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rfmcdonaldAfter I got dismissed early from work (wont of work), I hurried down to the Toronto Reference Library to pick up the copy of Burrough's The Soft Machine. Ensconced at Timothy's, I set to reading it.
Why is The Soft Machine considered such an important work? Reading it through a couple of times, all that I could detect in its text was a lot of gratuitous gay sex, abundant drug use, and the shadow of such misogyny (women as threatening, women as possessors of castrating genitalia, women as little more than their genitalia) as to make me wonder whether Burrough's shooting of his wife Joan Vollmer was not so much accidental as "accidental." Even after I turned to the relevant Wikipedia article it didn't make that much sense.
Am I doing something wrong? Do I need to (say) be taking drugs to understand it? Or is something else going on?
Why is The Soft Machine considered such an important work? Reading it through a couple of times, all that I could detect in its text was a lot of gratuitous gay sex, abundant drug use, and the shadow of such misogyny (women as threatening, women as possessors of castrating genitalia, women as little more than their genitalia) as to make me wonder whether Burrough's shooting of his wife Joan Vollmer was not so much accidental as "accidental." Even after I turned to the relevant Wikipedia article it didn't make that much sense.
Am I doing something wrong? Do I need to (say) be taking drugs to understand it? Or is something else going on?
