mr_demille

Found a copy a used book by William S. Burroughs Junior. He's the son of THE William S. Burroughs. Apparently, when Jr. was four years old he was at the party where his father accidentally shot his mother in the head (rumor has it they were doing a "William Tell" routine that went horribly wrong).

Anyway, Burroughs Jr. followed his father's footsteps into the world of drugs and narrative. His writing is straight ahead autobiographical, like dear old dad's "Junky" and "Queer", nothing like "Naked Lunch".

The book I'm reading "Speed" (as in the drug, not the movie), is published back to back with his second novel "Kentucky Ham". I haven't gotten very far into it yet, but already I was quite taken with the following passage"

"I sat on a rotten picnic table watching the oil on the surface and listened to the flagpoles clank in the wind. A little sailboat named Mercy Two was thudding weakly against a dock nearby, and I began to be afraid that if I didn't move soon, I'd have to stay there forever. So I got up and walked back to the street with the wind shuddering in my ears to come back.

I'd felt the same way before, but I've never been able to find the reason. Some kind of surrealist desolation and I kept wanting to look over my left shoulder."

Sweet.