William Seward Burroughs II ( ; 5 February 1914 - August 2, 1997) is an American visual writer and artist. Burroughs is the main character of the Beat Generation and the great postmodernist writer whose influence is thought to have influenced various popular cultures as well as literature. Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novels, six short story collections and four essay collections. Five books have been published about interviews and correspondence. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with many players and musicians, and made many appearances in the film. He was also known as pen name William Lee . Burroughs created and exhibited thousands of paintings and other visual artworks, including the famous 'Gunshot Paintings'.
He was born into a wealthy family in St. Louis. Louis, Missouri, grandson of inventor and founder of Burroughs Corporation, William Seward Burroughs I, and nephew of public relations manager Ivy Lee. Burroughs began writing essays and journals in his early teens, but did not start publishing his writings until his thirties. He left home in 1932 to study at Harvard University, study English, and anthropology as a graduate, and later study at medical school in Vienna. In 1942 Burroughs enlisted in the US Army to serve during World War II, but was rejected by the Office of Strategic Services and the Navy, after which he took a drug addiction that affected him for the rest of his life, while working various jobs. In 1943, while living in New York City, he became friends with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and beyond their mutual influence cultivated the foundations of the Beat Generation, which became a decisive influence on the 1960s cultural order.
Many of Burroughs' works are semi-autobiographical, mainly drawn from his experience as a heroin addict, while he lives throughout Mexico City, London, Paris and Tangier in Morocco, as well as from his travels in the Amazon of South America. His work also features the mythical, occult, or magical themes that are frequent - Burroughs constant preoccupations both in fiction and in real life.
Burroughs accidentally killed his second wife, Joan Vollmer, in 1951 in Mexico City with a pistol during a drunken "William Tell" game; he was convicted of premeditated murder. Burroughs finds success with his first novel of confession, Junkie (1953), but he is probably best known for his third novel Naked Lunch (1959), a highly controversial work that the subject of a court case after being challenged as violating US sodomy laws. With Brion Gysin, he also popularized literary cut-up techniques in works such as The Nova Trilogy (1961-1964).
In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the Academy and the Institute of American Art and Literature, and in 1984 he was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France. Jack Kerouac calls Burroughs "the greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift", a reputation he relies on for "lifelong subversion" of the modern moral, political, and economic system of American society, articulated in the often dark sarcophany. J. G. Ballard regarded Burroughs as "the most important writer that emerged since the Second World War", while Norman Mailer declared him "the only American author who may be dominated by geniuses".
Burroughs created visual art throughout his life, but never flaunted it until 1987, after the death of his friend and collaborator, Brion Gysin. During the last 10 years of his life, he presented his paintings and drawings in museums and galleries around the world.
Burroughs has one child, William S. Burroughs Jr. (1947-1981), with his second wife, Joan Vollmer. William Burroughs died at his home in Lawrence, Kansas, after suffering a heart attack in 1997.
Video William S. Burroughs
Early life and education
Burroughs was born in 1914, the younger of two sons born to Mortimer Perry Burroughs (June 16, 1885 - January 5, 1965) and Laura Hammon Lee (August 5, 1888 - October 20, 1970). His family is the foremost British ancestor in St. Petersburg. Louis, Missouri. His grandfather, William Seward Burroughs I, founded the company Adding Burroughs Machine, which evolved into Burroughs Corporation. Burroughs' mother is the daughter of a minister whose family claims to be closely related to Robert E. Lee. Her maternal uncle, Ivy Lee, was an advertising pioneer who was later hired as a publicist for Rockefeller. Her father runs an antique and gift shop, Cobblestone Gardens in St. Louis. Louis; and then in Palm Beach, Florida when they moved.
During Burroughs' childhoods developed a lifelong interest in magic and occultism - topics that will find their way into his work repeatedly over the years. Burroughs then describes how he saw the sighting of a green deer in the forest as a child, which he identifies as a totem animal, as well as a vision of a ghostly gray figure playing in his bedroom.
As a male, Burroughs lives on Pershing Ave. in St. Croix Louis' Central West End. He attended John Burroughs School at St. Louis where his first published essay, "Personal Magnetism" - which revolves around telepathic mind control - was printed at the John Burroughs Review in 1929. He later attended Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico, which made him stressful. The school is a boarding school for the rich, "where rich boys can be turned into male specimens." Burroughs keeps a journal documenting erotic attachments to other boys. According to his own account, he destroys this then, embarrassed by its contents. He keeps his sexual orientation hidden from his family to adulthood, because of the context in which he grows and from which he escapes - that is, "the family in which displays of affection are considered shameful". He became a famous homosexual writer after the Naked Lunch publication in 1959. Some say he was expelled from Los Alamos after taking cloral hydrates in Santa Fe with a college student. However, according to his own records, he volunteered: "During the Easter holiday in my second year, I persuaded my family to let me live in St. Louis."
