William Burroughs & Patti Smith & The Scarlet Fever Club

The speaker found a book called You're the Monkey to be similar to William Burroughs' work, as Burroughs believed that all the answers were within his writings. Burroughs also believed that suffering from scarlet fever at a young age opened a portal to receive otherworldly knowledge. The speaker and Burroughs shared the experience of having scarlet fever and even had a club called the scarlet fever club. The speaker felt that Burroughs' interpretation of the book of the dead was a way for him to reckon with mortality. The speaker also discussed how reading Burroughs' work was like following a jazz saxophone solo, where they would go with the flow of the writing without analyzing it.