Verbal reruns on the Web Analysis/Commentary The Web may yet have value as a medium for literary reruns. The New York Times this week featured articles and news about William S. Burroughs in its online edition. Here is our opportunity to visit again with an unpalatable author in a free medium -- which, of course, is like opening the Burger King drive up to the mission bums, a cheap treat dressed up as patronage. How many illusions have we had about The Times, we mission bums of culture? We forget that within its hallowed walls are patty machines -- frozen tripe and greasy carbohydrates -- the stuff of fast-food empires served on starched white paper. The Times has always pretended to serve the elite, but it toadies to the subway crowd. As much a servant of the public as any yellow rag, it pays its reporters and writers better, so they check their facts a little more carefully, search deeper, and reward themselves with a stylistic curlicue. Which doesn't impress the rewrite experts, but it does give the paper a cosmopolitan cachet. The Times' culturati love the miserati, the unholier than them, the maladaptive artists -- especially, the dead ones. They are enamored of artists who spend their life dying, like Genet, Kerouac, and Burroughs. In the tradition of intestinal bacteria, they renounce the open air and thrive on decomposition, deconstruction, and de-definition. They slim down their narrow views so that they curl up like weaving genetic strands. They think small in hopes of creating big. And, in some respects, perhaps they succeed. The Times' docu-series represents a step ahead in the pussy-footed progress of large institutions. Beyond the pretentious prose and attitudes of The Times' columnists, lies a trail of living clues, a crime scene still fresh and smoking. The perpetrator has decamped, but the gun is still warm. The victim shows traces of lividity, but perhaps lividity sets in early at literary crime scenes. The historians and analysts have yet to cordon off the area and begin their messy collections. Burroughs serves as a good subject for literary autopsy. Here is a man who, alive, could hold his breath for hours. We learn little of his inner workings either through his own prose or that of his acquaintance, Jack Kerouac. He is a fetishistic oddity -- a shadow, a skeleton, a mask of death in life and life in death. He cuts an ugly swath across the times he lived, engaged in crime, and for those who seem to know a little about such things, enjoyed perversity. He loved guns and hated people. He spoke like an oracle, but thought like a dime novelist. He minced his words, his prose, his books, until only the florid bacteria of underlife -- the exceptional culturati -- could digest his work. We others, still try. Unlike Kerouac, who talked a blue streak and resurrected the oral tradition, Burroughs' prose runs cold, analytic, ironic, and gutteral. He is the soul of meanness, wrapped in a deceptive bonhomie. Good old Uncle Bill, the blessed blackguard, the belching bohemian. Unlike Vladimir Nabokov, his contemporary, he lacks a living progeny, a PR man for afterlife. But, like him, he explores the evil flowers of art, and thumbs his nose at virtue. We view him now through the lenses of decades, a cypher of Sunday afternoons spent eviscerating The Times' Egyptian pulp. But today we also have the Web. A 24-by-7 cypher, unspoiled by Faberge or Armani; the cold print of yesterday transformed into electric words that burrow deep into time, and into Burroughs' burrow, the Interzone between now and yesterday, dream and rational thought, good taste and bad. These testimonials eat away, thankfully, at the margins of our perception, like the ever-present death of life in change. February 16, 2000