tin tin: the naked hunch

Its a hybrid. An odd juxtaposition of William S. Burroughs and Tintin in X’ed  Out, a comic by Charles Burns. …

X’d Out is the story of Doug, a young guy with a head injury who has taken to his parent’s basement in an effort to kick his addiction to prescription painkillers. It’s a detox story. The X’s being like the number of days left to serve in prison. So, the book vacillates between this sobering and foreboding reality and a dream state which he embarks on as the character Nitnit, an alter-ego of Tintin. Tintin as you know, is iconic character created by Herge. Except Nitnit is drugged and dreamy with the aspects of the two realities intersecting.

Read More:http://boingboing.net/2010/11/12/charles-burns-new-gr.html---artsy, angsty, twinpeaksy teens who take drugs and engage in risky behavior, but it's more hallucinatory than Black Hole. The story here bounces back and forth between Doug -- a student who does a performance art gig wearing a Tintin mask while reciting William Burroughs-inspired cut-up poetry (Doug goes by the moniker Nitnit and Johnny 23) -- and an otherworldly character who looks like a cross between Tintin and Doug. Their stories parallel one another's in several ways (for instance, both have bandaged heads -- for unknown reasons.) Both Doug and TinTin-Doug seem to think that the other character is merely a hard-to-remember dream. ---

So, besides the emulation of the look and feel of classic Tintin, there is the horror aspect as well.

Gregory Corso: What do you say about political conflicts?

William Burroughs: Political conflicts are merely surface manifestations. If conflicts arise you may be sure that certain powers intend to keep this conflict under operation since they hope to profit from the situation. To concern yourself with surface political conflicts is to make the mistake of the bull in the ring, you are charging the cloth. That is what politics is for, to teach you the cloth. Just as the bullfighter teaches the bull, teaches him to follow, obey the cloth.

William Burroughs: Death

Allen Ginsberg: What is death?

William Burroughs: A gimmick. It’s the time-birth-death gimmick. Can’t go on much longer, too many people are wising up.

Gregory Corso: Do you feel there has been a definite change in man’s makeup? A new consciousness?

William Burroughs: Yes, I can give you a precise answer to that. I feel that the change, the mutation in consciousness, will occur spontaneously once certain pressures now in operation are removed. I feel that the principal instrument of monopoly and control that prevents expansion of consciousness is the word lines controlling thought, feeling and apparent sensory impressions of the human host.Read More:http://beatpatrol.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/gregory-corso-allen-ginsberg-interview-with-william-s-burroughs-1961/ a

Read More:http://biblioklept.org/2010/10/19/charles-burns-annotates-a-page-from-xed-out/---“I don’t know exactly where he came from,” Burns says with a laugh about the mysterious guide in Nitnit’s world. “He’s got diapers, a backpack that’s got punk buttons on it. You can’t tell whether he’s young or old, but he’s kind of a street urchin. I haven’t figured out what to call him.”---

So many of your comrades, kindred spirits, have passed on and you’re still here. What is it like when you watch them leave?

Well, some I miss more than others. Some I don’t miss at all. I never had much empathy with William Burroughs. And I could have published Naked Lunch. I had an early version of the manuscript … before William Burroughs had written anything else, so we had no idea at City Lights that he would develop into a great writer with his other books. But Naked Lunch itself was a junkie vision of existence, junkie consciousness. And generally junkie consciousness was a death consciousness. I didn’t want to publish a book with that consciousness. ( Lawrence Ferlinghetti ) Read More:http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=23213 aa

Read More:http://www.avclub.com/articles/charles-burns,47913/---Burns:But Burroughs enters into it, and the protagonist is doing his spoken-word performances, trying to be like Burroughs, being a very artsy-fartsy sort of art student, standing up there doing his performance, and not getting a good reception at that point. Some of the writing, or the way the images are collaged together, has a feeling of a cut-up. There’s nothing random about it the way Burroughs was literally cutting pages and trying to do it almost the way you do a collage, try to put these words together and create cut-up writing that way. There’s references to that, but there’s nothing random about the way I’m piecing things together. ---

Read More:http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/10/xed-out-charles-burns-review

Perhaps the co-mingling of Burroughs and Herge is not that odd. Burrough’s countercultural ideas found their way into  the Nike corporation. The commercial openly flaunts the conjunction of capital and counterculture that it even brought  criticism down on the head of one of the doyens of the beats. It’s what Joseph Heath called The Rebel Sell.  Whether Burroughs’ presence actually makes that commercial subversive, is questionable, however Burroughs has proably been more assimilated into corporate mainstream culture than Tintin. Burroughs has been more easily adapted to the sponsored world than Tintin.”

Thomas Frank:The most startling revelation to emerge from the Burroughs/Nike partnership is not that corporate America has overwhelmed its cultural foes or that Burroughs can somehow remain “subversive” through it all, but the complete lack of dissonance between the two sides. Of course Burroughs is not “subversive,” but neither has he “sold out”: His ravings are no longer appreciably different from the official folklore of American capitalism. What’s changed is not Burroughs, but business itself. As expertly as Burroughs once bayoneted American proprieties, as stridently as he once proclaimed himself beyond the laws of man and God, he is today a respected ideologue of the Information Age, occupying roughly the position in the pantheon of corporate-cultural thought once reserved strictly for Notre Dame football coaches and positive-thinking Methodist ministers. His inspirational writings are boardroom favorites, his dark nihilistic burpings the happy homilies of the new corporate faith….

Read More:http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/william-burroughs-unabridged/Content?oid=1186237---Leyser's William S. Burroughs: A Man Within is the first full-length documentary to look at the entire life of the Beat and punk icon, author of Junky, Queer, and Naked Lunch. "I'm trying to figure out who the man was behind the persona, behind the monster," Leyser says. "He opened up queer and junkie culture and new avenues of thinking, but in his personal life he really struggled. You see through the interviews a deeply tortured man, who spoke openly about queer things yet couldn't bear to be in a relationship."---

… With its reorganization around information, capitalism has developed a new mythology, a sort of corporate antinomianism according to which the breaking of rules and the elimination of rigid corporate structure have become the central article of faith for millions of aspiring executives….Dropping Naked Lunch and picking up Thriving on Chaos, the groundbreaking 1987 management text by Tom Peters, the most popular business writer of the past decade, one finds more philosophical similarities than one would expect from two manifestos of, respectively, dissident culture and business culture. If anything, Peters’ celebration of disorder is, by virtue of its hard statistics, bleaker and more nightmarish than Burroughs’. Read More:http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/f/frank-dissent.html