william burroughs – the wild boys

By tdf, October 29, 2011

William Burroughs is one of my educators, one of my major inspirations as a haphazard wordsmith. Without any doubt, his mind was exceptional, mainly in terms of the journeys it could make and bring back to Reality, and thankfully, into written word record. With Hunter S Thompson, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Charles Bukowski, he is a King to me, when it comes to the Way of the Written Word…Naked Lunch, Junky, The PLace of Dead Roads, The Western Lands…all rank as some of the finest, most inspiring literature I have ever had the pleasure and good fortune to come across…As for The WIld Boys…despite the promotional spiel on the rear cover, with such praise as ‘more lucid than Naked Lunch. An ethereally beautiful book'(rolling stone)…and ‘the wild boys is certainly Burroughs’ most accesible book since Naked Lunch! It’s also his boldest experiment and, perhaps, finest achievement, the work of a brilliant mind that has mellowed but remained very much in tune with the crackle of the universe’ (los angeles time)…those words smack of total duplicity. For as a man who has read all of his work, this book seems, at best, littered with truly wonderful passages, but swamped by homosexual erotica of a definitely foul flavour, and much closer, in huge dollops, to his cut-up lunacy, than his gorgeous, often electrifying prose…

The book can be as stunning as…
their eyes light up inside like a cat’s and their hair stands on end. And they charge down the slope with incredible speed leaping from side to side. We open up with everything we have and they still keep coming. They aren’t human at all more like vicious little ghosts. They carry eighteen-inch bowie knives with knuckle-duster handles pouring into the river bed above and below us leaping down swinging their knives in the air. When one is killed a body is dragged aside and another takes his place. The regiment formed a square and it lasted about thirty seconds.

and as pointlessly awful as this…
I lay down with my legs up to Xolotl. He slides the fish inside me and everything was blue swimming away into the sky and I did it to him sometimes he is Xolotl grabbed from behind head back whining in his throat could hear myself whimpering face in his out into the night stars glow there with soft blue fire when I squirted my river of running water and vines.

Valdez Rating…5/10