R.I.P. Bill Burroughs

["Fiona Webster" <fi>]

"The doctor smiles terribly.  "I am referring your case directly to
  the coroner.' '' ---William S. Burroughs

I just heard about Burroughs' death by reading about it in this
AM's _Washington Post_.  I knew it was coming some year, and
I guess Allen Ginsberg's death was a warning of sorts, but still... I 
have that stunned, empty feeling you have when someone you've always
treasured, just that they're *out* there, being who they are, is now 
gone.  The "chronic malingerer," he called himself.  I wanted to 
believe he would never die.

The _Washington Post_ said that Kerouac and Ginsberg were better
known than Burroughs, and maybe that's true, but of the three,
Burroughs has been the most important to me (although it's a close
call).  Because of his writing -- his arrival in Interzone with "that 
grey anonymously ill-intentioned look that all writers have" -- 
because of _Naked Lunch_ and _Nova Express_ and "language is a virus 
from outer space" and the cut-up techniques and the talking asshole 
routine and the tales of Tangiers and the incomparable sound of his 
voice reading his own stuff. Giorno Poetry Systems.  "Towers, Open 
Fire."  The Inspector of Sewers.  The feel of a gun in his hand.  The 
Disposable Heroes of Hypocrisy.  Spare Ass Annie.  Dead City Radio. 
Even the Nike commercials were cool. *Damn.*  (I know I'm sayin' 
what's incredibly obvious.)

The way he envisioned death and eros -- the terminal orgasm.

The (putatively) morally repugnant universe (think Genet, Artaud) 
that is somehow redemptive anyway because of the sheer perversity of 
its beauty.

WSB was/is a master of repetition: repetition of images, repetition 
of words, repetition of ideas.  Repetition like that gets your mind 
going on an entirely different level, so when he wants to make a 
point, he doesn't even have to talk about the subject...he can talk 
about whatever he wants, and the reader makes the connection.  

The exquisite nuances of his paranoia: "the agent inside''---the spy 
who, unbeknownst to us, lives inside of us, betraying us,

The way he echoed Cocteau, Kafka, Rimbaud, Blake, Spengler, et al.

His attraction to the gratuitous act.

J. G. Ballard called him "the first mythographer of the mid-twentieth 
century, and the lineal successor to James Joyce, to whom he bears 
more than a passing resemblance--exile, publication in Paris, 
undeserved notoriety as a pornographer, and an absolute dedication to 
the Word . . . His novels are the first definitive portrait of the 
inner landscape of our mid-century, using its unique language and 
manipulative techniques, its own fantasies and nightmares."

Damn.  I'm gonna miss him.

			--Fiona Webster