Queer

This was my first Burroughs and reading it felt like fishing in a landfill. You're guaranteed to find something repulsive, profound, evocative, funny, rotting, weird, dull or all of the above, maybe all in the same statement. “Ugly American” doesn't cut it - maybe better to call him the “Repulsive American”. “Ugly” suggests a body that is ostracized or shunned for aesthetic reasons - we find ugliness in a junky or a disabled person (like the hunchback) or a queer (like the old queen Bobo). The author's ugliness runs deeper, a repulsiveness at the core - every possible -ism and pedeophilia to boot. Those assigned ugliness are not allowed to have an internal life, not even here - but the repulsive, that we explore, that we come to understand. Yes, “every country has its Shits”, and through the sheer violence of his imagination I'm thinking Burroughs was one of ours.

Despite it all - or because of it - I can't write it off. I wouldn't say that I “connect” to anything here, as most of it by design offends me to my core. But in all the bizarro self-absorption, the blind hedonism and the endless “routines”, there are moments where Burroughs found something real, in all this junk - a real pain, exquisite and sharp, captured here -
- “In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality. It is as final as the mountains: a fact. There it is. When you realize it, you cannot complain.”
- “He walked on, looking at every face he passed, looking into doorways and up at the windows of cheap hotels. An iron bedstead painted light pink, a shirt out to dry... scraps of life. Lee snapped at them hungrily, like a predatory fish cut off from his prey by a glass wall. He could not stop ramming his nose against the glass in the nightmare search of his dream. And at the end he was standing in a dusty room in the late afternoon sun, with an old shoe in his hand.”

Anyway I went crazy trying to analyze this book and then remembered I'm not in college and nobody's paying me, so at this point I shrug and toss my notes aside. Three stars because I said so.