The Wild Boys (William S. Burroughs)

Might I dare to admit that the sex in this book borders on being gratuitous and even pornographic? But I guess that's one of the main arguments that Burroughs enemies have always clung to. Somehow I used to feel that the sex in his books was all very cold and clinical, even surreal sometimes, and in this book it felt a little bit too indulgent. Anyway, that's hardly a worthwhile criticism. I thought sections of this book were startlingly well written. I feel like some of the chapters are written like pieces of music and sometimes read like sonatas, in that they have a tendency to wrap around themselves. The cut up method, which I'm sure was used in this book, engages in a somewhat more abstract sensibility, and allows words and images to be treated as musical themes. Echoes of earlier phrases (only appearing later in scrambled or simply rearranged forms) usually lend a passage a poetically definitive quality. That is, the words become more important and begin to mean more. Really I think that this book, rather than a novel, is more of a multi-movement chamber symphony.

The Hairy Ape (Eugene O'Neill)

An odd play. Wasn't sure what to make of it. At first I thought it was very vibrant and poetic, but then it seemed very simplistic and too purposeful or something.

Querelle (Jean Genet)

I actually read this book about 2-3 months ago and have been uninspired to write about it. I had seen the Fassbinder movie and thought it was intriguing but also kind of stupidly cryptic and eccentricly verbose, which I found difficult. The experience of reading the book left me feeling somewhat similarly, except that I now feel it is essentially not as cryptic as I thought it was. In fact, the theme of the book is something that now seems almost like a cliche in gay literature: I guess I would have to boil it down to the following: how sexual desire and "love" between men is invariably linked with competition, disdain, and ultimately, violence (in this case, homicide). But wait...that's maybe not the whole thing. there is also something about how homosexual desire is related to narcissism and possibly misogyny. Anyway, it's something that may have completely fascinated me before I read George Chauncey's "Gay New York," from which I learned all about the Pre-War history of the gay male in society- all about sailors and such. Still, I think these are valid themes to write about, and there certainly is some truth to them. And the prose is often very engaging and amusing in a sort of French way. The characters usually manage to be appealing at the same time as they are uninteresting stock characters. I kinda liked it.