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Read The Place Of Dead Roads (2001)

The Place of Dead Roads (2001)

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Rating
3.94 of 5 Votes: 5
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ISBN
0312278659 (ISBN13: 9780312278656)
Language
English
Publisher
picador

The Place Of Dead Roads (2001) - Plot & Excerpts

In The Place of Dead Roads, Burroughs takes a detour through the American Old West, beginning with the 1899 death of writer/gunslinger Kim Carsons in a Colorado shootout. From there the story unfolds in a nonlinear telling of Kim’s past experience -- across vast swaths of time and space, under various forms and guises -- as professional assassin and prominent member of “The Johnson Family” (incidentally, the novel’s original title). The Johnsons are a brotherhood of honorable thieves and other itinerants who play Robin Hood to the rapacious Sherif of Nottingham represented by the Immortality Control Board of Venus and their unwitting minions in government, religion, and other organizations of Earthly control. As might be expected, the goal of the Venusian conspiracy is to prevent our souls from ever reaching the Western Lands and the genuine immortality that awaits therein, keeping us forever trapped in a scheme of systematic vampirism that, like the serfdoms of medieval England and the wage slavery common to most modern states, is far from symbiotic in nature. In Kim’s words:"We’re not fighting for a scrap of sharecropper immortality with the strings hanging off it like Mafioso spaghetti. We want the whole tamale. The Johnsons are taking over the Western Lands. We built it with our brains and our hands. We paid for it with our blood and our lives. It’s ours and we’re going to take it. And we are not applying in triplicate to the Immortality Control Board. Anybody gets in our way we will get our communal back against a rock or a tree and fight the way a raccoon will fight a fucking dog."The ancient Egyptians pioneered the preservation of the physical body and protection of the immortal soul through a marriage of science and the arcane, but compared to what Kim has in mind, their methods were crude and uncivilized at best. To begin with, mummification was something that only the obscenely rich could ever hope to afford, thus putting this route to immortality in direct conflict with Kim’s own aims. But even if this privilege were equally available to all members of society, the logistics involved in shielding each and every mummy from the elements, vandals, and inevitable nuclear war were far too staggering to even consider. Besides, where would they even find the space to store them all?Unlike the pharaohs and their obsession with securing impregnable tombs underground, or the astronauts and their insistence on having their entire “awkward life process encapsulated and transported [with them] into Space”, Kim searches for a way that we might ditch our flawed form altogether on our way through the cosmos and the six cities between us and the Western Lands. He considers the human body to be the prison that keeps us stuck in our inescapable cycle of sex and death, one which only furthers the aims of those feeding off our vital life energies. Therefore, just:"[a]s a prisoner serving a life sentence can think only of escape, so Kim takes for granted that the only purpose of his life is space travel. [...] The alien medium we glimpse beyond Time is Space. And that is where we are going. Kim sees dreams as a vital link to our biologic and spiritual destiny in space. [...] Kim considers that immortality is the only goal worth striving for. He knows that it isn’t something you just automatically get for believing some nonsense or other like Christianity or Islam. It is something you have to work and fight for, like everything else in this life or another."Though vanished from this Earth now for over one hundred thousand years already, the cities may yet exist on other planes and planets, after all. And if a soul is able to project itself through space as well as time, no longer encumbered by its physical vessel, then its odds of locating the first station on the pilgrimage (Tamaghis) go from infinitesimal to infinite. For now anyway, the rest of us remain permanently earthbound and stranded, wandering through countless lives forever, somewhere along the dead roads:‘‘And what is a dead road? Well, señor, somebody you used to meet, uno amigo, tal vez....” Remember a red brick house on Jane Street? Your breath quickens as you mount the worn red-carpeted stairs.... The road to 4 calle Larachi, Tangier, or 24 Arundle Terrace in London? So many dead roads you will never use again ... a flickering gray haze of old photos ... pools of darkness in the street like spilled ink ... a dim movie marquee with smoky yellow bulbs ... red-haired boy with a dead-white face. The guide points to a map of South America. “Here, señor ... is the Place of Dead Roads.”On to The Western Lands.

