Another pic from Bellefontaine Cemetery. The writer William S. Burroughs, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Burroughs, is one of my cultural heroes. He was born here to great wealth - his grandfather had invented the adding machine and built a fortune on it. He went to Harvard, with degrees in English and anthropology, and later attended medical school in Vienna. Then he went on, with his pals Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, to revolutionize American writing through the course of his sordid life.
I remember reading Cities of the Red Night and The Western Lands when they were published during my 30's. The possibilities of prose would never seem the same to me. Some people left a few coins on the small grave stone in tribute. The fork has to be in honor of his infamous novel, Naked Lunch. The grave is not easy to find but for some of us is worth the effort.
You can find some audio clips on YouTube of Burroughs reading his work. Most of it is hilarious but not for the squeamish. I recommend a clip from Naked Lunch about Dr. Benway in surgery, https://youtu.be/7-MF6J9ZFB4 . Someone we know had cancer that required immediate surgery and he was assigned to a Washington University physician named Dr. Benway. We could have fainted.
2 comments:
Very nice to learn from your post today. Must look it up.
An unusual grave.
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