Ah Pook The Destroyer
William Seward Burroughs II was born on February 5, 1914 in St. Louis, Missouri. His grandfather founded the Burroughs Adding Machine Company. He graduated from Harvard in 1936. In 1943 in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. What the three of them started together would become the Beat Generation, later a defining influence on the counterculture of the 1960s and on nearly everything that followed. In 1951 in Mexico City, Burroughs shot and killed his wife Joan Vollmer at a party in a failed William Tell act. He was convicted of manslaughter in absentia and given a two-year suspended sentence. He later wrote: “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death.” He spent the rest of his life writing his way out of that moment. Naked Lunch was published in 1959. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts prosecuted it as obscene. In 1966, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court declared it not obscene. The case stands as the last major literary obscenity trial in the United States. There are writers whose work changes what language can do. He was one of them.
At the Beat Hotel in Paris in 1959, Burroughs discovered the cut-up technique with artist Brion Gysin. They sliced pages of text and rearranged the fragments into new sequences. Burroughs believed the method had a magical function. He wrote: “When you cut word lines the future leaks out.” The names alone tell the story of his reach. Steely Dan took their name from a device in Naked Lunch. Soft Machine named themselves after his novel. David Bowie used cut-up methods to write lyrics for Station to Station and Heroes. Ian Curtis read him. Roger Waters read him. Patti Smith read him. Kurt Cobain read him. In the mid-1970s, Burroughs moved into a former YMCA gym on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He visited CBGB to watch Patti Smith perform. He interviewed Jimmy Page for Crawdaddy magazine in 1975. In 1978, the Nova Convention drew Frank Zappa, The B-52’s, Philip Glass, Allen Ginsberg, and Debbie Harry in his name. In 1992 he recorded a spoken word piece with Kurt Cobain. The man who had published Junkie in 1953 was still inside the underground four decades later. He did not influence music from a distance. He was inside it.
Ah Pook the Destroyer began in 1970 as a collaboration with artist Malcolm McNeill. The project took its name from Ah Puch, the Mayan death god. Burroughs had studied Mayan codices at Mexico City College in 1950. The mythology never left him. They worked on the graphic novel for years. Publishers came and went. The project was abandoned. The text appeared alone in 1979. Dead City Radio was recorded at Burroughs’ home in Lawrence, Kansas in December 1988. Producers Hal Willner and Nelson Lyon assembled the musical accompaniment: John Cale, Donald Fagen, Lenny Pickett, Chris Stein, Sonic Youth, and the NBC Symphony Orchestra. Island Records released it on August 31, 1990. Thirty-six years ago today. The track “Ah Pook the Destroyer” features Burroughs reading over John Cale’s music. It later became the soundtrack to an animated short film directed by Philip Hunt. He died August 2, 1997 in Lawrence, Kansas. His grave marker in St. Louis reads: American Writer. That is what he chose. That is what he was.