Harvard University
Burroughs finished high school at Taylor School in Clayton, Missouri, and in 1932, left home to pursue an art degree at Harvard University, where he was affiliated with Adams House. During the summer, he worked as a cub reporter for St. Louis Post-Dispatch , covering the police folder. He did not like the work, and refused to cover several events, such as the death of a drowning child. He lost his virginity at St. Brothel's. Louis, Eastern Illinois that summer with a prostitute she routinely supports. While at Harvard, Burroughs traveled to New York City and was introduced to a gay subculture there. He visited lesbian dive, piano bars, and Harlem and the homosexual village of Greenwich Village with Richard Stern, a wealthy friend from Kansas City. They will drive from Boston to New York in a reckless way. Once, Stern was so scared of Burroughs that he asked to be expelled from the vehicle.
Burroughs graduated from Harvard in 1936. According to Ted Morgan Literary Outlaw ,
His parents, after his graduation, have decided to give him a monthly allowance of $ 200 of their income from Cobblestone Gardens, a substantial amount at the time. That's enough to keep him going, and indeed it guarantees his survival over the next twenty-five years, coming up with a pleasant regularity. The allowance is the ticket to freedom; it allows him to stay where he wants to and decide not to work.
Burroughs parents sold the rights to his grandfather's invention and did not own any shares in Burroughs Corporation. Shortly before the 1929 stock market crash, they sold their shares for $ 200,000 (equivalent to about $ 2,850,388 in today's funds).
Europe
After Burroughs graduated from Harvard, his formal education ended, except for a brief flirtation with anthropology studies at Columbia and medicine in Vienna, Austria. He traveled to Europe and became involved in the Austrian and Hungarian cultures of LGBT in the Weimar era; he raised young men in a steam bath in Vienna and moved into a circle of exiles, homosexuals and fugitives. There, he meets Ilse Klapper, a Jewish woman who fled the Nazi government in the country. The two had never been romantically involved, but Burroughs married her, in Croatia, against her parents' wishes, to allow her to get a visa to the United States. He went to New York City, and eventually divorced with Burroughs, though they remained friends for many years. After returning to the United States, he held a series of unattractive jobs. In 1939, his mental health became a concern for his parents, especially after he deliberately severed the last joint of the left pinkie on the knuckle to impress a man who was crazy about him. The show became an early fiction as the short story "The Finger."
Maps William S. Burroughs
Beginning of Beats
Burroughs enrolled in the US Army in early 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War II. But when he was classified as Infantry 1-A, not an officer, he became sad. His mother acknowledged his son's depression and made Burroughs a civil handicap-disabled discharge from duty based on the premise that he should not be allowed to register due to his previous mental instability. After being evaluated by a family friend, who is also a neurologist at a psychiatric care center, Burroughs waited five months limbo at Jefferson Barracks outside St. Louis. Louis before being dismissed. During that time he met a Chicago soldier who was also awaiting his release, and as soon as Burroughs was free, he moved to Chicago and held various jobs, including one as an exterminator. When his two friends from St. Louis, Lucien Carr, a student at the University of Chicago, and David Kammerer, Carr's admirer, went to New York City, followed Burroughs.
Joan Vollmer
In 1944, Burroughs began living with Joan Vollmer Adams in an apartment they shared with Jack Kerouac and Edie Parker, Kerouac's first wife. Vollmer Adams is married to G.I. with whom she has a daughter, Julie Adams. Burroughs and Kerouac had trouble with the law for failing to report a murder involving Lucien Carr, who had killed David Kammerer in a confrontation over the incessant and undesirable Kammerer hike. This incident inspired Burroughs and Kerouac to collaborate in a novel titled And Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, completed in 1945. Both novice writers could not publish it, but the manuscript was finally published in November 2008 by Grove Press and Penguin Books.
During this time, Burroughs began using morphine and became addicted. He eventually sold heroin in Greenwich Village to support his habit. Vollmer also became an addict, but the drug of choice was Benzedrine, an amphetamine that was sold on the table at that time. Because of his addiction and social circle, her husband immediately divorced her after returning from the war. With some insistence from Allen Ginsberg, and possibly also Kerouac, Burroughs became intellectually and emotionally associated with Vollmer and in the summer of 1945 had moved with Vollmer and his daughter. In the spring of 1946, Burroughs was arrested for fabricating a narcotics recipe. Vollmer asked his psychiatrist, Dr. Wollberg, to sign a guarantee letter for the release of Burroughs. As part of his release, Burroughs returns to St. Louis under the care of his parents, after which he went to Mexico to divorce with Ilse Klapper. Meanwhile, Vollmer's addiction caused a temporary psychosis that resulted in him entering Bellevue Hospital, which jeopardized the upbringing of his son. Upon hearing this, Burroughs soon returned to New York City to get his release, asking him to marry him. Their marriage was never formalized, but he lived as his wife-in-law. They returned to St. Louis to visit Burroughs parents and then move with his daughter to Texas. Vollmer soon became pregnant with Burroughs child. Their son, William S. Burroughs Jr., was born in 1947. The family moved briefly to New Orleans in 1948.
