To Write Like Ballard

More of an influence than Burroughs on me to be honest, although I have nothing in common with either of them, having neither shot my wife in the head nor been brough up in a Japanese Internment Camp. Formative years, a negative blank of non distinguishment, life the same as most others, fishing village to small town, nothing shot up, brains not blown out.

No Nova Mob graced my upbringing.

I like natural diasters, winds gutting the earth to the mantle, rains and humidity drowning the earth and leaving everyone counting back along their cervical vertebrae to a primieval jurassic park, primitive nervous system like the crocodile's bleeding up into a future where sophistication hinders not helps.

It appeals, as does sitting under endless rain under a tarpaulin with only rum and tea for company, grey clouds lowering to face level, and if the idea of fucking a cailipered cripple appeals not, I wish I could have thought of it as he did. Fuckholes lined in jagged metal; he saw it, I didn't. I can't.

Again I dream of having that power in my pen or the tips of my fingers; a dream, but a good dream, no? We'll see how it turns out, hammer the keyboard till you bleed, and let the words come

To Write Like Burroughs

I was drinking alone when the tipsy impudent couple across from me asked me what I was reading.

"The Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs" I said. "He was a repressed homosexual junkie who shot his wife dead by accident"

I thought the best way of explaining the work was like was to leave her to read the Hassan's Rumpus Room Chapter while I went for a cigarette. "You will never speak to me again now".

I smoked my cigarette and wondered how all the alien human anal sex while hanging, rubber dildoes up asses stuff would go down, jism spurting from the page into her bespectacled eyes, as I looked at another girl who was never going to talk to me.

She wasn't shocked, she thought it was all a bit forced. I diasagreed, I thought it was natural as hell, Ballard's Crash, now that is what I call forced and overwritten. I envy the flow of Burroughs words, little though my life will ever be like his.

I wish I could convey that kind of utter liquid, gooey force so effortlessly.