It's so strange to me that people prefer Naked Lunch to the other W. S. Burroughs novels; Naked Lunch is completely disgusting, whereas the trilogy of novels in Cities of the Red Night is only partially disgusting. And where it's not disgusting, it's imaginative and full of ideas which, under-appreciated as they are, any fantasy, sci-fi, or magical realist author should steal from. The first of the three books, Cities, is too straight-forward to be very inspiring, but it's also enough like a novel that it can segue the average reader into the second book, The Place of Dead Roads, which is almost a (Weird-) Western, featuring striking caricatures like The Priest, an outlaw who enters gun-fights intoning the Last Rites for his enemies, whom he's about to kill. There are others whose techniques are too upsetting to repeat right here, but they all seem like cameo guest-appearances from a folklore that doesn't exist, but would have been invented if we were a more creative species than we are. And the final book, The Western Lands, gives you a Sergio Leone-does-Ancient Egypt experience... or rather, it implies such an experience, but seems to consist only of the explanatory footnotes. It's almost like he's showing us what novels ought to have been, if we'd been strong enough to make them. He wasn't quite strong enough either to make these books -- because they're books about books that never quite made it from his mind into the world. He does explain, not only what they would have been, but all the secret and hidden meanings that would have been encoded into them. They're so full of thrilling ideas... I only read this trilogy because I needed to understand some of the occult-inflected imagery of "red desert" and "red cities" as they appear in other materials, and since such a place is more a vision than a formed idea, Burroughs commentary-like novels were pretty much perfect. 

​It's very slow going on Peer Gynt. I think I'm making more of it than I have to, because it's a very straightforward task -- take something that's written for the stage, but very hard to stage, and adapt it for radio, where you can do anything. But it's so easy to underestimate the source material. It's Ibsen, so all the mechanical stuff is hidden, you can't really see it just reading through the thing, and cognitively, I can't feel it either. It's all so smooth--in a bad way. It's like I'm looking for the component parts I know should be there, the plot twists, the reversals, the reveals of motivation or character, and they're really well hidden. I understand that for an audience, that can be really pleasurable, but for someone trying to adapt it, it's frustrating. 
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It's a great opportunity to study Norwegian folklore (as opposed to Norse Mythology, which is something else altogether) because among the elements I want to translate are the tales that might be as familiar and as automatic to Ibsen's audience as "Peter Peter Pumpkin-Eater" is to us, or "Yankee Doodle."  Not only familiar, but irritating: a playwright could count on the audience knowing them by heart, even though he wouldn't want to write any reminders of them into his play.