Last year we invited pre-eminent Burroughs scholar, Oliver Harris to select his most fitting, prophetic Burroughs-ian aperçus. It’s all of course prophetic and highly pertinent, every word that Burroughs wrote, but what more fitting than his 1953 tour-de-force, “Roosevelt After Inauguration“? (originally included in a letter to Allen, before being included in The Yage Letters (1963), and later published as a stand-alone volume by City Lights back in 1979).
We featured it (how could we not?) on Inauguration Day, January 2025 (and indeed on Inauguration Day, 2017). We make no apologies for featuring it again, and drawing your attention to the recent new and expanded edition – Roosevelt After Inauguration Redux. edited with an introduction by Harris, with a translation into German by Udo Breger, and published by the estimable Moloko Print.
from Harris’ introduction:
“If you didn’t know better, you would swear “Roosevelt After Inauguration” had been posted online this morning. You could say of almost all Burroughs’ texts that they read as fresh and fierce as the day they were written but in the case of “Roosevelt..” it really doesn’t seem to date from the 1950s let alone to be about US presidents of the 1930s, if you assume the names were changed to dodge a libel bullet, it reads like a wild gallows-humor satire of our present-day political apocalypse, a dirty bomb of obscene words primed to go off in the ugly orange face of the 47th President of the United States…”
“..a routine that ridicules a POTUS who fancies himself as a Roman Emperor, an American Caesar or latter day Nero shamelessly trashing democratic institutions, filling his cabinet with incompetent crooks, and packing the Supreme Court with purple-assed baboons for his stooges..”
“What seduces me”, Harris writes, “is not the illusion of prophecy…but the reality of this recurrent dreamlike sensation.. The coincidence is not literally prophetic but rather prophetically literal..”
Burroughs initial note to Allen (May 23, 1953): “Dear Al,/Enclose a routine I dreamed up. The idea did come to me in a dream from which I woke up laughing –…/ Love, / Bill.”.
Allen’s response?
“He thought it was funny and when I read it. I thought it was funny too…I was a liberal in those days and still am a commie pinko of some sort but when.I got this, it was just outrageous and obviously funny. It was like Alfred Jarry‘s Docteur Faustroll, or Ubi Roi.
It has some element of the school joke, but on the other hand it’s amazingly prophetic in terms of what actually goes on in politics.”
He thought it was funny but he was also (as was Burroughs intention) challenged and provoked:
“This (his comment), Harris notes, “is from years later but there is no need to doubt Ginsberg’s recollection. He knew Burroughs’ sense of humor and he knew when Burroughs was not just winding him up because he’d been a victim of it for years. As a letter-routine “Roosevelt” grew out of the long letter-lectures that Burroughs had mailed him throughout the late 1940s and into the early 1950s. This was before an epistolary dynamic of dependence or desire between the two men, and Burroughs wasn’t being insincere or ironic, he meant what he said but he was still playing a part, these were still performances..”
Citing a contemporary term (but one with, it turns out, a robust pre-history), Burroughs was “trolling”
Allen and, quite specifically, in response to recent correspondence from him, Harris reveals, was the spur and, paradoxically, the target
“Is this the real meaning of “Roosevelt” – that Burroughs used it to “own the libs” by trolling Allen Ginsberg?”
“Launching a vicious attack on Ginsberg’s favorite president might seem counter-intuitive if Burroughs desired and depended on him, but Burroughs was a master of reverse psychology – or should that be perverse psychology?” – “His routine for Ginsberg”, Harris notes, “plays out the same sado-masochistic psychology of seduction-repulsion that previous routines had for (a previous fixation) (Lewis) Marker
“Roosevelt” wasn’t about Roosevelt – or the New Deal, or the Presidency and the Supremes. All that was secondary to the goal of getting a reaction.That’s the thing about the economy of the letter-routine, that provoking a response is internal to its aesthetic, essential to it, the urgent personal context driving its political content”
Harris acknowledges the cruelty of the troll – “At the core of trolling is humiliation, and so its humor is essentially sadistic in taking pleasure in the other’s pain”
It’s also, as in “Roosevelt After Inauguration”, he argues, if listened to properly, cathartic.
“”We’ve always needed Burroughs”, Harris writes, “to wake us from our suspension of disbelief, our retreat into private resignation or business as usual politics, to shock us out of Capitalist Realism and liberal guilt. That “Roosevelt” provokes in me a nervous laughter is as it should be for a text that trolls the humanism of my inner Ginsberg – idealistic, naive, hypocritical. We need Burroughs not just to tell us the house is on fire but make us feel the heat. Were his words of warning all for nothing – or was it always too late?”
The first half of this edition presents a detailed account of the book’s complicated publishing history, notably the “pirated” 1964 edition from Fuck You Press – “In addition with assisting (Ed) Sanders with the binding, Ginsberg also upped the ante by emblazoning the back cover..with provocative references to the text.”
The front cover too – (“Ginsberg’s crudely hand-drawn covers”), his (intentionally) “raw amateurish graphics”)
This edition was also the first too to use a (redacted) version of the covering May 23 letter.
Harris tracks the many manifestations of “Roosevelt”, one notable one, his performance of ir in 1978 at the Nova Convention:
“Burroughs read only about 40% of it at the Nova Convention….but what it lacked in completeness it made up for in significance. This was, after all, not just any reading but Burroughs’ choice for his opening keynote address. He could literally not have given the text a higher billing.”
He takes issue with Burroughs opening remarks (the wording was “slippery..as well as factually sloppy”) – “But the key significance of the Nova reading was not the content or the framing but the medium itself..on stage at the Entermedia Theater in New York, he put “Roosevelt” on the map as a performance piece”
“This film is a sort of tip of the iceberg of this crazy, huge archive with Burroughs and all of these people and lots of ideas. It was a very conscious thing. I wanted to do two things with this movie. I wanted to put you in the NOVA convention to experience that, and I wanted to weave from the archive, put together, write with it, if you will, ideas that would speak to things that I thought were relevant and useful for today cause I’m still making this movie for today’s audience in today’s world.”
Burroughs looking into the future – We mentioned the forthcoming Cambridge University Press book, Allen Ginsberg in Context, CUP are planning a similar William Burroughs title, William Burroughs in Context (edited by Oliver Harris, Davis Schneiderman and Alex Wemar-Colan (due out this coming July). Thomas Antonic‘s much-anticipated The Three Wives of Queer William S Burroughs is due out from Beatdom in 2026 (Beatdom, it was who recently published Stewart Mayer‘s The Bunker Diaries)
One name pre-eminent and sadly absent this year (he passed away on New Years Day after a long illness), writer, scholar, editor, musician, James Grauerholz (the companion, and later adopted son, of William from 1974 to 1997, and, following that, guardian of his legacy, executor of Burroughs’ estate). See Ira Silverberg’s announcement, Steven Taylor’s obituary notice and Oliver Harris’ obituary notice – here
And today is also the birthday of important Ginsberg friend & associate poet activist Janine Pommy Vega RIP 🖤