William S. Burroughs - The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead
Imagine you have no inhibitions. Imagine you are saying a sentence but, in the process of doing so, every random bit of thought that enters your mind also comes past your lips, surreptitiously mingling amongst everything else you are saying. You end up putting a word after word in an endless line without breaks.
Imagine you are recounting some event in your head. Everything happened linearilly; you went somewhere, you met someone, you said something, you did something, you left. But your mind doesn't take heed of the order of things; it rearranges the memory as it wants, adding in the mix random details you noticed, suddenly shifts its concentration onto one certain word said, keeps jumping from one thing to another, making a total turmoil of the actual event.
It's a chaos of words; there's a meaning in it, but you need to dig it out amongst everything else that's going on at the same time to find it. You need to connect random bits of information that are so far away from each other they shouldn't even be related.
What I'm saying is, I found Burroughs writing style exhilarating. I liked the fact that there really wasn't an actual story here or some great big point in the making, just a parade of words assorted in any way they wanted to be, like he had just vomited them on the pages in one endless flow.
There's not really much to be said 'bout the actual book; there's no sensible storyline, no characters that you could cut into pieces and analyse, not a one certain event that would summarise the idea in it. I could say it's a story about the Wild Boys as the title would suggest, but I think that would be misleading. So, I'm not going to describe the book in any way other than saying it's about words and the usage of them, and that there's a general feeling of desolation and hopelesness surrounding the whole of it.
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-- It was impossible for the doctor to like Audrey. "He looks like a homosexual sheep-killing dog" he thought but he did not say this. He looked up from his paper in his dim gloomy drawing room and pontificated "the child is not wholesome."
His wife went further: "It is a walking corpse," she said. Audrey was inclined to agree with her but he didn't know whose corpse he was. And he was painfully aware of being unwholesome. --
-- Standing there under a dusty tree hot white juice spurts out on the golf course. It is a feeling by which I am here at all. --
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