Chemical Gardens In Rusty Shit People

It's all go this time of year ... no sooner has one (just about) recovered from the Joycean Saturnalia and, what do you know, it's time to strap it on and celebrate the birthday of William S. Burroughs.

... Wild Bill Burroughs ... what did Ballard call him , the hit man of the apocalypse? Amid the sex and violence, amid the hard-core cut-ups and fold-ins, amid the hipster and narcotic vernacular, there is a wonderfully nostalgic, elegiac strain in Burroughs (for all that you have to wade through pages of green lizard boys from Venus getting fucked while being hanged to savour it) ... the more interesting for being found in the work of a man who, to the casual observer, may be deemed to have left his human side behind. Few seem to realise how moving his writing can be.
Renegade from a background of money and privilege, self-described queer and junky, noted wife-killer, eminence grise to the counter culture for some five decades, life-long adversary of the Ugly Spirit ... the public mask existed quite apart from the serious and dedicated writer ... the greatest master of the Word since Joyce, the man who made literature come alive again.