Moonlight, white satin, roses. A bride.

Not many people can boast a photo of their grandmother posing for kiddiporn.

The clown may be the source of mirth, but - who shall make the clown laugh?

Among the monsters, I am well hidden; who looks for a leaf in a forest?

Iconic clothing has been secularized. . . . A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.

The kind of power mothers have is enormous.

Cats of all kinds weave in and out of the text; Burroughs has clearly taken to them in a big way in his old age and seems torn between a fear they will betray him into sentimentality and a resigned acceptance that a man can't be ironic all the time.