1 post tagged “beat poets”

William S. Burroughs is a literary worm weaponed, curled, and coiled in the dank, warm basement of my parietal lobe. When I first discovered the Beats, Ginsberg was of primary importance. Perhaps, because he was (as always) in fashion. The Beats were forbidden fruit to me, like dogged-eared Playboys hidden under my bed or in the deep recesses of my bedroom closet. There was a lust there, in those words. And, timid as I was, afraid to read them. I was, for all practical purposes, a benign teenager, disaffected, yet terrified to do anything to prove it. The Beats were seductive and scary, doing with language no boy had read before.

(I do not remember when I learned about Burroughs. Much of my knowledge of authors is the discovery of new freckles: sudden cognizance of something long since there, only later noticed.)

I learned more about him before I read him. I knew about the unfortunate incidence about the apple and his wife. I knew about the drugs. I knew about Interzone. And when he died, most of America, I am sure, thought he was already dead. Or wished him dead. Or left him for dead.

But when I found him, I found the voice of a sibyl, whose words are nothing less than infection and the Sickness and the sweltering nights of north Africa. Where Camus offers a moral compass, Burroughs sells that compass for the next hit of junk.