Mexico and South America (1950-1952)
Burroughs fled to Mexico to avoid a possible detention in Angola state prison, Louisiana. Vollmer and their children followed him. Burroughs plans to stay in Mexico for at least five years, the length of his statute of responsibilities. Burroughs also attended classes at Mexico City College in 1950 studying Spanish, as well as "Mexican image writing" (codices) and the Mayan language with R. H. Barlow.
Vollmer's Death
Their life in Mexico is an unpleasant thing. Without heroin and misuse of Benzedrine, Burroughs began chasing another man when his libido returned, while Vollmer, who felt abandoned, began drinking heavily and mocking Burroughs openly. One night while drinking with friends at a party over an American Bounty Bar in Mexico City, a drunken Burrough allegedly took his pistol from his travel bag and told his wife, "It's time for William Tell's action," though they never do such actions before. Vollmer, who also drank a lot and underwent amphetamine withdrawal, required him to put a tall glass in his head. Burroughs shot low and the bullet hit him, killing him immediately.
Soon after the incident, Burroughs claimed the "William Tell" incident had never happened, and that he had dropped his gun and was accidentally fired. Burroughs spent 13 days in jail before his brother came to Mexico City and bribed Mexican lawyers and officials to release Burroughs on bail, while he awaits trial for the murder, found guilty of murder. Princess Vollmer, Julie Adams, went to live with her grandmother, and William S. Burroughs Jr. go to St. Louis to live with his grandparents. Burroughs reports every Monday morning to jail in Mexico City while his top Mexican lawyer works to solve the case. According to James Grauerholz, two witnesses have agreed to testify that the gun was accidentally shot while he was checking to see if it was loaded, with ballistics experts bribing to support this story. Nevertheless, the trial continued to be delayed and Burroughs began writing what ended up being a short novel Queer while waiting for his trial. After Burroughs lawyer fled Mexico because of his own legal problems, Burroughs decided, according to Ted Morgan, to "pass" and return to the United States. He was convicted in murder and sentenced to two years in prison.
Although Burroughs wrote before the shooting of Joan Vollmer, the show marked him and, biographically argued, his work for the rest of his life. Death of Vollmer also resonates with Allen Ginsberg, who wrote about himself in Dream Records: June 8, 1955 Joan, what kind of knowledge does the dead have? Can you still love your mortal acquaintances? we? "
The Yage Letters
After leaving Mexico, Burroughs drifted through South America for several months, searching for a drug called yagà ©  ©, who promised to provide telepathic abilities to users. A book consisting of a letter between Burroughs and Ginsberg, The Yage Letters, was published in 1963 by City Lights Books. In 2006, a re-edited version, The Yage Letters Redux , indicates that the letters were mostly fictional from the Burroughs record.
Beginning literary career
Burroughs describes Vollmer's death as an important event in his life, and which provokes his writing by exposing him to the risk of possession by the evil entity he calls the "Ugly Soul":
I am compelled to conclude that I will never be a writer, but to Joan's death, and the realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with a constant threat of ownership, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So Joan's death got me in touch with the invaders, Bad Soul, and directed me to a long struggle, where I had no choice but to write my way out.
As Burroughs explains, the reference to this "possession" must be literally literally, stating: "My concept of ownership is closer to the medieval model than to the explanation of modern psychology... I mean a definite entity of ownership." Burroughs' writing is meant as a form of "magic", in its own words - to interfere with language through methods such as cutting-up techniques, and thus protect itself from possession. Later, Burroughs describes the Ugly Soul as "Monopolistic, Evil, Evil Evil, Bad Americans," and takes part in shamanic rituals with the explicit purpose of casting out the Ugly Spirit.
Oliver Harris has questioned Burroughs 'claim that Vollmer's death catalyzed his writing, highlighting the importance of Burroughs' traumatic relationship with the girlfriend figured in the story as Eugene Allerton, rather than Vollmer's shooting. In any case, he began writing in 1945. Burroughs and Kerouac collaborated on Dan Hippos Do Boil in Their Tanks, a loose mystery novel based on the Carr/Kammerer situation and that at that time remained unpublished. Years later, in the documentary What Happened to Kerouac? , Burroughs describes it as "not a very different job". An excerpt from this work, in which Burroughs and Kerouac wrote alternate chapters, was finally published in Word Virus, a summary of William Burroughs' writings published by his biographer after his death in 1997.
