“Mortimer graduated at M.I.T. and returned to St. Louis. In 1908 he married an elegant, ethereal St. Lousi woman of twenty named Laura Lee – a debutante who was tall and thin, much given to seeing ghostly apparitions and reading meaning into all seeming happenstance. The daughter of an eminent Methodist minister, the Rev. James Wideman Lee, Laura used crystal ball and Ouija board to contact the spirits of the departed.”

Might explain a thing or two about WSB’s worldview too.

G.

He does so much to prevent me from feeling “…old and gray and in the way.”

And your ‘Like Mother, Like Son’ piece is something you should feel very proud of.

An ability to examine the WSB legacy from such oblique angles is quite rare, in my own experience.

See, that’s the great thing about the net – it makes things so much easier sometimes. All I had to do was email Coke, they put me in contact with a top PR man, he posted me the info…and I didn’t even have to leave my chair. I looked high and low for info about LLB online, but could only ever find copies of her books, or ads from them, for sale. I got into the Singin’ Sam thing a bit, and found myself at websites with recordings of his, but no mention of who was in the shows, so it would be impossible to go through them all (and I can’t remember if you had to pay for them or not). You can find yourself at some weird and wonderful websites just from starting at one and following a history paper-trail.

It’s INCREDIBLE the amount of stuff on the net now, just at the click of a button or three. SUPERB. And people, as long as approached cordially, are generally gracious enough to help out. I always make sure to thank people for their help, because a little courtesy goes a long way. The net can be a bad thing, in that it can stifle thinking, but for the serious researcher it can offer so, so much by just putting a few words into search engine. It may be time consuming to look through endless pages, but the response you get from interested people like yourself makes it all worth it. And I’m very proud of that piece – I felt sort of weird writing it, and my wife looked at me slightly askance, but my hunch paid off about it.

Thanks yet again.
G.

I thoroughly appreciate the diligence that went into this work accompanying the ‘Like Mother, Like Son’ piece.

For me, it highlights how the “Electronic Book” could become something really useful to literary and linguistic research instead of merely being the marginal novelty item that presently marks its cultural significance.

If the collected works of all of our favorite authors – William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Jose Luis Borges and Marshall McLuhan in my case – were amassed into one of these gizmos, we could do amazing searches through all the amalgamated, machine readable, electronic documents and output cool stuff to files or our printers.

I would like to see ‘electronic publishing’ evolve to such a state in my own lifetime. Yet another case of “waiting for the connection to show…”

So, thank you for the excellent leg work on another fascinating subject about William S. Burroughs.