5/20/2023 0 Comments Gentle reader program![]() The world divides, furthermore, with Manichaean strictness, between the good guys and the bad. The bolder one is, the more imaginative and defiant, the greater one's chances are of immortality. But, unlike Bowles, who, with a terrifying vividness, depicts men as feeble creatures led by blind destiny to pointless deaths, Burroughs takes the God-is-dead premise as a challenge: Man must invent his life. Says a character in one of Kim's stories, "In fact Christianity is the most virulent spiritual poison ever administered to a disaster-prone plant." Burroughs, like the novelist Paul Bowles (a friend of Burroughs from Tangier days), takes the premise of God's demise with deadly earnestness. Gods, such as the ones in Greek mythology, might exist as helpers of heroic men, but there is no monotheistic, father-in-the-sky God who rewards the meek and the weak with eternal life. To the extent that the ideas elicit sympathy or even interest, the book will, or will not, engage.įirst of all, no surprise, this is a world without God. ![]() What really matters in this thinly veiled autobiographia literaria are the ideas, the opinions, the prejudices. Louis, largely self- taught (teachers hate him), openly homosexual, fascinated by disease, violence, and extreme, often drug-induced, states of mind, the Kim who gradually takes shape in this novel is, we soon realize, very much a fictional version of Burroughs himself. The National Rifle Association could probably use a guy like Kim if he weren't so, well, strange, in so many other ways.Īnd proud of his strangeness: "To be sure," the narrator informs us, "Kim was rotten clear through and he looked like a sheep-killing dog and smelled like a polecat, but he was also the most ingenious, curious, resourceful, inventive little snot that ever rose from the pages of Boy's Life, thinking up ways of doing things better than other folks." Born in St. He's a writer, for one thing goes by the pen name of Kim Carsons is the author of a novel called Quien Es? (from Billy the Kid's last words before being shot dead) leads a very peculiar gang is a notorious gunslinger loves guns, in fact, and thinks everyone should have one. The other is William Steward Hall, described in the newspaper story as a real-estate speculator. One, we learn, is a hired gun, a cunning, yellow, mean-spirited fellow by the name of Mike Chase. Who are the two guys in the gunfight, and why do they want to kill each other? That is the question of this novel. Where you end up on the space-time continuum, and how you end up there, is not really important. In Burroughs country, time hops, skips, and backflips. ![]() The year is 1899, but one should not be too concerned about chronology. ![]() ![]() Title and cover should serve as fair warning to the gentle reader that what follows is likely to be one of the wildest rides into the Wild West, and other parts known and unknown, he will ever have.Īnd yet all begins normally enough with a newspaper account of an old-fashioned shoot-out in a Boulder, Colorado graveyard. Equally disturbing is the bookjacket, which features 12 skimpily-clad Indians and two dandyishly-attired desperadoes, all of them peering out at you with the eeriest luminescent eyes, the eyes of huskies. The title, for one thing, is spooky, a bit like one of those well-intentioned but deeply unsettling road signs you sometimes come across (usually after 12 hours of caffeine-boosted driving)- "Beware of Rockslides," for instance, or "Bridge Ices before Road." You proceed at what seems your imminent peril. Not even deserving the status of initiate (I have read to the end only one novel, Naked Lunch, and sundry fragments from the 18-book corpus), I came to this book with some trepidation. As America's High Priest of Weird, he has, for decades now, been providing his following with psychic nourishment-jolts, one might say, of kinky wisdom-as well as advice on how to live in the 21st century, a time that Burroughs has already visited and may indeed inhabit. I am not sure how many Burroughs fans there are out there in the land, but I have met a few and know that their regard for the man borders on devotion. By JAY TOLSON JAY TOLSON is an associate editor of The Wilson Quarterly. ![]()
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