Before Vollmer died, Burroughs had completed most of his first novel, Junkie, written at the insistence of Allen Ginsberg, who was instrumental in getting published works, even as a cheap mass market pseudo-book. Ace Books published the novel in 1953 as part of Ace Double under the pen name of William Lee, repeating Junkie: Confessions of a Drug Addict that was not redeemed (it was later republished as Junkie >>, then in 1977 as Junky , and finally in 2003 as Junky: the definitive text 'Junk,' edited by Oliver Harris').
Overseas
During 1953, Burroughs was on the loose end. Because of legal problems, he can not live in the cities he most desires. He spent time with his parents in Palm Beach, Florida, and New York City with Allen Ginsberg. When Ginsberg rejected his romantic progress, Burroughs went to Rome to meet Alan Ansen on a holiday financed by his parents' ongoing support. When he found the company of Romans and Ansen bleak, and inspired by the fiction of Paul Bowles, he decided to go to Tangier, Morocco. In a house owned by a famous prostitute of homosexual prostitutes to visit American and British men, he rented a room and began writing a large number of texts that he personally referred to as Interzone .
For Burroughs, all signs are directed to return to Tangier, the city where medicine is freely available and where the financial support of his family will continue. He realizes that in Moroccan culture he has found an environment that is in harmony with his temperament and there is no obstacle to pursuing his interest and engaging in his chosen activities. He left for Tangier in November 1954 and spent the next four years working on fiction that would later become Naked Lunch, as well as trying to write a commercial article about Tangier. He sent these writings to Ginsberg, the literary agent for Junkie , but nothing was published until 1989 when Interzone , a collection of short stories, was published. Under the powerful influence of the marijuana confection known as the majoun and the German-made opioid called Eukodol, Burroughs settled for writing. Finally, Ginsberg and Kerouac, who had traveled to Tangier in 1957, helped Burroughs type, edit, and organize these episodes into Naked Lunch.
Naked Lunch
While Junkie and Queer have a conventional style, Naked Lunch is the first attempt in a nonlinear style. After the publication of Naked Lunch, a book of his creation to a certain extent the result of a series of possibilities, Burroughs hit Brion Gysin cut-up technique at the Beat Hotel in Paris in October 1959 He began to slice phrases and words to make sentences new. At Beat Hotel Burroughs finds the "port of entry" to Gysin's canvas: "I do not think I ever saw a painting until I saw Brion Gysin's painting." Both will foster long-term friendship that revolves around mutual interest in artwork and cut-up techniques. The scene is shifted along with a bit of care for the narration. Maybe think of her crazy doctor, Dr. Benway, he described Naked Lunch as a book that could be cut at any point. Although not considered science fiction, the book seems to predict AIDS, liposuction, and cracked pandemics.
The excerpt of Naked Lunch was first published in the United States in 1958. The novel was initially rejected by City Lights Books, publisher Ginsberg Howl ; and Olympia Press publisher, Maurice Girodias, who has published controversial French-language novels in France for their subjective views on sex and antisocial character. But Allen Ginsberg managed to get a quote published in the Black Mountain Review and Chicago Review in 1958. Irving Rosenthal, student editor of the Chicago Review , a quarterly a journal partially subsidized by the university, promised to publish more quotes from Naked Lunch, but he was fired from his position in 1958 after Chicago Daily News columnist Jack Mabley called the first quote. Is not appropriate. Rosenthal went on to publish more in his newly created literary journal Big Table No. 1 ; However, the General Post-General of the United States ruled that copies may not be delivered to customers under obscenity laws. John Ciardi obtained a copy and wrote positive reviews about the work, prompting a telegram from Allen Ginsberg to praise the review. This controversy made Naked Lunch attractive to Girodias again, and she published the novel in 1959.
After the novel was published, it gradually became famous throughout Europe and the United States, garnering interest from not only members of the counter-culture of the 1960s but also literary critics such as Mary McCarthy. Once published in the United States, Naked Lunch is charged as indecent by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, followed by other countries. In 1966, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts declared "indecent" employment on the basis of criteria developed largely for the defense of the book. The case against the Burroughs novel still stands as a last-ditch experiment on literary works - that is, a work composed solely of words, and excluding illustrations or photographs - is demanded in the United States.
