→ 25/10/2005 @12:04
Monument to William S. Burroughs, de Yuri Zupancic
William S. Burroughs – morreu aos 83 anos no início de Agosto de 1997 em Lawrence, Kansas, nos Estados Unidos – foi o grande fora-da-lei da literatura contemporânea. Importante e radical, a sua obra pode ser colocada em paralelo à de escritores como John Barth, Samuel Beckett ou Henry Miller. Norman Mailer considerava-o um génio. John Updike via-o como um «um escritor incorruptível». Já o seu companheiro da chamada Geração Beat, Jack Kerouac, dizia que Burroughs era o maior escritor satírico desde Jonathan Swift. Burroughs preocupou-se em explicar o fascínio que as drogas provocam em (algumas) mentes humanas.
Até ao momento em que morreu, foi uma espécie de guru para muitos escritores, músicos e cineastas. Muita da admiração por Burroughs deriva do facto de o escritor ter abordado, em plenos anos 50, temas que eram considerados subversivos para a repressiva sociedade norte-americana da época – a sociedade do sinistro patrão do FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. O que se segue é um extracto de um dos textos mais famosos de Burroughs – The Talking Asshole, que pode ser traduzido para algo como «O Olho do Cu Falante», retirado do livro The Naked Lunch e que David Lynch haveria de filmar, conseguindo o que muitos julgavam impossível.
[jbox title="The Talking Asshole"]Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down, you dig, farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard. This “ass-talk” had a sort of gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you hafta do is “turn loose”? Well, this talking hit you right down there. A bubbly, thick, stagnant sound. A sound you could smell. This man worked for a carnival, you dig, and tos tart with, it was like a novelty ventriloquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called “The Better Oh”, that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it, but it was clever, like, “Oh, I say, are you still down there, old thing? ’Nah, I had to go relieve myself!’”
After a while, the ass started talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib, and toss the gags back at him every time. Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy incurving hooks, and started eating. He thought this was cute at first, and built an act around it. But the asshole would eat its way through his pants, and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags, nobody loved it (…) And it wanted to be kissed, same as any other mouth. Finally, it talked all the time, day and night. You could hear him for blocks, screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it. But nothing did any good, and the asshole said to him, “It’s you who will shut up in the end, not me. Because, we don’t need you around here any more. I can talk, and eat, AND shit”. (…)[/jbox]
Registo áudio muito difícil de encontrar no qual Frank Zappa, um dos meus músicos preferidos, lê perante uma divertida audiência o texto completo de The Talking Asshole. A leitura ocorreu na Nova Convention, em Nova Iorque, a 2 de Dezembro de 1972, numa homenagem prestada ao grande guru da Geração Beat.
