Great documentary on William Burroughs available on Google video. About an hour and a half long.

I haven’t watched it all yet, but I watched some really interesting snippets - in one of them Burroughs discussed the time, in Mexico, when he shot his wife Joan dead after she suggested they ‘do their William Tell act’. You couldn’t make this stuff up. More than a little disturbing. Between the craziness of his real life and the insanity of his fiction his own life becomes merged with his writings and if events like this weren’t well documented publicly you’d think he must be making it up.

When I was in school there was a push on to try and interest people in the Library as a resource. The librarian came around and explained that we could request a book be bought for the library if we could present a good reason for buying it. I knew of one of Burroughs books of essays, which was among his tamer works, which contained an essay on the Great Gatsby. The Great Gatsby was on our course, so I went and presented my case to the librarian, who was a lovely woman.

I forget the name of the book of essays now, but if I remember correctly, in Burroughs analysis of The Great Gatsby, Gatsby was a literature junkie and had to shoot up pure prose on a regular basis to survive…

Anyway, shortly after I was called to the library and the librarian kindly explained that when she rang up to order the book it was out of stock, but that she asked if there were any other books by the same author available and she had been sent The Naked Lunch. Not one of Burroughs tamer books. By a long shot.

I thanked her and left the library as quickly as possible and related to my friends how I was now responsible for the most depraved book in the school library. It would only take one young first year to innocently pull the book down from the shelf and flick through it before they’d run screaming form the library scarred forever and I’d be hunted down for perverting and disgracing my school.

That never happened because having related my sordid tale one of my friends nicked what he perceived to be the only book of value in the school library.