Description
It’s a searing indictment of contemporary publishing that the first full-length survey of WSB’s influential intrusions into the fields of film and music must come from the pen of the world’s most obscure and frustrating experimental novelist. Boasting more than 323 items, this uh idiosyncratic survey is as comprehensive and insightful as it is undisciplined and incoherent, all of which qualities Strong appears to regard as cardinal virtues. If his self-designated mission is to somehow undermine the canon, his inspiration appears to be drawn from the charge of the Light Brigade. Nevertheless, even the most ardent Burroughs scholar will find something new here, even if it’s just been made up for funty laff value. Nice try pal.
Jack Sargeant (Naked Lens, Deathtripping etc.) –
There are many Burroughs – countercultural icon, groundbreaking author, artist, theoretician of control and prophet of dark futures and escape possibilities. Simon Strong traces Burroughs through multiple cultural artefacts, drawing links simultaneously actual and imagined between these ebbs and flows, unearthing numerous possibilities and potentialities. This is a book that eschews academia and dry analysis, its roots deep in the counterculture publishing of the sixties and seventies, joyously anarchic and deeply inspirational.