William S. BurroughsWilliam Seward Burroughs died recently at the age of 83 in the quiet of Lawrence, Kansas. Probably no other great American writer ever received such brutally damning “eulogy” upon his death. While the once-ridiculed Ginsberg was praised as one of America's greatest bards, obituary writers like Richard Severo of the New York Times (someone not very familiar with Burroughs' work) could dismiss this work as drugged-up experimentation and the public of Burroughs as mere "worshipping cults". Other obituary writers, hearing about clipping and randomization techniques, seemed drawn to their PCs' cut-and-paste icons, with which they turned critical sentences into gibberish. Thus, for the Associated Press, Naked Lunch "unleashed an underworld that defied narrative" and was somehow written "without standard narrative prose." published in Paris almost 40 years ago, it still poses such a threat to establishment arbiters that it must be continually misrepresented. After all, the literary world is unlikely to be inundated with Burroughs wannabes. Although he influenced experimental filmmakers, conceptual artists, and rock bands, his influence on writers and literature is harder to find. He left no school, few followers, no imitators. He was as unique as Joyce. But while countless writers around the world have attempted to incorporate Joyce's techniques, few have taken up Burroughs's. Even in the mid-1960s, the task of mass-marketing Burroughs required pigeonholing his work into familiar genres. “The only American novelist alive today who could be possessed by genius,” Norman Mailer proclaimed on the cover of the first American paperback edition of Naked Lunch. Its publisher, Grove Press, the most important and courageous publishing house of the time, knew what it had to do, and later works such as Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded and The Soft Machine were all explicitly labeled "a novel". Yet Burroughs then and always "simply" wrote books. He wasn't necessarily trying to change or explode the novel form. In Burroughs' books, routines, raps, skits and rants are held together by the sinews of sharply etched narrative prose. Reading it when it first appeared was like listening to a Lenny Bruce monologue. The "characters" who appeared were all playful voices: hucksters, drug dealers, swindlers looking for taps and brands: politicians, presidents of anti-fluoride companies, old screenwriters giving lectures on the viral nature of bureaucracy and the State..