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Rating: 
Summary: An intriguing look into the mind of Burroughs
Review: A wonderful text. Much of Burroughs carries a sadness, but nothing like this. These are the words of a little old man. His friends are dying, his cats are dying, and he knows his own end is imminent. Even his rants against the drug war and other stupidities seem tired, like he was simply rousing his energies toward old enemies to delay his own demise. Saddest of all was knowing how it would end.
Rating: 
Summary: The pathetic rantings of a scared old man
Review: I remember when Burroughs did an interview with Jerry Casale. And Casale spoke of midwestern misanthropy and the sense of shame about being a human. Well, in this diary, Burroughs gave full voice to his midwestern curmudgeon persona.
I almost croaked when I came across the following passage: "I must tell James: Please never conceal from me any nasty letters or reviews. I want the names of these creeps. The addresses, so I can put one of my curses on them. It will give me something to do. And jog a few higher-up elbows hiding behind the nameless a--holes. I will make a list and cross names off one after another. Like the new rich in St. Louis. At his daughter's coming-out party. Nobody showed. She went mad. He made a list of all the invitees who didn't show. And ruined them one after another. It gave meaning to his life. He crossed off the last name on his deathbed, gave a contented belch and died. He was a fully fulfilled evil old man."
The anti-drug-prohibition rants are tedious enough. But what's surprising is that he begrudges atheists just for being atheists. As if their mere existence was a personal insult to his non-denominational theistic yearnings: "I believe in God. Not omnipotent. He needs help now."
The cat-sentimentality is pretty icky. Burroughs ended up valuing humans only insofar as they're capable of being caretakers of cats: "If a plague should or will kill a third of the population, I can only pray that it affects not only humans but domestic animals, with special reference to dogs and cats. The picture of trillions of dispossessed cats is too horrible to be confronted."
Rating: 
Summary: What's missing?
Review: It will be good in the future to see the orginal notes--one really wonders what has been edited out to protect the image. Any journal is a problem to read--but when the editing is done by those with the most to protect (family, lovers, etc), historians must be really concerned. Probably not worth buying new, but it will be out in paper soon. Get the cheap copy.
Rating:
Summary: Death Trip Picture Show
Review: NECRO-SHINE: But didn't all of Burroughs' writings have an importunate, deathfully urgent necro-shine to them? Is his tone and rhetorical stance in these final journals so very different from the death trip picture show of his inescapable narrative fictions? It seems that Burroughs was always close enough to death to be in a position to constantly re-rehearse his "last words," as it were, his strange and haunting figures seemed always at the end of their orphistic tether, the sad music of humanity reflected in the placid eyes of a soon-to-be-extinct flying lemur.(!) Sadly, however, the fey tenderness of "Love? What is It? Most natural painkiller what there is. LOVE." (Burroughs' last written words) doesn't quite contend with the interrogatory abyss of William H. Bonney's "Quien es?", or the chilling senility of Winston Churchill's vision of the rains. Nope, like it or not, Burroughs' last words (as anthologized herein) are closer to that of bullet-riddled gangster Dutch Schultz, haunting and obscure, remiss in their snarled paroxysms. AUTOBIOGRAPHY: Excursions to the pistol-range, weekly trips to the methadone clinic (where Burroughs gets all chatty with the nurses), felinophilic feeding and urination rituals, painting and scribbling, dinner engagements with the good ol' folk of Lawrence KS, uninvited pilgrimages from college students and other academic stalkers, his appearance in the U2 video "Last Night on Earth" pushing a shopping-cart fitted with a huge rotating klieg light, a meeting with Steve Buschemi to discuss a combined film-version of *Junky* and *Queer*, and, much like Yeats in his final years, tramping around the house wielding an assortment of black-jacks, sword-canes, blowguns, throwing knives, and pepper-spray canisters, making long-range symbolic attacks against DEAs the world over.... "Old age is winter," Burroughs wrote in *My Education*, and boy do we feel the arthritic chill, as his friends start dying all around him, some of them bizarre and unexpected suicides (with the exception of Ginsberg, these deaths pale in comparison to that of his cat Fletch, who died three weeks before his human). The guilt of being a survivor is one of the more moving themes touched upon herein, even as most of the entries play out the old Audrey Carsons persecution-complex, diatribes of fear and resentment against the trollish WASP aristocracy that reviled him as an adolescent, the American police apparatus, and, most recently, some Puritan nut-job leaving hateful messages on his answering machine, "The fact that you exist is an insult to me"(146). Jesus, some people.... DREAM JOURNAL: As a supplement to *My Education: A Book of Dreams*(1995), let us all release a sigh of quiet disappointment. There are roughly three dozen dream fragments scattered here and there, but rarely followed up to any engaging degree of inquiry, except as prelude to another tiresome routine, recycled motifs trawled from the muddy waters of previous works. The terminal Burroughsian epithets ("He looks like a sheep killing dog." "No glot. Clom Fliday." "Nothing is true. Everything is permitted." "Towers open fire!") resound gratingly with the obsessive-compulsive pop and crackle of a broken gramophone, as if Burroughs must constantly construct effigies of himself as a stay against the darkness. Like Kafka and Borges, the strength of Burroughs' vision lay in his proximity to the REM state, to the lush, groggy dream-state of a distilled image-hunger. But