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:
“In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas ... a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“To save the theatre, the theatre must be destroyed, the actors and actresses must all die of the plague. They poison the air, they make art impossible. It is not drama that they play, but pieces for the theatre. We should return to the Greeks, play in the open air; the drama dies of stalls and boxes and evening dress, and people who come to digest their dinner.”
—Eleonora Duse (1859–1924)