William Burroughs Portrait by David Van Gough

"Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact"
William S Burroughs

The Poe piece I produced around Halloween was so well received, that between completing the sculpture and working on my book, I thought I'd continue the theme in a few spare hours this afternoon.

So Bill Burroughs-agent provocateur extraordinaire-the minds eye projecting a living corpse,dandy in the underworld, smacked up and shacked up in some seedy insectoid-alien infected apartment, writing virulent, insane prose and re assembling it in a wild turkey fever.

The myth of the man is all the more compelling in that he left the kind of exquisite indelible stain on literature that even the sterility of a shiny new Kindle could not erase.
And then there is Naked Lunch- a murky descent into the grotesques of the mind and the psycho sexual horror of a homophobes, crab infested nightmare, more in keeping with a Surrealists manifesto than any Beat generations wanderlust.

Of course I went on to read Nova Express, Wild Boys, The Soft machine and all the others, but the mercurial oddness of that book has stayed with me, which is why Mr Mugwump is the subject of this latest portrait.

It's also notable in that he has always reminded me of my old friend-John Liddy.