By coincidence JR sent me some scans of an obituary in Rolling Stone magazine that includes a piece Hunter S. Thompson wrote about William S. Burroughs, at the same time my Beat Scene magazine issue 56 came in the door from Kevin Ring. Both of which gave me some fodder for to-days post. William S. Burroughs 11th anniversary was August 2nd.

Rolling Stone issue # 769 published  9/18/1997 has an obituary published just after the death of William S. Burroughs, here is the piece HST wrote about him.

“William had a fine taste for handguns, and later in life he became very good with them. I remember shooting with him one afternoon at his range on the outskirts of Lawerence. He had five or six well oiled old revolvers laid out on a wooden table, covered with a white linen cloth, and he used whichever one he was in the mood for at the moment. The S&W .45 was his favorite. “This is my finisher” he said lovingly and then he went into a crouch and then put five out of six shots through the chest of a human-silhouette target about 25 yards away.

Hot Damn, I thought, we are in the presence of a seroius Shootist. Nicloe had been filiming it all with the Hi8, but I took the camera off her and told her to walk out about 10 yards in front of us and put an apple on her head. Wiliam smiled wanly and waved her off. “Never mind my dear” he said to her. “We’ll pass on that trick” Then he picked up the .454 Casul Magnum I’d brought with me. “But I’ll try this one” He said. “I like the looks of it.” The .454 is the most powerful hand gun in the World. It is twice as strong as a .44 Magnum, with a huge scope and a recoil so brutal that I was reluctant to let an 80-year-old man shoot it. This thing will snap back and crack your skull if you don’t hold it properly. But William persisted. The first shot lifted him two or three inches off the ground, but the bullet hit the throat of the target, two inches high. “Good shot,” I said. “Try a little lower and a click to the right.” He nodded and braced again.

His next shot punctured the stomach and left nasty red welts on his palms. Nicole shuddered visibly behind the camera, but I told her we’d only been kidding about the apple. Then, William emptied the cylinder, hitting once in the groin and twice just under the heart. I reached out to shake his hand as he limped back to the table, but he jerked it away and asked for some ice for his palms. “Well,” he said, “this is a very nasty piece of machinery. I like it.” I put the huge silver brute in its case and gave it to him. “It’s yours,” I said. “You deserve it.”

Which was true. William was a Shootist. He shot like he wrote- with extreme precision and no fear. He would have fired a M-60 from the hip that day if I’d brought one with me. He would shoot anything, and he feared nothing.”

Beat Scene magazine issue 56 has a great cover with a caricature of William S. Burroughs holding a gun, by Ashley Holt,  http://ashleyholt.com a site well worth checking out. In it there is an article by Oliver Harris called Everything Lost, the Latin American notebook of William S. Burroughs. The inside story.

Oliver Harris has done a huge amount of research on William S. Burroughs’ work, amongst other things he edited the 50th anniversary of “Junky”, he put together “The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1945-1959. There is some more information about his work on The Latin American Notebook here… http://judoairlines.blogspot.com/2007/12/everything-lost-latin-american-notebook.html

Also in this issue is an interesting article about Jack Kerouac’s On the Road scroll, and in the Beat Scene review section… Charles Bukowski, The Pleasures of the Dammed Poems 1951-1993, Dan Fante, Kissed by a Fat Waitress, The letters of Allen Ginsberg and many more.

Many thanks to JR for his ideas / thoughts on this and for the scans.