On the cover Native American males one 'white' guy (whatever the fuck that is) - all looking pretty illuminated from my seat. It reminds me of an excerpt from "Naked Scientology", one of the Burroughs bks I haven't listed here b/c I'm not sure I've read it entirely. In this excerpt, Burroughs defends things he's written about the Church of Scientology from a Church representative whose 'facts' against Burroughs are quoted:

7) Item: Wog
'Fact': A term not used by the Church. After all, all Scientologists were once non-Scientologists. I could see it being used to describe a person like Mr. Burroughs whose unwillingness to be honest has led him to spy on a Church.

FACT: I have heard Mr. Hubbard use the term Wog on tapes lectures. I have heard him define the term as a 'Worthy Oriental Gentleman'. I have seen bulletins that speak of the Wog World and Wog Law. As is well known, the term Wog has come to mean Non White. Mr. Sorrell could see it being used to describe a person like Mr. Burroughs? Thank you for that, Mr. Sorrell. I shoould be glad to change a color that has disgraced itself from the Conquistradores to Hiroshima.

Right on.. But did Burroughs ever get over his misogyny? ( )

Now that was a good damn book. Burroughs was a genius, and he was disciplined. He worked at his thing, and got better at it as he got older. His medium, the unconscious Naked Lunch surrealism thing, remains as it was in the Johnson Family, or rather Place of Dead Roads, but with age Burroughs is able to use that riff for ever-expanding purposes. He does a solid job with psychology, the unconscious, western US history, time-travel, evolution, and gun collecting, all while putting in what must be autobiographical elements, as he tells them with such real tenderness. A tour de force of tone and humor.
I'd say this and Cities of the Red Night are the best he ever did, which is remarkable for a writer of his age, considering Kurt Vonnegut's rather true assertion that American male writers tend not to do a fuck after the age of 55. Place of Dead Roads is also by far the funniest thing Burroughs ever wrote, drop-the-book, laugh-out-loud funny. Read it soon! ( )

I didn't understand this book. I didn't really see the point of it. I couldn't really follow it. To be honest, I bought it because I liked the cover. It's a very cool cover.

Admit it.

William Burroughs's novel, The Place of Dead Roads, begins as a satire of the classic American western gunslinger. The hero is a young man with a gun. He comes into town and very quickly forms a gang made up of other young men who all want to sleep with him.

Well, not sleep.

In fact, nearly all of the men our hero meets want to sleep with him. Most of them do.

For all of the sex our hero has in the first half of The Place of Dead Roads there's not much writing about sex in the book. Mr. Burroughs just states that so-and-so slept with the hero and moves on with his story. He saves his more flowery prose for descriptions of guns. There are lots of guns in The Place of Dead Roads. Guns described in ways I expect sex is described in 50 Shades of Gray. I've not read 50 Shades of Gray so I'm guessing here, but I imagine that the sex in 50 Shades of Gray is described in ways that are meant to be erotic but not in ways that go so far as to offend too many people. Real, but not that real. That's about how Mr. Burroughs describes the guns in The Place of Dead Roads.

That's probably part of the satire, that the guns are described like sex while the sex is not described at all.

About half way through The Place of Dead Roads the hero goes into the future and travels into space.

That's where Mr. Burroughs really lost me, but I think the rest of the book takes place on Venus.

There's not nearly as much sex in the second half of the book, which was kind of a let down, oddly. There aren't as many guns either.

I remember reading somewhere that Mr. Burroughs once took a manuscript, cut it into pieces and then rearranged those pieces more-or-less randomly to produce a new manuscript which he then published. By the end of The Place of Dead Roads I was beginning to wonder if something similar was going on. Mr. Burrough's writing is excellent. Judging his work on a sentence by sentence basis, even a page by page basis, I have to say that he is a wonderful writer. However, looking at the novel as a whole, I have to say that by the end of The Place of Dead Roads I remembered why I stopped reading William Burroughs two decades ago. ( )