William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible by Barry Miles

"This Burroughs is the man who saw the abyss and came back to report on it"

I've started reading this biography of Burroughs written by Barry Miles, and it's already really great. It covers a lot of ground, and I think this is because Miles knew Burroughs for many years.

Readers are given small details - memories, conversations, observations that I suppose could only be found out from talking to Burroughs himself. Some of the things are very funny and accurate and put the whole Burroughs vibe into words perfectly.

I'm also enjoying the amount of references in the book to Burroughs influences, as well as the influence he has had on popular culture including music, as well as sci-fi literature, and film...

"Photographs from the period reveal a thin, middle-aged, aristocratic man with a bony visage, wearing a business suit and tie, often topped by a Chesterfield with velvet lapels. He quickly became the most famous junkie writer alive"

"Then there was the voice. When the spoken word album Call Me Burroughs came out in 1965, the flat mid-west accent of T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound, dry as paper, the clipped syllables of a 1920s newscaster reporting the Great Crash, sometimes affecting a campy edge..."

"Many people have said they didn't really understand Burroughs until they heard that voice - the voice of a banker saying all those outrageous things"

"This was the man whom the Spanish boys called el hombre invisible as he slipped quietly through the narrow alleys of tangier, looking for a fix..."

Burroughs alongside Sting and Andy Summers of The Police

"At his 70th birthday party in New York in 1984 he spoke briefly with Sting and Andy Summers from the Police, then one of the biggest bands in the world...Later Bill warned some of his other guests who might have been carrying drugs, 'I don't know whether you're holding, but someone told me that those guys were the cops.'"

"I hate parties. I hardly know Mick Jagger, I don't know those pop people"