The Wry Boy in the Cadaver Suit:

Wm. S. Burroughs, an Appreciation

Back in the great secret global-warming in the gray-suit 1950's, there arose from the psychic seas a continent, or at least a dripping land mass, called: WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS! It was both fetid and arid, but never totally dry, crisscrossed by dead roads where (ahem) some dead young boys hung on trees covered with green slime & lit by sparkler dims.Using peripheral vision, you might see the poisonous 2-headed "Mr Bradley Mr Martin"slobbering in the bush, or the polymorphously perverse super-addict and assassin Dr. Benway, quoting every possible literary source, voice and newsclip, come along and and suck it all up into a syringe - WHICH IS THE PRINTED PAGE!

And Mr. Burroughs' real name might be "Dr GOT-YOU" because he "got" everybody: pre-millenial literary America has bared its warm thigh and taken it in for the last 30 years. I took it, everyone took it. Repulsed or fascinated, we were all affected by Wm. S. Burroughs. Awesome he was.

WAS. Died a few weeks ago, aged 83. Dr. Benway-Burroughs, well-pickled in heroin and dapper to the end, is gone and there is no new burning bush of reptilian fervor. He was my hero of hard cool. He was a fearless literary symphony of jungle yage hip-talk, verbal riffs of bungee-cord tensile strength and chemical violins, maybe ending in a chorus of pistol shots, which he fired till recently on a range in Lawrence, Kan....

(Hmmm. Interesting idea: while shooting, was he communicating with his dead wife Joan of the famous "William Tell Overture for .38 Special?")

My path through the lost forest world of Burroughs started with the corrupt corpulence of NAKED LUNCH, a book that stands up and bites you, but I quickly found my bearings in the deadpan twisted normalcy of JUNKIE, ACE Books edition... This book is a small masterpiece of pure writing, before Bill entered the world of Byron Gysin, where his style paralleled abstract expressionism and also post-modernism. ...Burroughs' own devotion is to exact honesty and clarity, to precisely WHAT! is on the end of the famous fork of Naked Lunch.

Then I traveled the desperate pages of The Yage Letters & U-turned into the blind alley of Nova Express, where I bhonged with the Heavy Metal Kid, whose very name has entered the English language. Recently I re-read bits of the later works, Dead Roads and Cities of the Red Night, checking out Burroughs' style, asking myself: COULD THE OLD BUZZARD STILL WRITE? Answer: Yep (see below).

This man was an encyclopedia of every written work and sensation. He was a one-man Internet of arcane information, if somewhat gargoyle and freak-showed oriented. He walked over knowledge as if it were the ground; his perversions were horrific and direct. His prose was ethereal hot-line etching, echoing and creating cross-currents on audial, rhythmic, emotional, visual and all-associational levels. He was the master-originator of the grand hysteric dramatic RIFF: each spew of words comes in pulses and bursts, shoots up (no pun intended) like fireworks, spreads and subsides back into retinal consciousness, where it continues to bubble.

This writing is of course an appreciation of William Burroughs, no punches pulled.

If you have read this far, you dig him too. So then what "mere metaphors" can describe the excellence of Bill's writing? Here are four:

(1)...an energized spine of consciousness, spun out in jewel-faceted riffs; (2) ...it has a weird buckle, fearful and exciting to traverse, like a bridge during a big earthquake; (3) ...like riding a hot third rail; (4)...like a chariot with silver whirling scythes on its wheels, this astonishing consciousness chews through one's normal lines of defense, propriety and most private thoughts. He picks up shit with cloth of gold. As Yeats said, "Love has pitched his tent// in the place of excrement."

TWO things TO KNOW about William Burroughs: (a) His ADDICTION METAPHOR as relevant to all aspects of modern life; everything is potentially JUNK being strutted for someone's jones. "Pay it back, Play it back" rants Ibn-Hassan in Naked Lunch - to all of us. What? How? Why? Mr. Burroughs is a total confront.

(b) After he shot his wife in the head - a dark, conflicted mystery, he said that an "Ugly Spirit" had broken out like a demon into the air, and had marked him forever, and he now had to "write his way out of it" - keep running ahead of that demon, throwing out words like ballast... and he did.

And of course, while Bill was friends with hundreds, met with thousands, and was known to millions of people - he was unable to relate emotionally to his tragic son, who died drinking after a liver transplant because of his drinking.... Bill made a deal. He was a separate man, a gambling riverboat that pulls up alongside your wharf and invites you go get aboard HIS world.

What was his world? Remember, I checked up on his chops and found him still aching with fine words in his 70's in Place of Dead Roads (p57):

" Carbolic soap lean buttocks a dead green sunlight. Puff of orange knees.

What ass kicking hi? The light. I can. Sweet thirst. Quien es? Stagnant slate-green color a flash of violet light.... My picture in the light. I can. Old paper. A naked youth about somehow his timeless, enchanted reflection..."