Two Burroughs Pieces
Beyond the letters themselves, the book is noteworthy for two short pieces by Burroughs. The anarchic "Roosevelt After Inauguration", a savage parody of American politics in which "a purple-assed baboon" is appointed to the United States Supreme Court, was omitted from the original edition of the book on the grounds it might be considered obscene; it was subsequently issued as a chapbook later in the 1960s and was later published in the small volume Roosevelt After Inauguration and Other Atrocities with two political essays. The story was restored to The Yage Letters in a later reprinting by City Lights.
The second notable piece serves as the epilogue to the book. "I Am Dying, Meester?" is considered a poem by some and is an early demonstration of the "cut-up technique" espoused by Burroughs in the 1960s, shuffling together fragments of sentences and thoughts from other texts to create a surreal new narrative.
Read more about this topic: The Yage Letters
Famous quotes containing the words burroughs and/or pieces:
“After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“The chess-board is the world; the pieces are the phenomena of the universe; the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)