Tuesday, April 08, 2003

I'm turning into a William Burroughs scholar of sorts. Rereading biographies, buying "restored" versions of his books...what next? If WSB was still alive I'd probably be pounding on his door in Lawrence: "Open up! You're the only sane person left on this planet! Please speak to me!"

Actually, I did exchange words with Burroughs once, at a symposium at the University of Kansas. Usually meeting authors is boring. It's their books we're interested in, after all. And while I didn't "meet" Burroughs, it was almost intolerably cool just to have him sitting nearby.

In other news: Boy, we sure "liberated" some Iraqis today, huh? A field correspondent on NPR said that the hospital in Baghdad had stopped keeping track of the bodies. Fifteen of them had been stuffed in a freezer to keep them from rotting prematurely.

The US blew Iraqi TV headquarters to smithereens, of course. Why? Most likely to seal a potentially nasty public relations breach: I doubt Dubbya is too keen on the idea of actual reality intruding on his crusade in the form of televised corpses. It's in bad taste. And it's unpatriotic. We should all be buying Precious Moments "freedom fighter" figurines (yes, these infernal goddamned things actually exist) and tying yellow ribbons around trees and in general acting like the brainwashed numbskulls we're inexorably becoming.

Maybe I should stop reading Burroughs for a while. I've heard those "Left Behind" books are addictive!

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