As a confessed Burroughs fanatic, I gotta say this is probably one of his best. It seems to have just the right mix of everything WS Burroughs is known for ... All in the context of a post modern western. Which in itself I find hilarious (in the wry sort of sardonism he offers so often ["offered" I suppose, considering he's not with us anymore]). Kim Carsons, the protagonist, is one of my favorite characters of fiction, though I think he may be a quasi-autobiographical fictional vision of the author, had he been part of the old western frontier. It's even set in/around Los Alomos which I won't explain the significance of since it's too complex and thick. This is the second book of a trio. The first is Cities of the Red Night, the third being The Westerlands. None of them have much to do with one another, and in my opinion this is the most "accessible" of the three. It's pretty straight forward with the occasional drift into stream of consciousness automatic style prose he's known for - very vivid. Above all the book is hilarious, which I mean in the Burroughs sense of hilarity ... It's not for everyone - definitely. The kind of humor brought forth in this (or any other writings of WSB) instill the nightmares of say ... Rick Santorum (the contemporary politician).It's a real western written in WSB's style. So expect the unexpected and if you are not comfortable with typical WSB content, then it's not for you. But if your a fan ... It's one of his best. *there are a number of places you might find audio of Mr Burroughs reading excerpts from this novel. Find them! It's always better to hear the man read his own work.

What do You think about The Place Of Dead Roads (2001)?

This is the second of the Red Night trilogy; I have yet to read the other two.Readers unfamiliar with Burroughs should, as always be warned that, like most of his works, this is hallucinatory, disjoint, violent, and graphic.However, as always, it is leavened by wacky black humor, and vivid writing that has a paradoxical dark beauty.It's more narrative than his cut-up works, which took language to near-Joycean-Wakean extremes.There is a Western narrative of sorts, although there is considerable time-jumping. It centers on the mission, if one could call it that, of Kim Carson and his band of randy and often transvestite outlaws, and the outrages they commit to save the planet from itself, and make Earth safe for non-linear thought and the dissolution of the system. The usual conspiracies, repulsive and threatening invertebrate, reptilian and alien life forms, and bizarre sex acts taken to the level of absurdity also make their appearance.
—Ed Smiley

More homo-mysticism and rod rubbing from W S Burroughs, probably the greatest writer in the "action" genre. Faster in some parts than others, like most things written by W.S.B. it is both a great tale unto itself and development upon Cities of the Red Night. As usual Burroughs makes silly putty newspaper prints of the truth as an attempt to reproduce his own visions. The outer space polemic had less of an impact on me, as I really see it as a metaphor for occultist exploration of inner space. Burroughs would like to marry the two, but I might just be too square to be the minister, even thought I thoroughly enjoy his treatment of both themes. For me the winner was the continuation of sexual communication of language thematic.
—Levon

I read this book, and its prequel, Cities of the Red Night, for the first time when I was in college, and a lot of it went over my head. Interestingly (and perhaps because of this), I also came out of it convinced that Burroughs was a genius, and that his every word should be taken as the Gospel Truth. Looking at it now, I "get" what he's saying a lot better, and I find that I disagree with him more.This book begins as a gay Western, with some sci fi interludes, and gradually becomes more bizarre and non-chronological. The protagonist is Kim Carsons, who may or may not be a fictional character from the writings of "William Seward Hall," a man who died in a shootout at the turn of the century, and presumably an alter-ego for Burroughs himself. Carsons is a misfit, a rebel, an expert shootist, and an insatiable homophile. We watch Carsons as he develops from a shy but dangerous teenager into the leader of a movement called "the Johnson Family," which, Burroughs explains, was a term "to designate good bums and thieves," which was "elaborated into a code of conduct." In the book, it elaborates still further, into a vast international organization fighting authority and preparing humanity for the evolutionary leap it must take to colonize the stars. Much of the book is actually propaganda for Burroughs' own views regarding sexuality, conformity, the State, space exploration, human transcendence, and gun rights. For all that, Burroughs is a skillful artist, who doesn't allow polemic to overwhelm his prose - in fact, at times exactly the opposite takes place. Burroughs was that rarest of combinations, a poet and a political thinker, and only rarely did he lose sight of the art in his work. It is probably for this reason that he remains so influential. While in some way each of his books is a rant in favor of his own viewpoint, he never descends to the transparency of an Ayn Rand. Burroughs allowed creativity to dominate, which is probably why some of his "genius" insights into politics seem questionable to me now. They are unsystematic, often the result of trying to push a stray thought to its logical conclusion, and intended to be more shocking than insightful. He is also an expert eroticist, although that will be disturbing to anyone who is unprepared for such explicit scenes of gay sex. This was one area I got more out of the second time around.This book is less explicitly misogynist than its predecessor, but there remains a disdain/disinterest/suspicion of women in the subtext. Women characters are rare, and they are often disgusting, evil, and/or stupid. The exception is Salt Chunk Mary, a de-sexualized grande dame of Burroughs' imagined underworld. She isn't particularly well-developed as a character, although the same could be said of many of the male characters. At least she never turns out to be part of the alien conspiracy to enslave humanity, which is itself a concession on Burroughs' part.For all the criticisms I've put into this review, it remains a a very enjoyable work of fiction, and earns four stars for being something I'm glad I took the time to return to.
—Michael

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