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Rating:  -
This was a very welcome addition to my library. I wouldn't say that it provides a capstone to his works, it's not that kind of greatness, but it did leave me feeling closer to the man...and that's really what I was seeking. Seeing inside the process, as well as getting a feel for the pulse of his last days were both accomplished very well by the book. I'll read it again, and again, whenever one of his novels awes me and I need to revisit the human who created such superhuman texts.
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NECRO-SHINE: But didn't all of Burroughs' writings have an importunate, deathfully urgent necro-shine to them? Is his tone and rhetorical stance in these final journals so very different from the death trip picture show of his inescapable narrative fictions? It seems that Burroughs was always close enough to death to be in a position to constantly re-rehearse his "last words," as it were, his strange and haunting figures seemed always at the end of their orphistic tether, the sad music of humanity reflected in the placid eyes of a soon-to-be-extinct flying lemur.(!) Sadly, however, the fey tenderness of "Love? What is It? Most natural painkiller what there is. LOVE." (Burroughs' last written words) doesn't quite contend with the interrogatory abyss of William H. Bonney's "Quien es?", or the chilling senility of Winston Churchill's vision of the rains. Nope, like it or not, Burroughs' last words (as anthologized herein) are closer to that of bullet-riddled gangster Dutch Schultz, haunting and obscure, remiss in their snarled paroxysms.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY: Excursions to the pistol-range, weekly trips to the methadone clinic (where Burroughs gets all chatty with the nurses), felinophilic feeding and urination rituals, painting and scribbling, dinner engagements with the good ol' folk of Lawrence KS, uninvited pilgrimages from college students and other academic stalkers, his appearance in the U2 video "Last Night on Earth" pushing a shopping-cart fitted with a huge rotating klieg light, a meeting with Steve Buschemi to discuss a combined film-version of *Junky* and *Queer*, and, much like Yeats in his final years, tramping around the house wielding an assortment of black-jacks, sword-canes, blowguns, throwing knives, and pepper-spray canisters, making long-range symbolic attacks against DEAs the world over.... "Old age is winter," Burroughs wrote in *My Education*, and boy do we feel the arthritic chill, as his friends start dying all around him, some of them bizarre and unexpected suicides (with the exception of Ginsberg, these deaths pale in comparison to that of his cat Fletch, who died three weeks before his human). The guilt of being a survivor is one of the more moving themes touched upon herein, even as most of the entries play out the old Audrey Carsons persecution-complex, diatribes of fear and resentment against the trollish WASP aristocracy that reviled him as an adolescent, the American police apparatus, and, most recently, some Puritan nut-job leaving hateful messages on his answering machine, "The fact that you exist is an insult to me"(146). Jesus, some people....
DREAM JOURNAL: As a supplement to *My Education: A Book of Dreams*(1995), let us all release a sigh of quiet disappointment. There are roughly three dozen dream fragments scattered here and there, but rarely followed up to any engaging degree of inquiry, except as prelude to another tiresome routine, recycled motifs trawled from the muddy waters of previous works. The terminal Burroughsian epithets ("He looks like a sheep killing dog." "No glot. Clom Fliday." "Nothing is true. Everything is permitted." "Towers open fire!") resound gratingly with the obsessive-compulsive pop and crackle of a broken gramophone, as if Burroughs must constantly construct effigies of himself as a stay against the darkness. Like Kafka and Borges, the strength of Burroughs' vision lay in his proximity to the REM state, to the lush, groggy dream-state of a distilled image-hunger. But apparently old age had dulled his ability to make use of these paradigms, hobbling his once-great power to transmit the REM wavelength to a sympathetic readership....
FLOTSAM AND JETSAM: Burroughs' devotion to the world of magic and ESP, his elegiac love for the primeval animal kingdom and environmental horror at the predicament of endangered life-forms, his harrowing disgust of the centipede and its human counterparts, it's all very moving at times (one high point occurs in the entry for June 13, 1997, subtitled "Applicants for God's position", where he provides a stunning criterion of precisely what is *required* of those who wish to become writers), although this late in his life, when Burroughs rolls the bones, it is usually a crapshoot, with enough snake-eyes to fill a reptile house at the carnival.... For the Burroughs completist, certainly, there is enough important material to make *Last Words* as essential a purchase as *Word Virus*. Following J.G. Ballard's recent remark, we can be inspired that Burroughs continued to be creative up until the brink of senility and death, but the literary value of these fragments is still few and far between. Burroughs wrote some incredible material in his later years (*The Western Lands*, *Ghost of Chance*), and was apparently working on a novel about the Mary Celeste, a pirate ship whose crew mysteriously disappeared in the salty days of yore, painting scenes from the novel in tandem with its composition. Now I for one would have preferred that *those* fragments were edited and published, rather than have to choke on the dregs of this great writer's excruciating enervation and depletion, as registered by these entries. The sucking ebb of entropy pulls at the reader like the black riptide of gerontological death-in-life, the ghost of William Burroughs prematurely haunting this grand old man of letters.
Rating: -
This book offers a nice tribute to William S. Burroughs, who was one of the most important figures of twentieth century literature. His most famous book is probably Naked Lunch which is a satire written in a series of routines. But whether you begin with Junkie, Naked Lunch or any of the others he was a man who spoke the TRUTH with a compassion and insight achieved by few others as to the state of the modern age. His words are designed to infiltrate the mind, fight the virus with itself, searching out and consuming attitudes of control impregnated by the biologic and social programming of our lives.
Rating:  -
It is hard to evaluate journal entries, because they are not coherent, and they were originally intended for an audience of one, rather than a large circulation readership. I think "Last Words" is a very interesting look into the mind of one of the most controversial writers of the 20th Century. Burroughs recalls various moments from his life, his favorite pieces of literature, the grocery store novels he was reading, the love of his cats, his hatred of "the war on drugs" and secular humanists, and his reaction to the death of Allen Ginsberg. Owing to the fact that he was 82 years old when he wrote these entries, sometimes they are very disjointed and repetitive, which does not come as much of a shock, considering that many of his greatest novels were disjointed and repetitive. I think the last words in his journal are very optimistic and semi-profound. This book is definitely recommended to Burroughs' fans, and to fans of the Beat genre.
Rating: -
A wonderful text. Much of Burroughs carries a sadness, but nothing like this. These are the words of a little old man. His friends are dying, his cats are dying, and he knows his own end is imminent. Even his rants against the drug war and other stupidities seem tired, like he was simply rousing his energies toward old enemies to delay his own demise.
Saddest of all was knowing how it would end.
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