apparently old age had dulled his ability to make use of these paradigms, hobbling his once-great power to transmit the REM wavelength to a sympathetic readership.... FLOTSAM AND JETSAM: Burroughs' devotion to the world of magic and ESP, his elegiac love for the primeval animal kingdom and environmental horror at the predicament of endangered life-forms, his harrowing disgust of the centipede and its human counterparts, it's all very moving at times (one high point occurs in the entry for June 13, 1997, subtitled "Applicants for God's position", where he provides a stunning criterion of precisely what is *required* of those who wish to become writers), although this late in his life, when Burroughs rolls the bones, it is usually a crapshoot, with enough snake-eyes to fill a reptile house at the carnival.... For the Burroughs completist, certainly, there is enough important material to make *Last Words* as essential a purchase as *Word Virus*. Following J.G. Ballard's recent remark, we can be inspired that Burroughs continued to be creative up until the brink of senility and death, but the literary value of these fragments is still few and far between. Burroughs wrote some incredible material in his later years (*The Western Lands*, *Ghost of Chance*), and was apparently working on a novel about the Mary Celeste, a pirate ship whose crew mysteriously disappeared in the salty days of yore, painting scenes from the novel in tandem with its composition. Now I for one would have preferred that *those* fragments were edited and published, rather than have to choke on the dregs of this great writer's excruciating enervation and depletion, as registered by these entries. The sucking ebb of entropy pulls at the reader like the black riptide of gerontological death-in-life, the ghost of William Burroughs prematurely haunting this grand old man of letters.
Rating: 
Summary: FINAL WORDS OF THE BURROUGHS CANON
Review: Thanks to James Grauerholz for this final goodbye from one of the 20th centuries most influential authors, (even if polite society won't admit it). FINAL WORDS will appeal to the Burroughs collector/afficianado as you will see the Grand Old Man return again and again in his final writings to themes that appear in his other works. Also, his commentary on current events and personalities, (Clinton, Timothy McVeigh, his fears of a growing world police state), make this book a must for the Burroughs fan. Particularly touching is how jarred Burroughs was by Allen Ginsberg's death. Burrough's remained true to his ideas/ideals to the very end, even if only at the end realizing the importance of love. From the entry for January 17, 1997: "What then is the meaning of respect? When all lies, deceit, pretense is stripped away, what remains? The truth of a painting, or a book or a man. No one is perfect. No, but by the flaws in the picture the truth will emerge."
Rating:
Summary: Three and a half stars, really
Review: These last words of Burroughs will have great poignancy for his fans, but might not be all that meaningful to the casual reader. He writes about mundane everyday occurrences, memories of his eventful life, makes extensive literary references and provides loving descriptions of his cats. For me, the Burroughs magic is here in abundance and this book helps to complete the big picture of his life and work. It's not all smooth sailing, though, as his repetitive railings against the "war on drugs" can become a bit tedious. Obscure references are explained in the explanatory Notes: I was interested to see he was a member of IOT (International Order of Thanateros - see the books Liber Kaos and Liber Null & Psychonaut by Peter Carroll) and friends with V. Vale (See Re/Search Publications like Industrial Culture Handbook and Incredibly Strange Music). Some sections are funny, some are sad (especially where he writes about Joan Vollmer and his family) and some very interesting from a literary perspective. There are powerful passages of great beauty that stick in the mind. His love for his cats and for other animals like lemurs is very moving and shows that he may have been larger than life, but in the end he was very human. So, to wrap it up: Last Words is essential reading for the Burroughs enthusiast and the Burroughs scholar, to finally understand the man and his writing. Phew ... I am relieved, to know how much he loved some people and his pets, in the end.
Rating:
Summary: A nice tribute.
Review: This book offers a nice tribute to William S. Burroughs, who was one of the most important figures of twentieth century literature. His most famous book is probably Naked Lunch which is a satire written in a series of routines. But whether you begin with Junkie, Naked Lunch or any of the others he was a man who spoke the TRUTH with a compassion and insight achieved by few others as to the state of the modern age. His words are designed to infiltrate the mind, fight the virus with itself, searching out and consuming attitudes of control impregnated by the biologic and social programming of our lives.
Rating:
Summary: What's missing?
Review: This was a very welcome addition to my library. I wouldn't say that it provides a capstone to his works, it's not that kind of greatness, but it did leave me feeling closer to the man...and that's really what I was seeking. Seeing inside the process, as well as getting a feel for the pulse of his last days were both accomplished very well by the book. I'll read it again, and again, whenever one of his novels awes me and I need to revisit the human who created such superhuman texts.
Rating:
Summary: poignant writings
Review: Touching, amusing entries in the life of an intellectual pioneer. Burroughs revealed so much in his fiction but the journals are a more probing way we can peer into his mind and see what he was thinking in the last days. One often wonders where good psychedelicists are headed in their final corporeal days, so works like this provide a certain insight not gleaned from their main body of work. Burroughs was quite a character.
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