beats, william s burroughs - book - 2011 - Naked Tea: The Burroughs Bits

Naked Tea: The Burroughs Bits
Philip Willey with George Laughead
illustrations by Lyle Schultze
2011
54 pages

This book is a brief piece of William S. Burroughs fan-fiction, apparently excerpted from a novel-in-progress by Philip Willey.  Although the author is writing a novel, his name only appears online in conjunction with other small publications, or with anecdotes about meeting writers.  Naked Tea is, according to the book’s website, inspired by meetings with Burroughs.  Willey (I believe it to be the same Willey, although I may be mistaken) previously contributed an anecdote about meeting Henry Miller to a 1989 book titled Brushes with Greatness: An Anthology of Chance Encounters with Celebrities.  Willey seems to have a knack for turning his run-ins with authors into writing of his own, as exhibited in Naked Tea.

This book is a small and short self-published work featuring a brief narrative of hanging around and talking which includes William S. Burroughs as a character.  The writing itself is more Hunter S. Thompson (who is referenced directly in the text) prose-style than Burroughs, and so is much of the art, which (sorta) evokes a pastiche of Ralph Steadman’s wild illustrations, with one exception being a mixed media image that looks like a modified piece by Jean Dubuffet.  The text is a tribute to Burroughs, more than anything else, as it often reads as a stream of unexplained references to Burroughs fairly large and disjointed body of written works.

Lyle Schultz - 2010 - The Cut Ups (featured in Naked Tea)

Jean Dubuffet - similar to an image in Naked Tea!

The pieces written by Willey are imaginary conversations with the great American author, and this book thus makes an odd and fictional companion to other collections of Burroughs interviews such as the Semiotext(e) publication Burroughs Live, and the RE/Search books on Burroughs.  After two such imagined encounters between Willey (presumably) and Burroughs, the first at a tea shop (hence the title) the second at a rock concert, the book segues to a candid sketch of Burroughs in his final months contributed by George Laughead, the manager of the Kansas Heritage Group virtual library.  Laughead was a personal friend to Burroughs while the author lived in Laurence Kansas, and his online resource includes a Burroughs photo gallery and a page devoted to the Beat movement (which features a promotional statement regarding this book).

Apparently this is not the only work of Burroughs/Beats fan fiction out there...

Photo of installation by Marco Perego featuring a sculpted representation of Burroughs titled The Only Good Rock Star is a Dead Rock Star