William S Burroughs - Dead City Radio [1990]

Bill’s Narratives

This is a fascinating listening experience, Burroughs reading a selection of his writing set to music, some of this music written specifically for the performances, for example three by John Cale, and one each by Donald Fagan and Sonic Youth. It ranges widely, from the caustic satire of A Thanksgiving Prayer – surely and sadly apt today where it would also intone the Tea Party – to the beautiful horror of Naked Lunch Excerpts: You Got Any Eggs For Fats?/Dinner... and the mocked beatitudes of The Sermon on the Mount (W.S.B. Reads The Good Book) where Burrows interrupts his recitation with the comic bathos of ‘ah, he keeps repeating himself....’

I’m not as knowledgeable of Burroughs’ work as I should or would like to be – and listening to this reading prompts me to rectify this – but I was pleased to be asked to contribute to a memorial collection of writing for him in the 1998 Stride anthology my kind of angel, i.m. william burroughs, and this is my poetic tribute:

Naked

No mummified asshole

or sureshot

Bill could still see through

to the end of his fork:

probably Beluga caviar

because after the Sickness

this was addiction

to dream of killing for.

Wouldn’t you?

Well, not really,

nor Mexican boys,

but reading was fun –

kinda like sharing without

the messiness.

The Artistic Adviser

said it was all junk

so we’d all read on

in that comfortable

and cosy fix,

perhaps missing the humour

and ironies:

goose-pimples and

smooth sea shells,

shit on the stelea,

the fact that

we’re all patatas fritas

in the phosphorous heat

of Bill’s narrative.