I don't feel like I'm finished with William S. Burroughs yet. And although it isn't his third book, The Yage Letters is the third book in The Yage Trilogy. (Or perhaps more properly The Naked Lunch Trilogy. "...the trilogy to which, in late 1953, Burroughs originally applied the title “Naked Lunch” — texts published separately as: Junky, Queer, and The Yage Letters." https://realitystudio.org/scholarship/confusions-masterpiece/ But that would be confusing, so Yage it is.) Unfortunately, neither the library nor Libby nor hoopla had a copy of it. Internet Archive had this
...but they also showed me this:
Note the Borrow Unavailable. Hmmm.
Yage is listed as having 84 pages, Redux 184. That's a big difference.
And now it's time for...A Closer Look.
So yeah...I'm wanting Redux. No time to order it, no Kindle version available. But wait, what's this?
I'm not a big fan of audiobooks. They tend go put me to sleep. In fact, I often use one for just that purpose, and if I set the shut diff timer for 15 minutes, I almost never make it to that point, so strong a soporific is this for me. But in this case, I'm going to give it a go. In tandem with the original publication.
You know, I doubt that there's any writer who has been more subject to Restored / Expanded versions of their works than William S. Burroughs. Is that because he continued to rework his texts, or because his original works were subject to such strict censorship by editors?
Okay. 184 pages, then. Though I won't be able to track pages very well. Guess % will have to do for this one.
Day 1 (DDRD 2,829), July 31, 2025
"Read" to 33%...approximately page 61.
Well. The Editor's Introduction accounts for quite a few of the Redux version's 100 added pages: it ends at 59 minutes...about 20% of the whole Redux book. (This would equal approximately 37 pages.
According to the Editor's Introduction, Queer was supposed to be the sequel to The Yage Letters, not vice versa as I had thought. So...Burroughs wrote Junky first, then immediately started work on Queer. But the house that was going to publish Junky (Ace) wanted more material, so Burroughs strip-mined Queer for some of that material. (Thus some of the Restored Text of Queer was material taken back from Junky. Then he wrote the "letters" which constitute The Yage Letters * But it wasn't published until 10 years after Junky (1963), and Queer wasn't published until 1985, after most of Burroughs' other works had seen print. What a convoluted bibliography!
After the Editor's Introduction, there's a section entitled "The South American Book Might Turn Into Something of Interest." It seems to be more Editor Introduction. In it, we add further confusion to the whole bibliography affair when we get a reference to "From Naked Lunch Book 3: In Search of Yage." Also, "Whether the letters of In Search of Yage are authentic records or literary works, or whether we attribute them to some composite figure inhabiting the interzone between fact and fiction, a hybrid of William Burroughs and his persona, William Lee, changes how we read them, and behind the received version of how these letters were written there lies another story altogether."
Also, part of The Yage Letters was "cannibalized" to form a part of Naked Lunch. Thus at this point I say ⚐⚐⚐⚐⚐.
ANYway...this section ends at 1:33:15, which is 33% of the book...thus approximately 61 pages. Which means that Redux doesn't include that much "new" Burroughs material. And there's also a 27 minute section at the end of the book which I'd guess is editorial commentary, so maybe indicating even less "new" Burroughs material...like maybe jyst 20 pages or so?
* "Harris established that the 1953 letters were in fact largely fabricated from notes and a prose narrative which Burroughs first wrote." (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yage_Letters)
P.S. The audio book thing worked out okay. I am glad to be switching to text for the next (and major) part of the book, though. I think I'll play the audiobook along as I read just to see what kind of changes the editor made from his comments in the introduction(s). It seems like it was primarily punctuation and spelling stuff.
P.P.S. I have had a lot of visitors from Brazil in the past day...1.89 K. O que houve com isso? I dunno, but
Valeu pela transmissão, Brasil!
