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Editorial Notes

I feel it necessary to provide just a little background material here, much as I prefer NOT to dwell on the work of corpses best left to moulder unloved and remembered in a negative light.

William Seward Burroughs (1914-1997) was a writer with one or two interesting ideas and lots of boring, hateful, misogynist ones to over-balance them. He wrote a couple of reasonably tolerable novels, "Junky" and "Queer", before the fateful night in which he shot and killed his then-wife Joan Volmer (1924-1951) in a state of conveniently drug-induced psychosis (funny how he never seemed appropriately sorry afterwards, for which I might have granted him one or two tiny points of grace, except in that sickening way of suggesting that her death was necessary to activate his muse - you know, the old poets of the Elizabethan era at least didn't have to KILL their lady loves to get ideas (and it is significant to note that the few female writers whose work survives from that dubiously romantic period of worshipping an icon and neglecting the real woman pretty much think it's silly tommyrot...)). He then wrote a lot of really bad stuff, including at least 90% of the famous NAKED LUNCH.

One of his techniques was apparently taking texts and subjecting them to cutting up and pasting (sort of like 'zines, except, in his case, with nothing interesting or affirming to say...in fact, his poor, sad manager/executor, James Grauerholz, has been known to claim that Burroughs was behind the 'zine scene...though I guess he wouldn't admit to inspiring the anti-Burroughs multi-part masterpiece Double Bill, would he?) to creat new works.

In that regard, I have decided to go through "Last Words - The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs", edited by James, who was attempting to prove that Billy was not just a gun-sucking, woman-hating paedophile, but was, instead, a kind loving person who adored cats. I will apply Mr. Burroughs' techniques in order to demonstrate that, though he may have been kind and loving to some people, and one certainly does not want to discourage decent treatment of animals, he was still a rather unpleasant fellow at his core (in fact, I suspect his mother simply could not spell 'Sewered' for a middle name).

All quotes have had unnatural acts committed upon them, though a few are actually word-for-word, if not necessarily placed in the text next to the words they are found with HERE. :)

I'm that terrible old man - an evil old bastard.

I blame myself for Joan? I never will! Killing makes me feel safer.

(Snarling gun man - well, that's more or less it - it was all he had).

'You have guilty feelings about what you do?' Swear to God, I done it then and I'll do it again.

They noted he got a terrible gloating feeling when he killed someone.

'You are old, father William.' (okay, so that's Burroughs quoting Lewis Carroll - one good paedophile recognizes another...)

(He suddenly saw his wretched life).

'God?'

Wrong Address! DENIAL OF THE SOUL!