- William S. Burroughs: “Okay, now just put the apple on your head, dear.”
There are two Burroughses. One is fascinating, the other one not so much. One is like a creature from another world; the other has the originality of an artist who finds middle-class values to be suffocating and dadaism to be liberating. The first Burroughs can do something as basic as walking down a street, or as empty as staring at you with those bleary and old eyes, or as banal as singing a popular tune from back in the day while doing some chore or other in a small apartment, and yet he never for a moment loses his grip on your attention. The other Burroughs is the one we find in the pages of his books (of which there are too many), and also his readings—desk on a stage, lamp over papers, flat words flowing out of a mouth whose lips barely part. The sad truth (for some) is that Burroughs is just far more fascinating as a person—as a body, as clothes on that body, as a being at rest or in motion—than as a writer…
