Mary is strapping on a rubber penis: "Steely Dan III from Yokohama," she says, caressing the shaft. Milk spurts across the room.
"Be sure that milk is pasteurized. Don't go giving me some kinda awful cow disease like anthrax or glanders or aftosa..."
"When I was a transvestite Liz in Chi used to work as an exterminator. Make advances to pretty boys for the thrill of being beaten as a man. Later I catch this one kid, overpower him with some supersonic judo I learned from an old Lesbian Zen monk. I tie him up, strip off his clothes with a razor and fuck him with Steely Dan I. He is so relieved I don't castrate him that he come all over my bedbug spray."
"What happen to Steely Dan I?"
"He was torn in two by a bull dyke. Most terrific vaginal grip I ever experienced. She could cave in a lead pipe. It was one of her parlor tricks."
"And Steely Dan II?"
"Chewed to bits by a famished candiru in the Upper Baboonasshole. And don't say 'Wheeeeeee!' this time."
"Why not? It's real boyish."
From Naked Lunch
© 1959, William S. Burroughs
The following required by law:
The fact of the matter is that there's really nothing more to say about this, but apparently, I must expound at great length upon it to satisfy the demands of that fickle maiden 'fair use'. The portion of this writeup below the horizontal line is my obligatory endeavor to do so.
My task is complicated by the fact that this is the Steely Dan node, not the William S. Burroughs node. I have loads of stuff to say about Burroughs, but the only thing I really have to say about Steely Dan here is that this is the snippet of literature from which they got their name. You already knew that. It's rather likely that you knew it coming in to this node, but even if you didn't, it's pretty obvious from the excerpt.
"Why even have this writeup then?", you ask. A fair question. So fair that I don't really relish having to answer it. The writeup as it existed before this exegesis was just a footnote - piece of useful documentation, but polished to a fine glint by the ultrafine grit of Burroughs' prose. In that form, it needed no excuse. In this form, I still need one hundred seventy-five more words to bring it into compliance. Make that 162.
This is not to be taken as a criticism of E2 or its copyright policy. The policy is fair, logical, and probably quite necessary. The strange unintended consequence to be found in this writeup is an outflow of current miserable state of Copyright Law and the litigeousness that accompanies it.
If this were a William Burroughs writeup, I could probably make some ironic point about that, but alas, it is a Steely Dan writeup, and there's really nothing more to say, as I have said before. And, I would point out, as I shall say again and again, until I have fulfilled my obligation under the law to make the use of Burroughs' copyrighted work 'fair'.
If you have read this far in expectation of some payoff at the end, I'm afraid I'll have to disappoint you. I really don't have anything more to say on this subject. Only fourteen words left, though, so the agony is nearly over. One more: Sorry.