THE WRITERS OF THE CWE: WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

 

Ah, my favorite of the Central West End writers, William S. Burroughs. Born to a wealthy St. Louis family (anyone remember Burroughs adding machines?), he revolutionized fiction writing with his bizarre techniques such as cut-ups, taking  finished text and literally cutting it into strips and rearranging it. Much of his work was drawn from long but intermittent periods of addiction. His narrators were notoriously unreliable, shifting times and personas. Novels such as Naked Lunch, Cities of the Red Night and The Western Lands stirred outrage and admiration. Characters like Dr. Benway wielded humor with predator’s claws.  

Towards the end of his chaotic life he moved to Lawrence, Kansas, of all places. He died at 83 of a heart attack and is buried in St. Louis, in the Burroughs family plot in Parisian-elaborate Bellefontaine Cemetery. His marker is unassuming.                

AND YOU'RE WORRIED ABOUT LOCUSTS

The eastern half of the United States is about to be infested by the 17 year locust explosion. Home town boy William S. Burroughs, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Burroughs, has other bugs to worry about, possibly from all those things he self-injected. At least he is protected from substances in the air.

His bust is in the Central West End, across the street from that of a much better behaved but no less revolutionary native writer. T. S. Elliott.               

NAKED LUNCH

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.             

Happy Birthday, Bill

Oops, forgot about this, leading to a rare second post in a day.

Today is the one hundredth birthday of one of St. Louis' most famous and infamous sons, William S. Burroughs. His writing has the power to shock even today and most of his life was wild, to put it mildly.  My pupils must have dilated hugely when I read The Western Lands and Cities of the Red Night.

He spent his last 13 years in Lawrence, Kansas, not far from Kansas City and home of the University of Kansas, but asked to be buried in the family plot here. They had money - his grandfather invented the adding machine. Now he rests in beautiful Bellefontaine Cemetery, the location marked by only a small stone.

Burroughs often wrote with ripping, outrageous humor. Here's an example with him reading the notorious Dr. Benway bit  from Naked Lunch (see also here). I like the photo that goes with this on YouTube, showing Frank Zappa standing by the writer, smiling with obvious admiration. WARNING - this recording is not for  minors, the easily offended  or people who are certain they know what good literature is.                            

Thursday Arch Series

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Chew on this for Thanksgiving Day in the US, an occasion on which most of us eat too much and some of us spend much of the day watching football in a turkey-induced torpor. Not me. I'll probably edit pictures in a turkey-induced torpor. Who knows, I might even take some.

The sign is in front of the McDonald's on South Broadway in Soulard. I wonder what D B S stands for. Damn burger slop? Don't buy spinach? Leave a comment if you have other creative suggestions.

The trip to Kansas got canceled. A local family member needed urgent medical attention. So far, so good, and I may be able to say more about it later. However, as a big fan of St. Louis native William S. Burroughs, I was blown away when I found out that the surgeon was named Dr. Benway! boggleboggleboggle... Burroughs wrote: Dr. Benway is operating in an auditorium filled with students: "Now, boys, you won't see this operation performed very often and there's a reason for that.... You see it has absolutely no medical value. No one knows what the purpose of it originally was or if it had a purpose at all. Personally I think it was a pure artistic creation from the beginning.

I hope the art was working yesterday. I really, really do.

The Western Lands

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Next to Calvary Cemetery, where Tennessee Williams rests, is Bellefontaine Cemetery. The two of them contain the remains of many people of local note and a few of international stature. Williams and William S. Burroughs top the list.

Burroughs, a native St. Louisan, was a revolutionary writer. His 1959 novel, Naked Lunch, was the last written work prosecuted for obscenity in the U.S. Burroughs won. If you don't know him and are interested, the anthology Word Virus is a perfect introduction. My copy sits by my bedside. It also has a CD of the author reading his work, much of which is hilarious. His satire of Franklin Roosevelt's pre-war administration and battles with the Supreme Court is fall-out-of-your-chair funny and not for the kiddies.

Burroughs is a champion to me but I bet that many people picking up one of his books for the first time would think he's dangerously insane, flagrantly offensive, or both. Well, you pays your money and you takes tour choice. The Western Lands is the name of one of his best-known novels (I loved it), the title referring to the ancient Egyptian home of the dead west of the Nile. At least Bill made it west of the Mississippi.

By the way, the object to the right of the stone is a decaying pumpkin with a couple of cigarette butts sticking out of it, probably left by a fan. Burroughs would approve.

WHAT I NEED TO FIGURE OUT REAL SOON: where the bleep did I put my remote shutter release?

TOMORROW: winter looking down, part 1.