William S. Burroughs & what he brough to The Western

[David Patty]

Anyone else think this passage resounds w/ Burroughs-esque imagist prose?

ATD p. 483, (base of the page & top of 484):
"Wish it could be Denver...  be a saloon girl...  She crossed out the words,
but went on daydreaming about it, whole dime novels full of lurid
goings-on.  Chandeliers and Champagne.  Men whose faces were never too
clear.  Pain that felt just so good, imagined in detail.  Girl intimates who
lay around in fancy linen sharing laudanum on long slow winter nights.  A
loneliness nothing could touch.  An embrace of distant, empty rooms, kept
clean by the wind forever blowing through.  A high-mountain sunlit
spareness, a house framed in absolute rectilinear purity, dry, bleached,
silent but for the wind.  And her young face, remembered by a hundred
no-goods all through the San Juans for its clean delicacy, unshielded before
the days and what they were doing to it."

I think it's the reportorial style that does it, that and the restrained
choice of adjectives.  There are passages in 'Queer' and 'The Place of Dead
Roads' both that resemble it, in terms of precision (and, perhaps, juvenile
longing).

Dunno if Pynchon intended it--  I might be the only one imagining it  --but
felt it strongly, and in light of the intentional pastiche of style
canvassing this account, felt it worth noting.  Burroughs really did bring
Hemingway & Céline to the frontier, in more ways than one...  Maybe
Pynchon's repaying the favor?
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