No one ever mentioned William Burroughs to the Prof. Junior in excitement interrupted the Prof to praise the cut-up technique, its revolutionary impact on the future of literature and culture, and the controversial leader of this experimental style. After preparing and serving veal and wine to the thirteen other students who hadn’t been in detention and the Prof (who seemed particularly taken by the sanguine/plasmatic elements), their assignment was the famed cut-up technique. On day two, Junior was granted release and permitted re-entry if he forfeited several of his basic rights and abided to certain nonbinding, categorical statutory limitations. It was all a blur, but what was to follow was a twenty minute tirade on monarchs’ irresponsible intergenerational migration patterns, gypsy garb and orgiastic violent nature, and unsanitary caravan encampments the sooey of a bayou tenor followed by Junior’s physical submission into the cold linoleum floor and the forced detention he faced with some forty or so other students in a humid, dim, windowless trailer that had far past exceeded its capacity, fire/safety regulations. Though on reflection one might muse upon the raw, terrible beauty of its provocation, the scene was a brutal induction to the course, to say the least. No moths, schmetterlings, papers folded in half, ribbons, nothing remotely lepidopteran. It was later learned that in fact, one doesn’t mention butterflies at all in his class, at any time. Junior’s initial mistake was mentioning his first-day-of-school butterflies as an icebreaker for the Prof’s Workshop.

The sooey pill