{books} – Page 233 – { feuilleton }

Paging Doctor Benway

Roy Scheider as Dr A. Benway in Naked Lunch (1991).

1: Naked Lunch (1959) by William Burroughs

So I am assigned to engage the services of Doctor Benway for Islam Inc.

Dr. Benway had been called in as advisor to the Freeland Republic, a place given over to free love and continual bathing. The citizens are well adjusted, cooperative, honest, tolerant and above all clean. But the invoking of Benway indicates all is not well behind that hygienic facade: Benway is a manipulator and coordinator of symbol systems, an expert on all phases of interrogation, brainwashing and control. I have not seen Benway since his precipitate departure from Annexia, where his assignment had been T.D.—Total Demoralization. Benway’s first act was to abolish concentration camps, mass arrest and, except under certain limited and special circumstances, the use of torture.

“I deplore brutality,” he said. “It’s not efficient. On the other hand, prolonged mistreatment, short of physical violence, gives rise, when skillfully applied, to anxiety and a feeling of special guilt. A few rules or rather guiding principles are to be borne in mind. The subject must not realize that the mistreatment is a deliberate attack of an anti-human enemy on his personal identity. He must be made to feel that he deserves any treatment he receives because there is something (never specified) horribly wrong with him. The naked need of the control addicts must be decently covered by an arbitrary and intricate bureaucracy so that the subject cannot contact his enemy direct.”

2: Doctor Benway Operates (1983)

A short sequence from Howard Brookner’s Burroughs: The Movie. Burroughs himself takes the role of the notorious doctor in a staging of the operation scene from Naked Lunch.

3: Repo Man (1984)

Alex Cox’s feature film includes a hospital scene in which a Doctor Benway and a Mr Lee are paged over the PA. As I recall, Mr Lee is requested to “return the drugs”. There’s apparently a similar scene in Dark City (1998) but if so this must be in the director’s cut which I’ve yet to see.

4: Nomads (1986)

I’ve not seen John McTiernan’s thriller but it contains another instance of a Doctor Benway being paged at a hospital. (Thanks, Márcio!)

5: Naked Lunch (1991)

David Cronenberg’s film shows the address of Benway’s surgery to be in Mott Street, New York. This happens to be in the Chinatown area of the city, and is also the location of the Genco Olive Oil Company in The Godfather: Part II.

6: Love is the Devil (1998)

John Maybury’s Francis Bacon bio-pic features an early screen appearance by Daniel Craig as Bacon’s doomed lover, George Dyer. The latter’s descent into drug-fuelled self hatred includes this scene in a dimly-lit phonebox where Dyer calls up a “Dr. Benway” to request another angry fix. The BFI subtitles give the name as “Banway” but the reference is hardly accidental, especially when Bacon and Burroughs were friends.

7: Standards (2001) by Tortoise

Track 4: Benway.

8: Autopsy (2008)

Adam Gierasch’s horror film has Robert Patrick playing a Doctor Benway. With a title like that it seems almost inevitable.

9: Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010)

Near the beginning of Panos Cosmatos’s feature film Barry Nyle (Michael Rogers) is seen consuming a quantity of unspecified pills. A brief shot shows the origin of the drugs. Some of the experiments taking place in the Arboria Institute where Nyle works aren’t far removed from either Cronenberg’s or Burroughs’ fictions.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The William Burroughs archive

Cthulhu playing cards

You know, there was a time when HP Lovecraft’s dreaming monster was a rare entity known only to aficionados. Cthulhu may not have achieved Hello Kitty-style ubiquity yet but it’s only a matter of time (or strange aeons).

Adding some new products to my CafePress pages recently I noticed that the ever-expanding product line there now includes playing cards, so here’s a new addition to the growing mountain of Cthulhuiana. I was going to add a playing card option to some of my recent designs (the Summerisle one in particular) but there seems to be a fault in the processing at the moment so the ones I’ve tried haven’t shown up. This design seems to have worked because it was a png rather than the usual jpg. If I can persuade the software to behave I’ll add more in future. As usual the price is relatively steep, a consequence of the high base price rather than my rapacity.

Update: After another CafePress malfunction (or something) my shop vanished. But you can now get a similar set of cards at Zazzle.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• More CthulhuPress
• Cthulhu Calendar
• Cthulhu for sale
• Cthulhu God
• CthulhuPress

Weekend links 252

Waiting by Liz Brizzi.

• “Music, politics, sex, and art were also widely represented by Evergreen. Gerald Ford famously maligned the magazine on the floor of Congress for printing the likeness of Richard Nixon next to a nude photo.” Jonathon Sturgeon on the return of an avant-garde institution.

