QotD: "Many years ago my first contact with the Land of the Dead: It is in the backyard of 4664 Pershing Avenue." WS Burroughs

And here's another view of the William S. Burrough's birthplace as well as another quote of the day:

"Many years ago my first contact with the Land of the Dead: It is in the backyard of 4664 Pershing Avenue. Darkness and patches of oil and smell of oil. In the house now, and I am bending over Mother from in front, eating her back, like a dinosaur. Now Mother comes screaming into the room: “I had a terrible dream that you were eating my back.” I have a long neck that reaches up and over her head. My face in the dream is wooden with horror. It is like a segment of film underexposed. Not enough light. The light is running out. Dinosaurs rise from the tar pits on La Brea Avenue. Oil and coal gas."

From My Education: A Book of Dreams (1986-1994). As collected in Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader (1998)

QotD: "His mother had been to dancing school with “Tommy Eliot”—(His socks wouldn’t stay up. His hands were clammy." WS Burroughs

I had an opportunity to visit St. Louis on business and stayed at the Chase Park Plaza hotel in the Central West End. I've been there before, but while browing Google Maps, I saw that the birthplace of William S. Burroughs was just around the corner. Had to stop and take a peek (as I have always found Burroughs strangely compelling, both as a writer, a person, and a personality).

So, our quote today is from the Word Virus anthology:

"ST. LOUIS RETURN (ticket to St. Louis and return in a first class room for two people who is the third that walks beside you?) After a parenthesis of more than forty years I met my old neighbor, Rives Skinker Mathews, in Tangier. I was born 4664 Berlin Avenue changed it to Pershing during the war. The Mathews family lived next door at 4660—red brick three-story houses separated by a gangway large back yard where I could generally see a rat one time or another from my bedroom window on the top floor. Well we get to talking St. Louis and “what happened to so and so” sets in and Rives Mathews really knows what happened to any so and so in St. Louis. His mother had been to dancing school with “Tommy Eliot”—(His socks wouldn’t stay up. His hands were clammy. I will show you fear in dancing school)—Allow me to open a parenthesis you see Rives Mathews had kept a scrapbook of St. Louis years and his mother left a collection of visiting cards from the capitals of Europe. I was on my way back to St. Louis as I looked through Rives’s scrapbook dim flickering pieces of T. S. Eliot rising from the pages—(But what have I my friend to give you put aside on another tray? Those cards were burned in my winter house fire, October 27,1961..."

From The Burroughs Files (1984), "St. Louis Return" (1965). As collected in Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader (1998)

QotD: Stores selling artificial limbs, wig-makers, dental mechanics, loft manufacturers of perfumes, pomades, novelties, essential oils ...

Stores selling artificial limbs, wig-makers, dental mechanics, loft manufacturers of perfumes, pomades, novelties, essential oils. A point where dubious enterprise touches Skid Row

- Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader


Burroughs, much like Oscar Wilde, can turn a phrase faster than an aesthete can tipple their absinthe.

At left, a store window, certainly not in Skid Row, in Sao Paulo, Brasil.