THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 26, 1995 TAG: 9502220386
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY SHARON WEINSTEIN
LENGTH: Medium: 75 lines
MY EDUCATION
A Book of Dreams
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
Viking. 193 pp. $21.95.
HAVE YOU EVER waded through trash to find one, maybe two or three, things of interest or value to you? Reading William S. Burroughs' latest ``book'' is an experience something like that.
You learn in his acknowledgments that a large portion of My Education comes from ``many hastily jotted notes on scraps of paper and index cards and pages typed with one hand.'' Burroughs gratefully credits four men with helping him to bring this effort into being, and I can only heartily wish they hadn't bothered.
My Education is rambling, disconnected, irregular, unusual and infinitely boring. You could say, of course, that dreams are like that. Fine. Then leave them where they belong. In a notebook by your bedside for you and your therapist alone.
The 80-year-old Burroughs recounts packing dreams, cat dreams, dreams about homosexual encounters, the lonely streets and hotel rooms of New York and Paris, dreams of feeling disembodied. Guns, narcotics, airplanes and trains figure strongly in these dream episodes. So do friends, family and acquaintances - many of them dead. L. Ron Hubbard, Jack Kerouac and Mick Jagger make appearances.
Some dream characters seem to come directly from Burroughs' fiction, whether from the period of Naked Lunch (1959) or from such later books as Cities of the Red Night (1981).
The book sounds like it could be interesting, but the dream sequences lack connective tissue. There is no momentum. The passages remain, on the whole, isolated - even tedious - bits.
Burroughs writes things like ``I am giving a film script for Dutch Schultz.'' And ``I give an extemporaneous performance. Anthony there. He says: `I would have used more nuances.' Arrive at Antoine's in New Orleans.''
He is darkly comic in places: ``I have been suffering from paralyzing depressions. Sometimes I seriously ask myself how anyone can feel this bad and live. Often I simply collapse in ed. I mean bed, of course. . . come to think of it, never had a lover named Ed.''
And eerily beautiful in others: ``I was in a hotel in the Land of the Dead. On a balcony I saw beautiful landscapes in lighter and darker shades of green. There was a valley and a hillside in front of me, with light green palm trees. A green area to the left, marshy ground with pools of water here and there, and further away to the left, a lagoon.''
Burroughs published Junky: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict in 1953, and he continues to maintain an intriguing reputation. He is full of dichotomies: He appears in a popular television commercial but also is a member of the American Academy and Institute for Arts and Letters and a Commandeur de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France.
Sometimes you remember why he is so famous. In an eloquent passage about writing, worth (maybe) the whole book:
``Writer, where are you going? . . . Always remember, the work is the mainsail to reach the Western Lands. The texts sing. Everything is grass and bushes, a desert or a maze of texts. . . Sky in all directions. . . Each page is a door to everything is permitted. The fragile lifeboat between this and that. Your words are the sails.'' MEMO: Sharon Weinstein is a professor of English at Norfolk State University
and the author of a book of poems, ``Celebrating Absences.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
ALASTAIR THAIN
William S. Burroughs' ``My Education'' lacks momentum and focus.
by CNB