The Adding Machine – DaneCobain.com

William Burroughs – The Adding Machine: Selected Essays | Review

September 12, 2013 danecobain

Title: The Adding Machine

Author: William Burroughs

Type: Non-Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 201

Rating: 5/10

William Burroughs – The Adding Machine

This should make for an interesting review, although it wasn’t a particularly interesting book – it was nowhere near as gripping as Burroughs’ fiction. Written over three decades, these essays cover everything from Burroughs’ thoughts on ‘creative reading‘ and the ‘technology of writing‘, to discussions about the writers who influenced his style, including Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad and Samuel Beckett.

Burroughs doesn’t limit himself to the dead greats, though – he also writes about his relationships with fellow beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. It seems like all of the great beat writers wrote about each other, thus enhancing the careers and awareness of each participant. Many beat readers first read On The Road by Jack Kerouac, and it’s only after that they delve in to the work of Burroughs, Ginsberg, Synder et al.

Two last points to mention before I hit my word limit – first, there’s an interesting discrepancy in the title. UK editions are called ‘Collected Essays‘ and American editions are called ‘Selected Essays’. Secondly, the title itself is a reference to Burroughs’ grandfather’s famous invention – the adding machine.

William Burroughs

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William Burroughs – Cities of the Red Night | Review

May 26, 2013 danecobain

Authors A-E (By Surname)Fiction

Title: Cities of the Red Night

Author: William Burroughs

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 287

Rating: 7/10

William Burroughs – Cities of the Red Night

William Burroughs is insane, and this novel is a weird tale of sex, surrealism and death spanning centuries that’s inspired by his own experimentation with heroin, orgones and spurious religious beliefs. Cities of the Red Night is the first book in his final trilogy of novels (the Red Night trilogy), and it’s followed by The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands.

Loosely speaking, the non-linear plot alternates between a group of pirates seeking the freedom to set up an anarchist community during the 18th century, and a detective who’s searching for a lost boy at the tail-end of the 20th century, at the present time during the writing. Really, though, it’s trippy and difficult to follow – because the story isn’t linear, it almost doesn’t matter what order you read it in.

William Burroughs Quote

Burroughs himself described the project as a ‘tour de force‘, which is true – there’s something about Cities of the Red Night that I can’t put my finger on, a lingering sense of brilliance despite the fact that half of the time I had no idea what was happening.

Interestingly enough, some of the chapters are named after a group of random phrases that Burroughs gathered in an essay called ‘Ten Years and a Billion Dollars‘ in his collection of non-fiction called ‘The Adding Machine‘. It’s always interesting to see how different members of the beat generation write prose and poetry, and Burroughs is no exception – the ideas and techniques behind the novel are actually more interesting than the novel itself, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t read it.