He violates every Taboo, and I should too, and while I'm not opposed to pornography (literary, otherwise) he does push my buttons a bit. First of all, the flavour, not mine exactly. And second of all, while I appreciate his transgressive approach I prefer Henry Miller - wherein he only goes so far, enough to generate social outrage, but then drops it and moves it on in other directions. Burroughs, well, he's obsessed.
But this - as Burroughs himself observes - is the point - to so habituate us to what is taboo, forbidden, that it becomes the new normal. And maybe he was warning us, only - well, look at the world, we all missed the point.
It took me a while to get his humour, interspersed as it was with his gruelling pornography and philosophy, Jokes like “Bumsell”, the French Aristocrat, a hundred others, his time-jumping, the references to “Bring out your dead” - Python, or Carlos Castaneda, juxtaposing Beau Brummel and Somerset Maugham, referencing “Psychic discoveries behind the Iron Curtain”, following a narrative that jumps freely and without warning between countries and and characters and times and points of view can be a bit difficult. He's formidably well read, informed by and given the initial chapter that somehow put me in a different time and setting, Kim Carsons in the Wild West, I’m stuck, confused, but that was his intention, by design, high comedy when you can bypass the violent imagery, and I forget that for a time we were contemporaries, he died in 1997, damn, I could have probably found him in Tangiers when I visited and paid my respects, although, being younger and considerably more handsome probably would have had my admiration misconstrued, his obsession with Centipedes, young admirers, heroin...
I'm reading him in the library, coming to the lurid bits, feels a bit like surfing pornography on a screen where everyone can see, so it has to wait until I’m home, I want no protesting that “it’s not to my taste”, yet despite all this he's a genius that reminds me of Thomas Pynchon, he's inspiring me, referencing countless rabbits that I waste far too much time pursuing...
His ideas, brilliant, he's - despite being a junkie - considerably more alert, attuned, than I am (Heroin VS Alcohol, Heroin +10).
And I have to remember that all this knowledge was hard-won through book learning, watching films, television, no internet then, and I can appreciate how few references I’m probably getting, how my appreciation only sees but a portion of the whole man, and I'm in awe.
So, a long read, although when I got a few pages in it flew quicker, and while I'm reading the books painfully out of order I'll come again to them, in order next time, and try and make sense of his philosophy, admirable and demanding a bit more of my attention than I have to spare...