 | It’s painful and terrible that youth is over, and with it that whole game of looking and longing and vying for attention, hoping for something, for some absolute transformation of everything. But it’s also a reprieve to be let off that hook and know that you’re simply in your own hands at last. |  T. Hadley |
MY BOOK WORLD
Burroughs, William S. Queer. New York: Viking, 1985.
I first read this book before I started keeping records of my reading history, and that 1985 reading reflects not a single annotation—assuming I perused it entirely for pleasure. Not long ago, my partner and I watched the recent film of Queer starring Daniel Craig, and my interest in Burroughs’s novel was rekindled.
Bars and hotels play a great role in this short novel. The primary bar related to Mexico City where forty-something American, William Lee, is now living is the Ship Ahoy (the real name of the bar upon which it is based)—which seems particularly significant. Lee uses the bar as one might use a vessel, to search out sexual partners. In that sense he is a predator, particularly when he first sights Gene Allerton, a young American: “His mouth was a little open, showing his teeth in the half-snarl of a baffled animal. He licked his lips” (25).
Burroughs painstakingly portrays the exhaustion caused by Lee’s desires for Allerton: “In the dark theater Lee could feel his body pull towards Allerton, an amoeboid protoplasmic projection, straining with a blind worm hunger to enter the other’s body, to breathe with his lungs, see with his eyes, learn the feel of his viscera and genitals . . . Lee felt a sharp twinge, a strain or dislocating of the spirit. His eyes ached. He took off his glasses and ran his hand over his closed eyes” (36). All Lee and his bar friends seem to do, with the singlemindedness of the amoeba, is drink, eat, and fuck.
Burroughs’s economic use of words is admirable: “He must have slept. Mary and Allerton were gone. Tom Weston brought him some hot coffee. He drank the coffee, got up and staggered out of the apartment. Exhausted, he slept till the following morning” (62). The ellipsis between leaving his friend’s apartment and landing in his own bed is understood. Burroughs does this all throughout, and it is a good lesson for writers of fiction. You need to show (rather than tell) the important things, yes, but not necessarily that which is easily understood or taken for granted.
Lee convinces Allerton to take a trip deeper into South America in search of Yage (Ayahuasca), a psychoactive drug used by certain tribes in the region. The recent film departs severely from the book in that it makes this search a more exciting climax than in the book, where it seems to be just one more of Lee’s (and Allerton’s) endless scavenging for that great drug high.
Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | James Ellroy
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Rosa Luxemburg
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Elizabeth Barrett Browning
FRI: My Book World | Eric Haseltine, The Spy in Moscow Station: A Counterspy's Hunt for a Deadly Cold War Threat
I first read this book before I started keeping records of my reading history, and that 1985 reading reflects not a single annotation—assuming I perused it entirely for pleasure. Not long ago, my partner and I watched the recent film of Queer starring Daniel Craig, and my interest in Burroughs’s novel was rekindled.
Bars and hotels play a great role in this short novel. The primary bar related to Mexico City where forty-something American, William Lee, is now living is the Ship Ahoy (the real name of the bar upon which it is based)—which seems particularly significant. Lee uses the bar as one might use a vessel, to search out sexual partners. In that sense he is a predator, particularly when he first sights Gene Allerton, a young American: “His mouth was a little open, showing his teeth in the half-snarl of a baffled animal. He licked his lips” (25).
Burroughs painstakingly portrays the exhaustion caused by Lee’s desires for Allerton: “In the dark theater Lee could feel his body pull towards Allerton, an amoeboid protoplasmic projection, straining with a blind worm hunger to enter the other’s body, to breathe with his lungs, see with his eyes, learn the feel of his viscera and genitals . . . Lee felt a sharp twinge, a strain or dislocating of the spirit. His eyes ached. He took off his glasses and ran his hand over his closed eyes” (36). All Lee and his bar friends seem to do, with the singlemindedness of the amoeba, is drink, eat, and fuck.
Burroughs’s economic use of words is admirable: “He must have slept. Mary and Allerton were gone. Tom Weston brought him some hot coffee. He drank the coffee, got up and staggered out of the apartment. Exhausted, he slept till the following morning” (62). The ellipsis between leaving his friend’s apartment and landing in his own bed is understood. Burroughs does this all throughout, and it is a good lesson for writers of fiction. You need to show (rather than tell) the important things, yes, but not necessarily that which is easily understood or taken for granted.
Lee convinces Allerton to take a trip deeper into South America in search of Yage (Ayahuasca), a psychoactive drug used by certain tribes in the region. The recent film departs severely from the book in that it makes this search a more exciting climax than in the book, where it seems to be just one more of Lee’s (and Allerton’s) endless scavenging for that great drug high.
Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | James Ellroy
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Rosa Luxemburg
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Elizabeth Barrett Browning
FRI: My Book World | Eric Haseltine, The Spy in Moscow Station: A Counterspy's Hunt for a Deadly Cold War Threat
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