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193 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1971
Souvenir post cards a violet evening sky rising from the boy's groin ... sad 1920 scraps ... dim jerky faraway stars splash the stagnant creek ... "I was waiting there" ... held a little-boy photo in his withered hand ... The boy was footsteps down the windy street a long time ago.
Our aim is total chaos.The sentences are stringed like thoughts, sometimes coherent other times disjointed; shuffling words around producing different meanings. Poetic experimentalism giving a dream quality to pain and intimacy. Curiously, when the prose doesn't make sense as whole, patterns emerge. It's a detective work of sorts to collect the reference points, a) there's always a boy, an american boy, alienated, full of desires, impulses, sickness; b) wild creativity, pulp magazines and science fiction concepts; c) death; d) framed by the dichotomy between two worlds, one young, lustful, free, the other one militarized, wasteful, hypocritical.
We intend to destroy all dogmatic verbal systems.
We don’t want to hear any more family talk, mother talk, father talk, cop talk, priest talk, country talk or party talk. To put it country simple we have heard enough bullshit.
There are Bowery suits that appear to be stained with urine and vomit which on closer inspection turn out to be intricate embroideries of fine gold thread.The book is mostly creative, (the sex scenes can still get very repetitive), in its depictions of violent acts and orgies. At first it can be difficult to see the tears under the dirt, but it's there, a silent frustration, fruit of forbidden desire. Death in that context is a passing, not an end. This is, after all, a Book of the dead as in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Burroughs is explicit in his intentions to extract and distillate some form of spirituality from all this blood and cum. A Queer book of the dead. Idealizing life to achieve a meaningful release.
Rather like fairyland isn’t it except for the smell of gasoline and burning flesh.Even with its manic feel and furious language, it's not hard to sympathize with these wild boys, it's not hard at all, which is frightening and intoxicating, as if Burroughs was daring the reader to dream a chaos of their own making. We've all been wild boys at some point, even if only in dreams, even if only in fiction