Do any of you, with your enviable access to various franchises of Pondgravels Books (etc) ever read any William Burroughs? 

No, you don't., and I agree with you all that he is a fake and a clown, and much worse: an influence.

Seems that we owe to the present puffing of the worthless Alexander Trocchi in part to Burrough's baleful shadow.

Perhaps our writers feel that they will find validation in the example of a Scot who touched the fruitless fields of the US Beat-en? 

Anti-literature may find buyers today but it dies quick and is as worthless as it is childish.

It is how Romanticism ends, with Prometheus not chained to a rock, but cared for in the community with a prescription for Temazapam.

Timid sadists swapping fuck books with Tony Blair's smiling consent.

Why does everything published in the last twenty years read like a series of dramatised newspaper headlines?

Cherechez la femme Burroughs.