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Oginga Odinga
Jan. 19th, 2007 09:27 pmToday I managed to finish reading Nova Express. It was probably the least favourite of the three William S. Burroughs books I've read to date.
The other Burroughs I've read--Exterminator! and The Place of Dead Roads are later books, and he relies less on the "cut-up" technique. In other words, there is more prose and less quasi-random arrangements of words. The latter, not being prose, must fall under the category of "poetry", being words arranged in a given way to provide a certain effect. That effect may be as random as a Pollock(?) splatter-painting, but the artist surely has an intent.
So it boils down to my problem with poetry. I don't get poetry, on most levels. When I'm reading, my brain is working more linearly than laterally. When I hit a block of poetry in a book, I tend to skip over it. This may be a shortcoming in me, but I'm comfortable with it now, and I just tend not to even try poetry.
Oddly enough, I don't have nearly as much of a problem listening to poetry. The parts of reading Nova Express that I enjoyed the most were those that I recognized from having heard them on one of the Burroughs recordings I have. Those, I tend to enjoy listening to, and there the cut-up technique doesn't work that badly. I can enjoy the arrangements of words, and appreciate the segments that turn up more than once. But when I read one of those paragraphs of fragments separated by dashes--I think that most of the periods in the book come in the oft-repeated phrase "Mr. Bradly Mr. Martin"--my eyes start to skid over them and my mind wanders.
Maybe I'll try some of his later stuff sometime. Maybe someday I'll try watching the movie based on "The Naked Lunch". If I could get recordings of Burroughs reading all of his books, I'd probably prefer that, but I suspect that that doesn't necessarily exist. (Could anyone else pull it off? Not sure.)
Needing a change of pace, I've picked up Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz as my next one. My wife loves this one, and it does seem like a more light-hearted sort of dark thriller for Mr. Koontz. Should be good.
The other Burroughs I've read--Exterminator! and The Place of Dead Roads are later books, and he relies less on the "cut-up" technique. In other words, there is more prose and less quasi-random arrangements of words. The latter, not being prose, must fall under the category of "poetry", being words arranged in a given way to provide a certain effect. That effect may be as random as a Pollock(?) splatter-painting, but the artist surely has an intent.
So it boils down to my problem with poetry. I don't get poetry, on most levels. When I'm reading, my brain is working more linearly than laterally. When I hit a block of poetry in a book, I tend to skip over it. This may be a shortcoming in me, but I'm comfortable with it now, and I just tend not to even try poetry.
Oddly enough, I don't have nearly as much of a problem listening to poetry. The parts of reading Nova Express that I enjoyed the most were those that I recognized from having heard them on one of the Burroughs recordings I have. Those, I tend to enjoy listening to, and there the cut-up technique doesn't work that badly. I can enjoy the arrangements of words, and appreciate the segments that turn up more than once. But when I read one of those paragraphs of fragments separated by dashes--I think that most of the periods in the book come in the oft-repeated phrase "Mr. Bradly Mr. Martin"--my eyes start to skid over them and my mind wanders.
Maybe I'll try some of his later stuff sometime. Maybe someday I'll try watching the movie based on "The Naked Lunch". If I could get recordings of Burroughs reading all of his books, I'd probably prefer that, but I suspect that that doesn't necessarily exist. (Could anyone else pull it off? Not sure.)
Needing a change of pace, I've picked up Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz as my next one. My wife loves this one, and it does seem like a more light-hearted sort of dark thriller for Mr. Koontz. Should be good.
