Besides getting his toilet fixed by a man called “Dirty Dave,” William Burroughs spent the day reading Asylum by Patrick McGrath.

It’s been a long time since I read that book. I remember I enjoyed it but little more.

What Burroughs notes is a line: “She brushed at a wasp that was buzzing around her glass.” This is a good detail, he says. A wasp is something we can all relate to as a thing that gets our attention when it’s around. The reader is “there,” as Burroughs puts it, imagining how it would be seeing the wasp.

We’ve all got a go-to strategy for dealing with wasps. I had a friend who, if a wasp landed on his face, would just sit absolutely still until the wasp got bored and flew away. Anything not to annoy the wasp. I’m usually a bit more pro-active, jumping up and shooing until it clears off.

The point is, the wasp puts you in the story because you immediately know what you would do in that situation.

At this point in his life (Burroughs was 83), he would read, and scribble a bit, read some more… until friends dropped around in the late afternoon and it was time for cocktails. In his last journals, Burroughs often seemed frustrated that he couldn’t get a new piece of writing going. He’d try jumping off from whatever he’d been reading. Today he’s reading a book about a psychiatrist, which gets him thinking about the career he never had in medicine. He starts writing a story about a doctor who spies on his patients as they sit in the waiting room, but he only gets a couple of lines in.

“What I’m writing here is lifeless and flat as old mud-spattered snow.”

Burroughs is concerned with liveliness today; how to make words and images jump off the page at the reader. He can’t find anything as vivid as a wasp.

(I’ve been reading Last Words: The Final Journals of William Burroughs, edited by James Grauerholz.)