The Word Hoard , the collection of the manuscripts that produced Naked Lunch , also produced part of the later work of The Soft Machine (1961), Exploding Ticket (1962), and Nova Express (1964). These novels feature an extensive use of cut-up techniques that affect all of Burroughs' next fictions to a degree. During Burroughs friendship and artistic collaboration with Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville, the technique was combined with images, Gysin paintings, and sounds, through the Somerville tape recorder. Burroughs was so dedicated to the cut-up method that he often defended the use of his techniques before editors and publishers, especially Dick Seaver at Grove Press in the 1960s and Holt, Rinehart & Winston in the 1980s. The cut-up method, because its random or mechanical basis for textual creation, combined with the possibility of mixing in text written by other authors, underscores the traditional role of the author as the creator or originator of words, while simultaneously raising the importance of the author's sensitivity as editor. In this sense, the cut-up method can be regarded as analogous to the collage method in the visual arts. The newly restored edition of the Nova Trilogy (Trilogy Cut-Up), edited by Oliver Harris (President of the European Beat Studies Network) and published in 2014, includes notes and materials to reveal the care Burroughs uses with his methods and composition. history of the manuscript.
Paris and the "Beat Hotel"
Burroughs moved to a slum hotel in the Latin Quarter of Paris in 1959 when Naked Lunch was still looking for publishers. Tangier, with his political unrest, and the criminals involved with him, became dangerous for Burroughs. He went to Paris to meet Ginsberg and talk to the Olympia Press. He left a criminal charge that eventually caught up with him in Paris. Paul Lund, a former British crime smuggler and smuggler who Burroughs met in Tangier, was arrested on suspicion of importing narcotics into France. Lund surrendered Burroughs, and evidence involved Burroughs in the import of narcotics to France. As the Moroccan authorities continue their investigation to French officials, Burroughs faces criminal charges in Paris for a conspiracy to import opium. In this upcoming case, Maurice Girodias publishes Naked Lunch; His appearance helps Burroughs get a probation sentence, because his literary career, according to Ted Morgan, is a respected profession in France.
The "Beat Hotel" is a typical European-style boardinghouse, with public toilets on every floor, and a small place for private cooking in the room. Life there is documented by photographer Harold Chapman, who lives in the attic room. This shabby and inexpensive hotel was inhabited by Gregory Corso, Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky for several months after Naked Lunch first appeared.
Burroughs time at the Beat Hotel is dominated by occult experiments - "mirror, scrying, trance and telepathy, all triggered by a variety of mind-changing drugs." Then, Burroughs will describe the "vision" that is gained by staring into the mirror for hours at a time - his hands turn into tentacles, or the whole image is transformed into a strange entity, or a vision from a distant place, or someone else quickly experiencing metamorphosis. From this febrile atmosphere this famous cut-up technique emerged.
The actual process by which Naked Lunch is published is partly a function of the "cut-up" presentation to the printer. Girodias gave Burroughs only ten days to prepare the manuscript for the printed galleys, and Burroughs sent the manuscript in pieces, preparing the parts in no particular order. When published at random, Burroughs liked it better than the original plan. The international rights to the work were sold shortly thereafter, and Burroughs used a $ 3,000 advance from Grove Press to buy drugs (equivalent to about $ 25,000 in today's funds). Naked Lunch is featured in the 1959 magazine cover story of Life, partly as an article highlighting the growing movement of Beat literature. During this time Burroughs found an outlet for material that was otherwise unpublished in Jeff Nuttall's My Own Mag . Also, some Burroughs poems appeared in the small avant garde magazine Nomad in the early 1960s.
London Year
Burroughs left Paris for London in 1960 to visit Dr. Dent, a famous British medical doctor who spearheaded the infamous painless drug withdrawal treatment using apomorphine. The apomorphine drug Dent is also used to treat alcoholism, although it is held by some who do so no more than direct hate therapy. But Burroughs believes. After his first healing, he wrote apomorphine and other medicinal appreciations, which he submitted to The British Journal of Addiction (Vol.53, 1956) under the title "Letter From Master's Addiction to Dangerous Drugs"; this letter was added to many editions of Naked Lunch .
Despite his eventual relapse, Burroughs eventually worked in London for six years, returning to the United States on several occasions, including one-time escorting his son to Lexington Narcotics Farm and Prison after the younger Burroughs had been convicted of a fraudulent recipe in Florida. In his "Closing Word" for a compilation of two previously published novels, Speed ​​Bury and Burroughs wrote that he thought he had a "small habit" and leaving London quickly. without narcotics because he suspects US customs will search him very closely on arrival. He claims he went through two months of the most torturous opiate withdrawal when he saw his son through his trial and sentence, traveling with Billy to Lexington, Kentucky from Miami to ensure that his son entered the hospital he once spent as a volunteer. reception. Previously, Burroughs visited St. Louis, Missouri, made great progress from Playboy to write an article about his journey back to St. Louis. Louis, one of which was finally published on The Paris Review , after Burroughs refused to change the style for Playboy publishers . In 1968 Burroughs joined Jean Genet, John Sack, and Terry Southern in covering the Democratic National Convention of 1968 for the Esquire magazine. Southern and Burroughs, who first met in London, will remain friends and lifelong collaborators. In 1972, Burroughs and Southern failed to try to fit Naked Lunch for the screen along with American game-show producer Chuck Barris.