Stopped at page 19 (2:02:03, 43%). The new version of Internet Archive is a pain in the ass. If you stop reading, when you start back up it opens to page 1. As for the audio vs. text, there's almost no difference at all. I noticed a few times when the reader did a contraction that wasn't it the text if added a shirt word (like "an"), but they might have jyst been Reader lapses. At any rafe, they make no difference whatsoever, so I'm not very impressed with this whole Redux business as if now.
P.P.P.S. Oops. My mistake. If you hit the little bookmark symbol on the left of the screen on Internet Archive, you can set a bookmark, and when you reload the page later you can do he same think to get back to the page you marked. Not as smooth as the old system nor so wide as a church door, but t'will do.
And furthermore...I read a nice review of The Yage Letters Redux in Rain Taxi*. You can check it out HERE.
* Which, by the way, has published a half-dozen or so of my book reviews. 🔴 [Actually it was 8. I checked.]
Day 2 (DDRD 2,830), August 1, 2025
"Read" to 39.
The guy who reads the "Bill Lee" sections--the majority of the book--is terrible. It sounds like he's trying to do an imitation of Burroughs' voice, but it's a bad imitation, and he ends up sounding angry about everything.
Ah-ha! There's a footnote on Page 42 that wasn't included in the Audiobook. It's a good footnote, too:
Wonder why they left it out.
An added section! "Roosevelt After Inauguration." Available on several sites, like THIS ONE. Pretty short, but worth perusing. Fits in well with the current political scene in the US of A. Oh...correction. The link text isn't the whole thing that's read on the audiobook...though it does include a YouTube video of Burroughs reading this Reddit version, so there's that. This bit is so much like Trump's moves that it's uncanny.
This first section ("In Search if Yage") ends at 3:16:06 / 69% / page 49. The next section ("Seven Years Later") is mostly Ginsburg, so some relief from that obnoxious reader's voice.
Added Ginsburg section: about going to a doctor, and only a few lines long. Very skippable.
Another section when Ginsburg is talking about a man preparing a drug for him has some different FD's just a few lines. It makes no difference whatsoever.
In addition to a better reader (who seems to be imitating Ginsburg), this section has two drawings and a poem. Some minor variations throughout, but none substantial.
The Burroughs reply letter which ends this section (which is not included in the audiobook) is a pretty interesting note on cut up technique...obviously very early in Burroghs' experiments with Brion Gysin's "discovery." Strangely, this letter is signed William Burroughs instead if Bill Lee.
This section ends at 3:39:28 / 77% / page 66.
Then: "Epilogue." Ends at 3:45:44 / 79% / page 72. And that's it for the original version of the book. (The remaining pages are either blank or lists of other City Lights books.) So that leaves 21% of the book, which would amount to approximately 39 pages. Let's see what we've got there.
First up, Appendix 1, a description of yage preparation...parts of which were familiar, I think repeating lines from earlier on in the book.
Then Appendix 2, a Burroughs letter. Lots about centipedes.
Appendix 3, 4...more, more, more.
Time for a break, I think. I'm at 3:58:16, 83% of the way through. Probably will finish this off later today.
The LFPL has two copies of Naked Lunch Restored Edition). Surprisingly, both are out. So I put in a request, but as I will be needing it tomorrow, I checked out an e-copy. So I guess I'm still on this William S. Burroughs Train.
Coinky Dinky Time: I've been following John Porcellino's work for some time now, and when I (recently) found out that he had a Facebook page, I started following that, too. And today, just a few hours after I wrote about Brion Gysin (who seems to have invented the cut cup method of writing) popularized by William S. Burroughs, this appeared in my Facebook feed:
No doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
Day 3 (DDRD 2,831), August 2, 2025
"Read" to Page 184, The End. The last sections have a little bit of repeated matter, but most of it is new, including ore material from Ginsberg. So I guess the Redux is worth seeking out. (I'd doubted that before.) I'm becoming interested in Ginsberg. "One day death will vomit me out of this body." He seems like a gentle, wise man.
So now...I think it's going to be Naked Lunch. Not sure how I feel about that, but time will tell.
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