I don't remember when I first heard of him. I know that I'd absorbed a lot of his ideas, because I was paying attention to artists who were paying attention to him. I knew the phrases before I knew the man as anything more than "One of the original Beats." Naked Lunch, Language is a Virus, The Soft Machine, The Orgasm Death Gimmick... These were in my head--I just didn't know from where they had come.
Years ago, Michele wrote a paper on Burroughs. She used my computer to type and print the paper. We talked about it, and I looked through the books she used for research. It cracked my head open.
I read Naked Lunch. I read interviews. I read critiques. Something was very wrong with Burroughs, I thought, but he had a thrilling set of work habits and concerns. The cut-ups, fold-ins, and collages put pressure on a part of me that I had not acknowledged since coming to school. My artistic inclinations became a confluence. Photography, collage, and writing met in the scrapbooks. Burroughs tapped me on the shoulder and laughed at my fumblings with his methods.
Late in the year, two friends and I took a road trip through the Southeast. Our original idea was to go see Burroughs's grave in Kansas. After we found out that he's buried in New York, we decided to stay closer to home. We drove to see author's graves in the southeast--Walker Percy, John Kennedy Toole, and Faulkner--and on the trip, we recorded our conversations and destinations in a copy of Naked Lunch which we casually mangled--crayons, ink, glued photographs and receipts, cigarette burns, page bits cut and reattached--until it became a singular object. I took it to conferences to show it off. Naked Lunch and the scrapbooks got me a job.
Burroughs sits with me most days, and sometimes he even guides my hand. He devoted himself to exploring his unbearable core, and he left behind a trail that one can follow to anywhere.