Burroughs supported himself and his addiction by publishing pieces in the emphasis of small literature. The avant-garden reputation grew internationally as hippies and students discovered their previous works. He developed a close friendship with Antony Balch and lived with a young teenager named John Brady who constantly took home young women despite protests from Burroughs. In the midst of this personal turmoil, Burroughs successfully completed two works: a novel written in a screenplay format, The Last Words of Dutch Schultz (1969); and the traditional prose format of The Wild Boys (1971).
At that time in London, Burroughs began using his "playback" techniques in an attempt to condemn the various people and places that have provoked his anger, including the Moka coffee bar and the London Scientology headquarters. Burroughs itself is linked to the incident of Moka's coffee bar:
The following is a sample operation performed on the Moka Bar at 29 Frith Street, London, W1, beginning on August 3, 1972. Reverse Thursday. The reason for the operation was the cheesecake was rude and unwarranted and unwarranted. Now to close at Moka Bar. Record. Take a photo. Stand outside. Let them see me. They are churning there... Screening will come later with more pictures... Screening is done several times with more pictures. Their business is falling. They continue to be shorter and shorter. On October 30, 1972, Moka Bar was closed. The location is taken over by Queen's Snack Bar.
In the 1960s, Burroughs joined and later left the Church of Scientology. In speaking of experience, he claims that Scientology's engineering and philosophy helped him and he felt that further study of Scientology would produce remarkable results. He is skeptical of the organization itself, and feels that it cultivates an environment that does not receive critical discussions. Subsequent critical writings about the church and his commentary on Inside Scientology by Robert Kaufman caused a battle of letters between Burroughs and Scientology supporters on the pages of Rolling Stone magazine.
Return to the United States
In 1974, worried about the well-being of his friend, Allen Ginsberg earned Burroughs contract to teach creative writing at City College of New York. Burroughs managed to withdraw from heroin use and move to New York. He finally found an apartment, nicknamed "The Bunker", on the Lower East Side of Manhattan at 222 Bowery. The residence is a partially modified YMCA fitness center, complete with lockers and a shared bathroom. The building falls under the New York City rental control policy which makes it very cheap; only about four hundred dollars a month until 1981 when lease control rules changed, doubling the rent overnight. Burroughs added "teacher" to a list of jobs he did not like, because he only lasted a semester as a professor; he found the students unattractive and without much creative talent. Though he desperately needed income, he refused a teaching position at the University at Buffalo for $ 15,000 per semester. "The teaching event is a lesson that never again.You give all this energy and no one returns." His rescuers are the newly arrived bookshops, twenty-one years old and Beat Generation fan James Grauerholz, who works for Burroughs part-time as a secretary and also in bookstores. Grauerholz suggested the idea to read the tour. Grauerholz has run several rock bands in Kansas and led in bookings for a Burroughs reading tour that will help support him over the next two decades. It raised its public profile, ultimately helping in getting a new publishing contract. Through Grauerholz, Burroughs became a monthly columnist for the popular popular culture magazine Crawdaddy, where he interviewed Jimmy Led Zeppelin's Page in 1975. Burroughs decided to move back to the United States permanently in 1976. He then began to associate with New York cultural performers such as Andy Warhol, John Giorno, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and Susan Sontag, often entertaining them in the Bunker; he also visited places like CBGB to watch the likes of Patti Smith perform. Throughout early 1977, Burroughs collaborated with Southern and Dennis Hopper on a screen adaptation of Junky . Financed by a closed acquaintance of Burroughs, the project loses its appeal after financial problems and creative strife between Hopper and Burroughs.
Hosted by Columbia professor SylvÃÆ'¨re Lotringer, Giorno, and Grauerholz, the Nova Convention is a Burroughs retrospective multimedia event held from 30 November to 2 December 1978, at various locations throughout New York. The show included readings from Southern, Ginsberg, Smith, and Frank Zappa (filled last minute for Keith Richards, then trapped in legal matters), in addition to panel discussions with Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson and concerts featuring The B-52, Suicide, Philip Glass, and Debbie Harry and Chris Stein.
