William Burroughs: unlikely mentor for neurologist writer Andrew Lees
A couple of years ago, at a European Beat Studies Network conference in Tangier, I interviewed a character named Davis Schneiderman. I asked Davis what William Burroughs meant to him. He said ‘Different people have their different Burroughs. But no one has Burroughs. That’s the secret. There is no Burroughs, at least not in a way easily communicable in a few words.’ I was reminded of this when I read Andrew Lees’s Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment.
Andrew is a medical doctor and Professor of Neurology at the National Hospital in London. He is one of the three most highly cited Parkinson’s researchers in the world and included in Thomson Reuters 2015 List of the World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds. Andrew’s Burroughs is someone with an enormous amount to teach the medical scientific establishment. His Burroughs is very different from mine and perhaps yours. Which is one of the reasons why it was such a pleasure to talk to him.
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