RealityStudio.org

So has anybody actually read this character that Burroughs obsessed over so much? I haven't, personally...

http://alex.edfac.usyd.edu.au/BLP/websi ... cerpts.HTM

See WSB wrote an intro to this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Youth-Pleasure-De ... 551&sr=8-1

Yes, I really recommend 'In Youth is Pleasure', which is very readable and from which you will often tell that Burroughs got various kinds of stylistic influence from. There is an edition I used to have which has quite a good introduction by Burroughs.

Also 'A Voice through a Cloud'; well worth reading even just the first 10 or so pages where Welch makes all sorts of simple everyday objects very haunting and somehow magically portentous of tragic events that have not yet occured in the text. Very reminicent of that short story by Burroughs in 'Interzone' where he cuts off a part of his finger; the build up to this incident in the Burroughs story entails a similar ominous sadness being sparked off by similarly simple objects and observations that suddenly become charged with a strange almost magical significance. Burrough's uses this literary device over and over in his books and I think he basically got it from Welch. So, essential reading I'd say (and very readable and poignant too).

i concur.

The Place of Dead Roads is dedicated to Welch.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/fe ... anreview23

Some parallels with JG Ballard, his social station, writer's life and time in Shanghai here, but it all sounds a wee bit twee and English middle-to-upper-middle class to me. Still sort of curious to read some of it though...

burroughs said welch was the writer who most influenced him.

he wrote:
"he makes the reader aware of the magic that is right under his eyes."

how many writers nowadays can you say that about? especially in this era, where almost everyone considers themselves writers, thinking that just babbling on with words on a page is enough.