Amazing bit on William S. Burroughs’ stay in Lawrence, KS over at NPR: “Lawrence officials have dedicated a creek, a trail, a park… ‘The fact that there is a Burroughs playground is a little bit ironic,’ especially since Burroughs wrote about sexual encounters with young boys, accidentally shot and killed his wife, and took lots of drugs. Not everyone here is crazy about him, though you wouldn’t know it from the hundreds who turned up for one of the art exhibitions celebrating his centennial. James Growerford says that despite a very hard turn to the right in Kansas politics, the qualities of Lawrence that made Burroughs feel at home still stand. ‘And now it is my hope that the fact of his association with Lawrence will shine brightly, like a beacon, to indeed attract the different and the strange and the alien and the intelligent and the daring to this town.'”
I probably shouldn’t waste too many blips of internet light arguing against James Growerford, who will NEVER EVEN READ MY CONTENTION, but whenever completely secularized people speak about the “different and the strange and the daring” this little giddy interior voice says, “Oh, you must be referring to the flagellant monks!”
In graduate school, once, at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, on the first day of class, a fellow student (named something more feminine but she’d changed her name to Avery, which she considered “gender neutral”) said that she was specializing in Queer Studies. Person A (you can decide whether person A was or was not affiliated with the person writing this; it’s a free country after all) asked, “What is Queer Studies?” (knowing full damn well what Queer Studies is. She said that it is “all about promoting and studying deviant sexual behavior.” Person A said “Oh, so, in a permissive society wherein EVERY form of libidinous, uncontrolled sexual behavior is more or less lauded or at least loudly tolerated, then this would mean studying the behavior of celibate Benedictine monks.” “No,” Avery said. Person A did’t have the sanity to ask why. He was later found in the Swiss Alps, receiving natural spa treatments for post-traumatic stress. If you need to speak with him about further details, please contact his Angelic Lawyer, Angelico.
Yeah, sometimes I think the devil’s second greatest trick was convincing the world that sin was anything but ordinary.