In 1976, Billy Burroughs was having dinner with his father and Allen Ginsberg in Boulder, Colorado, at the Ginsberg Buddhist poem school (Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics) at Naropa Chogyam Trungpa University when he started vomiting blood. The senior Burroughs has not seen his son for over a year and is worried about his appearance when Billy arrives at Ginsberg's apartment. Although Billy had successfully published two short novels in the 1970s, and was considered by literary critics such as Ann Charters to be "a bona fide second-generation beat writer," his brief marriage to a teenage waitress had been destroyed. Billy is a continuous drinker, and there are times when he is not related to his family or friends. The diagnosis of liver cirrhosis is so complete that the only treatment is a rare liver transplant surgery. Fortunately, the University of Colorado Medical Center is one of two places in the country that transplant under the work of Dr. pioneer. Thomas Starzl. Billy went through the procedure and beat a life chance of thirty percent. His father spent time in 1976 and 1977 in Colorado, helping Billy through additional surgeries and complications. Biography Ted Morgan asserts that their relationship is not spontaneous and has no real warmth or intimacy. Allen Ginsberg supports Burroughs and his son during a long recovery period.
In London, Burroughs has begun writing what will be the first novel of a trilogy, published as the Red City Night (1981), The Place of Dead Roads (1983) , and The Western Lands (1987). Grauerholz helped edit City when first rejected by Burroughs old editor Dick Seaver at Holt Rinehart, after which was considered too disjointed. The novel is written as a direct narrative and then cut into a more random pattern, leaving the reader to sort characters and events. This technique is different from the previous author cut-up method, which was not accidental from the beginning. Nevertheless, the novel was rearranged and published, still without a linear straight form, but with less rest in the story. The Trilogy displays a time travel adventure in which Burroughs robbers rewrite episodes from history to reform humanity. Review mixed for City . Novelist and critic Anthony Burgess highlight the work on the Saturday Review, saying Burroughs is a boring reader with recurrent episodes of pederast fantasy and sexual strangulation that lacks a world view or a comprehensible theology; Other reviewers, such as J. G. Ballard, argue that Burroughs form a new literary "myth".
In 1981, Billy Burroughs died in Florida. She had severed ties with her father several years earlier, even publishing an article in Esquire magazine claiming her father had poisoned her life and revealed that she had been harassed as a fourteen-year-old by one of them. friend of his father while visiting Tangier. Liver transplantation did not cure her desire to drink, and Billy suffered serious health complications several years after surgery. After he stopped using transplant rejection drugs, his body was found near the side of Florida's highway by foreigners. He died shortly after that. Burroughs was in New York when he heard from Allen Ginsberg about Billy's death.
Burroughs, in 1979, was once again a heroin addict. Cheap, easy-to-buy heroin outside his door on the Lower East Side "makes its way" into its veins, coupled with the "rewards" of passionate admirers with good intentions who frequent Bunker. Although Burroughs will have a free episode of heroin, from this point until his death he is regularly addicted to drugs. He died in 1997 on a methadone maintenance program. In the introduction of Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs, James Grauerholz (who ran the Burroughs reading tour of the 1980s and 1990s) mentions that part of his work is to deal with "the underworld "in every city to secure the drugs the author needs.
Years later in Kansas
Burroughs moved to Lawrence, Kansas in 1981, taking up residence at 1927 Learnard Avenue where he would spend the rest of his life. He once told a Wichita Eagle reporter that he was content to live in Kansas, saying, "The thing I like about Kansas is that it's not nearly as hard, and it's a lot cheaper, and I can get out in the country and fish and shoot and that more. "In 1984, he signed a seven-book deal with Viking Press after he signed a contract with literary agent Andrew Wylie. This agreement includes the publishing rights to the unpublished 1952 novel Queer . With this money he bought a small bungalow for $ 29,000. He was eventually inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Art and Literature in 1983 after several attempts by Allen Ginsberg to make it acceptable. He attended the induction ceremony in May 1983. Lawrence Ferlinghetti said Burroughs induction into the Academy proves Herbert Marcuse's view that capitalist society has a great ability to combine the only outsider.
At this point, Burroughs is a counter icon. In his last years, he built a group of young friends who succeeded his aging contemporaries. He inspired the 1970s proto-punk rock band Madness. In the 1980s he collaborated with players ranging from Bill Laswell's Material and Laurie Anderson to Throbbing Gristle, The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy and Ministry, and in the movie Gus Van Sant 1989 Drugstore Cowboy, playing characters based on stories short he published on Exterminator! , "The" Priest "They Called Him". In 1990, he released a spoken word album Dead City Radio, with music support from producers Hal Willner and Nelson Lyon, and alternative rock band Sonic Youth. Burroughs and R.E.M. collaborated on the song "Star Me Kitten" in Album Songs in Key X: Music From and Inspired By X-Files Album . Collaboration with musicians Nick Cave and Tom Waits produced a short prose collection, Smack My Crack , later released as a word album pronounced in 1987. He collaborated with Tom Waits and director Robert Wilson at The Black Rider , a drama that opened at Thalia Theater in Hamburg in 1990 to be a critical acclaim, and then performed throughout Europe and the US In 1991, with Burroughs approval, director David Cronenberg adapted Naked Lunch into feature films, which opened for critical acclaim.
