum in recent months, making a transition from what used to be mainly a literary taste to a Web-propagated way of life.

(…)

“And, in keeping with the make-it-yourself ethos of punk, they assemble their own fashions, an adventurous pastiche of neo-Victorian, Edwardian and military style accented with sometimes crudely mechanized accouterments like brass goggles and wings made from pulleys, harnesses and clockwork pendants, to say nothing of the odd ray gun dangling at the hip. Steampunk style is corseted, built on a scaffolding of bustles, crinolines and parasols and high-arced sleeves not unlike those favored by the movement’s designer idols:Nicolas Ghesquiere of Balenciaga, Alexander McQueen and, yes, even Ralph Lauren.”

(…)

“Devotees of the culture read Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, as well as more recent speculative fiction by William Gibson, James P. Blaylock and Paul Di Filippo, the author of “The Steampunk Trilogy,” the historical science fiction novellas that lent the culture its name. They watch films like “The City of Lost Children” (with costumes designed by Jean Paul Gaultier), “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” and “Brazil,” Terry Gilliam’s dystopian fantasy satirizing the modern industrial age; and they listen to melodeons and Gypsy strings mixed with industrial goth.”

“My Cid rode up to Burgos,

Up to the studded gate between two towers,

Beat with his lance butt, and the child came out,

Una niña de nueve años,

To the little gallery over the gate, between the towers,

Reading the writ, voce tinnula:

That no man speak to, feed, help Ruy Díaz,

On pain to have his heart out, set on a pike spike

And both his eyes turned out, and all his goods sequestered,

“And here, Myo Cid, are the seals,

The big seal and the writing.”

And he came down from Bivar, Myo Cid,

With no hawks left there on the perches,

And no clothes there on the presses,

And left his trunk with Raquel and Vidas,

That big box of sand, with the pawn-brokers,

To get payed for his menie;

Breaking his way to Valencia.

Ignez da Castro murdered, and a wall

Here stripped, here made to stand.

Drear waste, the pigment flakes from the stone,

Or plaster flakes, Mantegna painted the wall.

Silk tatters, “Nec Spe Metu.””

From Canto III by Ezra Pound