obviously luc sante is a fan of william s. burroughs. but this review of a collection of his letters just makes burroughs more obviously grotesque, ridiculous, and idiotic than he was already. really: orgone boxes, e-meters, random cut-and-paste or 'stroboscope' as literary techniques, drugs drugs drugs: surely these and myriad other details bespeak a miserable, insufferable human being and an obvious literary charlatan. there is not a moment in this review that would give you any reason to do anything but ignore burroughs for the rest of time. do. his status as legend etc is just a sign of critical credulousness. like a lot of the clowns and monsters that emerged in the golden age when shooting heroin and then your wife was an irrefutable indication of transcendent genius, burroughs shows what happens when you actually take modernism seriously as a road to artistic liberation. well, i ain't too impressed by ginsberg, kerouac, de kooning, dylan, etc either. thank god that shit is over, but now we've got to kill the nostalgia too.
it's true that 'literary quality' or even craft can be oppressive, that immediacy, spontaneity, and unfinishedness have their place in the aesthetic repertoire. mere conventionality or following the rules doesn't get you anywhere in the artistic realm. ok! it doesn't follow, as all these folks and their fans believe with such deep conviction, that the worse something sucks, the better it is, that one's intelligence corresponds to the amount of ridiculous crap one accepts, that the nastier and grosser a person is the freer, etc. etc. y'all seem kind of confused.
