A Pair of Burroughs

I love the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the excellent pulp writer who created Tarzan, Pellucidar, Barsoom, and many other memorable characters and locations. Burroughs had a clear racy style and his fiction generates its own momentum. He was a conventional but extremely effective story-teller. I am happy to report that I have just started reading his second Tarzan novel, recently issued by Penguin.

I love the work of William Burroughs, the avant-garde writer whose extreme lifestyle and psychotropic explorations inspired his obsessive themes. Burroughs was simultaneously a crusader against, and salesman for, the trappings of modern paranoia. Heroin, time travel, sodomy, alien invasions, conspiracies, cut ups, fold ins: these were his entry points into the savage neuroses of the contemporary mind.

I love the work of Philip José Farmer, the playful genius who once tried to fuse both kinds of Burroughs in a single short story. That story, a wild piece of work entitled 'The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod', was a re-telling of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan myth in the style of William 'Naked Lunch' Burroughs... Now I'm wondering if it's time to try that experiment in reverse, to attempt a re-telling of a William Burroughs text in the style of Edgar Rice, and I'm wondering if I might be the man for the job!

The Welsh National Anthem -- in English!

I recently found this highly accurate transcription of the Welsh National Anthem. For the full effect listen to the anthem being sung here by Katharine Jenkins and sing along. Ready?

My hen laid a haddock, one hand oiled a flea,

Glad farts and centurions threw dogs in the sea,

I could stew a hare here and brandish Dan’s flan,

Don’s ruddy bog’s blocked up with sand.

Dad! Dad! Why don’t you oil Auntie Glad?

Can whores appear in beer bottle pies,

O butter the hens as they fly!