IdleRich
IdleRich
Yeah his family was very wealthy and that enabled him to go gallivanting around the world. As well as the William Tell incident I was thinking of that when talking about how his actions affected his family of course, but also thinking of his son who died young after a life of addiction. I mean, of course you make your own choices and so but I can imagine that the influences he had in that respect were not great.Maybe because Burroughs was a literary genius? .. but if Bill had ever visited my flat I'm sure I would have kept an eye on him, wouldn't want him pocketing valuables to trade for smack..although he was a trust fund kid so that probably wouldn't have been an issue... and objectively he was a creep - the whole "Yage Letters" episode is a case in point..obsessing about a young lad to the level of stalking ( also documented in "Queer" ).. then the issue of the underage boys he'd pay for sex in Morocco.. also some of his best ideas were filched from Brion Gysin.. but still he seems to rise above all that...and he did love cats as documented in "The Cat Inside" which effectively gives him a pass from me...
Compared to him the rest of the Beats strike me as a sorry bunch - pederast Allen Ginsberg, the one hit wonder of poetry, Gregory Corso, a toothless wonder dealing smack out of the Chelsea Hotel. As Patti Smith recounts, 'I first encountered Gregory long ago in front of the Chelsea Hotel. He lifted his overcoat and dropped his trousers, spewing Latin expletives. Seeing my astonished face, he laughed and said, “I’m not mooning you sweetheart, I’m mooning the world.” ' What a dick...
An aside - googling Cassady a minute ago I read that he was Ginsberg's lover for years, maybe that's common knowledge but I don't think I'd heard it before.
With the Moroccan thing, sadly he was far from the only one almost openly doing that, seems there was a whole bunch of perverts (or let's not beat around the bush, child rapists) meeting up there regularly as is documented by Joe Orton. Again I like his plays and even the novel he did but his diary - Jesus Christ, if that had come out while he'd been alive they would have definitely locked him up and thrown away the key and quite rightly. Obviously the diary was not intended for consumption by anyone else so - once his lover had bludgeoned him to death with a hammer - and it was published, huge parts of it amount to a long and detailed confession to a string of horrible crimes. I think it was him who said "Ah... Marrakesh, where one can get brown in minutes".
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