CITIES OF THE RED NIGHT 1

"The Museum of Lost Species is not exactly a museum, since all of the species are alive in dioramas of their natural habitats. Admission is free to anyone who can enter. The coinage here is the ability to endure the pain and sadness of observing extinction and by so doing to reanimate the species by observing it."
—page 51, Ghost of Chance by William S. Burroughs

"Audrey felt the floor shift under his feet and he was standing at the epicenter of a vast web. In that moment, he knew its purpose, knew the reason for suffering, fear, sex, and death. It was all intended to keep human slaves imprisoned in physical bodies while a monstrous matador waved his cloth in the sky, sword ready for the kill."
—page 309, Cities of the Red Night by William S. Burroughs

Last night, the wife and I watched Blood Diamond. I was very disappointed. It was an action film loosely wrapped in current events and politics of Africa. The characters of Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hansou) were quite unbelievable, especially that of Archer. This was a Stallone or Schwarzenegger movie dishonestly veiled behind a weak attempt to show how we really should care about how the diamond industry is really hurting individuals and families in Sierra Leone and Liberia. The problem was that the movie was not about community and caring, but about individual heroics, individual greed, and individual motivations. In addition to the narcissism of all of the protagonists, there were so many bullets fired near Archer and Vandy that they should have been killed scores of times.

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I stumbled upon William S. Burroughs's Ghost of Chance by accident. It was sitting on a bargain table in Elliott Bay Book Company so I bought it on a whim. I am very pleased that I did. It is a very slim novel, rather more novella or short story due to its length. Like Blood Diamond, it combines individual heroics with the problems of the modern world, in this case how the rape of the global environment, capitalism and colonialism run amok, and the need of nation-states/corporations to establish and maintain control are leading us down a path of our own destruction. In other words, it presented a more balanced, more believable world than that of Blood Diamond—addressing many of the same issues—even though it is a fantasy that bounces around through various times and "realities" as most of Burroughs's work, and less rooted in a world that "looks" like ours, such as that of Blood Diamond. Read it and weep. Burroughs doesn't hold out much hope for us as we open Pandora's box upon Pandora's box.

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Ghost of Chance led me to another novel by Burroughs that I had not yet read. A review of Ghost of Chance dismissed it due to its subject matter and brevity, stating that it could easily have been a prologue to Cities of the Red Night. I disagree.

Although there are some minor similarities between the two novels, they each stand alone. Cities of the Red Night and Ghost of Chance both contain elements present in many of Burroughs's short stories and novels—drug use, sex, homosexuality, rebellions, backroom dealings, pirates, strange diseases, morphing or altered bodies, "aliens," and the police or military. For me, even though Ghost of Chance is a strong indictment of our culture and way of life, Cities of the Red Night is even moreso.