• “The hallucinogenic properties of language are widely recognized by all repressive societies…which treat words like other tightly controlled substances.” Askold Melnyczuk reviews Where the Bird Sings Best, a novel by Alejandro Jodorowsky.

• Mixes of the week: A Mix For Thomas Carnacki by Jon Brooks whose Music for Thomas Carnacki has been reissued on vinyl; Solid Steel Radio Show 27/3/2015 by DJ Food.

One of the few vice-friendly cities left in the US, New Orleans remains his spiritual home, or whatever the atheist equivalent is. Waters’ supposed favourite bar in the world is here in the historic French Quarter. The Corner Pocket is a gay dive bar with tattooed strippers—filthy in exactly the way Waters likes.

“Trash and camp just don’t cut it any more,” he told a rapt audience at his interview panel on Friday. “Filth still has a punch to it. The right kind of people understand it and it frightens away the timid.”

John Waters growing older disgracefully

• Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti are being republished in a single edition by Penguin. Jeff VanderMeer wrote the foreword.

• “The film is brimming with Bacchanalian revelry, arcane mystery and mortal dread.” Robert Bright on The Saragossa Manuscript by Wojciech Has.

• Alistair Livingston has posted page scans from When Darkness Dawns, volume two of his zine from the early 80s, The Encyclopedia of Ecstasy.

• “Without first understanding the flâneur we cannot understand the development of arcades,” says Aaron Coté.

• At A Journey Round My Skull: Jo Daemen cover designs; at 50 Watts: the art of Manuel Bujados.

• Vast spacecraft and megastructures: Jeff Love on the science-fiction art of Chris Foss.

• At Dangerous Minds: RE/Search’s Vale on JG Ballard and William Burroughs.

• RIP John Renbourn

• Pentangling (1968) by Pentangle | Lyke-Wake Dirge (1969) by Pentangle | Lord Franklin (1970) by Pentangle

Yuggoth details

Yuggoth Cultures (1994) by John Coulthart.

Earlier this week I spent a day scanning this painting—which I’m now surprised to find is 21 years old—so I might at last have a good quality digital copy. There’s been a copy on the website for years but that was a print made at a high-street copy shop that did nothing for the detail and range of colour. It’s quite a large piece—49.54 x 71.39 cm (19.5 x 28.1 inches)—done with acrylics on board. Since 2003 the painting has been used (in another poor reproduction) on the cover of The Starry Wisdom, the controversial collection of Lovecraftian fiction from Creation Books. The painting wasn’t originally intended for that collection, however, and doesn’t quite fit since a number of the portraits don’t feature in the book at all.

Yuggoth Cultures would have been an earlier collection of Lovecraftian fiction and non-fiction that Alan Moore had begun writing for Creation in 1993. Alan’s idea was to take Lovecraft’s Fungi from Yuggoth sonnet sequence as the basis for a collection that would explore Lovecraft’s fictional world and also draw together a variety of figures from the same era: fellow writers, occultists like Aleister Crowley and Austin Spare, and Harry Houdini for whom Lovecraft ghost-wrote Imprisoned with the Pharaohs in 1924. Unfortunately the stars were not right on this occasion; Alan took the sole copy of the half-written manuscript to London in order to read selections at an event in Soho but left the papers in a cab. Some pieces survived, having been copied and stored elsewhere—The Courtyard in The Starry Wisdom is one of these—and there was talk for a while of the lost pieces being rewritten but enthusiasm for the project flagged.

This is Alan’s sketch for the cover, the idea being to have a Lovecraft head made of fungal growths rather like an Arcimboldo painting. The head would be sprouting tendrils whose loops would contain pictures of some of the people featured in the book. Alan’s quick sketch is actually a better approximation of Lovecraft’s strange features than my painted version which isn’t narrow enough. For the record (and because people always ask), the other people on the cover are Alan himself, Austin Osman Spare, Aleister Crowley, Harry Houdini, Robert E Howard (not Al Capone as people often think) and Clark Ashton Smith.

While searching through the archives I discovered these lettering designs although they’re probably not bold enough to read very well on such a busy painting. Before I started using a computer, designs like this had to be drawn at large size then scaled down using a photocopier.

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Jo Daemen’s The Sacred Flame

Johanna Maria Hendrika Daemen (1891–1944), credited here as “Jo”, wrote and illustrated The Sacred Flame: The Fairy-Tale of Stefan Pártos (1927), a tribute to a Hungarian violinist who died young. Daemen was a Dutch illustrator, graphic designer and glass artist who one suspects would be better known if she’d been British or American. The detail and composition of these illustrations is exceptional, falling somewhere between Kay Nielsen’s meticulous detailing and Harry Clarke’s stained-glass designs. This is another volume currently for sale at silver-gryph’s eBay pages where larger views of the drawings may be seen. (Thanks again to Nick for the tip!)

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