During 1982, Burroughs developed a painting technique in which he created an abstract composition by placing spray paint cans some distance in front of an empty surface, and then firing on a paint can with a shotgun. This scattered and scratched canvas panel was first exhibited at Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York City in 1987. By this time he has developed a comprehensive visual art practice, using ink, spray paint, collage and unusual things like mushrooms and plunger to apply paint. He created the painting folder files featuring this media as well as the "auto calligraphy" inspired by Brion Gysin. He initially used the folders to mix pigments before observing that they could be seen as art in themselves. He also uses many of these painted folders to store manuscripts and correspondence in his personal archive. Until his final years, he productively created the visual arts. Burroughs' work has been featured in over fifty international galleries and museums including the Royal Academy of Arts, the Center Pompidou, the Guggenheim Museum, the ZKM Karlsruhe, the Sammlung Falckenberg, the New Museum, the Museum of Modern Irish Art, the Los Angeles Museum, and the Whitney. Museum of American Art.
According to frontman of the Ministry of Al Jourgensen, "We hung out at Burroughs' house once in '93.So he decided to take heroin and he took out this utility belt full of syringes.The big one, the ancient from the 50s or something Now, I do not know how an 80-year-old man found a blood vessel, but he knows what he's doing.So we all lay tall and stuff and then I noticed in the pile of letters on the coffee table that there was a letter from the White House.I said 'Hey , this looks important. ' and he replied 'Well, it might just be junk mail.' Well, I opened the letter and it was from President Clinton inviting Burroughs to the White House to read the poem.I said 'Wow, do you know how big this is !?' So he said 'What? Who's the current president?' and that pisses me off - he does not even know who our president is at the moment. "
In 1990, Burroughs was honored with a star in St. Louis Walk of Fame.
In June 1991, Burroughs underwent a triple bypass surgery.
He became a member of the chaos magic organization, Illuminates of Thanateros, in 1993.
Burroughs' last performance was in the music video for "Last Night on Earth" by Irish rock band U2, filmed in Kansas City, Missouri, directed by Richie Smyth and also featuring Sophie Dahl.
Political confidence
The only newspaper columnist whom Burroughs admired was a right-wing opinion-maker for William Randolph Hearst's newspaper network, Westbrook Pegler. Burroughs believes in frontier individualism, which he fights for as "our glorious border heritage in the care of your own business." Burroughs came to equate liberalism with bureaucratic tyranny, viewing governmental authority as collective of nosy powers that set aside the limitation of personal freedom. According to his biographer Ted Morgan, his philosophy to live one's life is to obey the laissez-faire path, which is unencumbered - essentially a credo shared with the capitalist business world. His hatred of the government did not prevent Burroughs from using his program for his own benefit. In 1949, he enrolled at Mexico City College under GI Bill, who paid his school fees and books and gave him a salary of seventy-five dollars a month. He maintains, "I always say, keep your snout in the public trough."
Magical belief
Burroughs has a long-standing preoccupation with magic and occultism, derived from his earliest childhood, and insisted throughout his life that we live in a "magical universe". As he himself explained:
In the magical universe there is no accident and no accident. Nothing happens unless someone wants it to happen. The dogma of science is that volition is unlikely to affect external forces, and I think it's just ridiculous. It's just as bad as the church. My view is the opposite from a scientific point of view. I believe that if you meet someone on the street for a reason. Among the primitive people, they say that if a person is bitten by a snake, he is killed. I believe it.
Or, speaking in the 1970s:
Since the word "magic" tends to cause confusing thinking, I want to say exactly what I mean by "magic" and the magical interpretation of what is called reality. The basic assumption of magic is the "volition" statement as the prime mover force in the universe - a deep conviction that nothing happens unless someone or another creature wants it to happen. For me it always seems real... From a magic point of view, there is no death, no illness, no misfortune, accident, war or unintentional unrest. There is no accident in the wizarding world.
This is not an unemployed passion - Burroughs is also active practicing magic in his daily life: seeking a mystical vision through practices such as scrying, taking steps to protect himself from possession, and trying to put a curse on those who have crossed it. Burroughs spoke openly about his magical practice, and his involvement with occultism was evidenced by many interviews, as well as the personal accounts of those who knew him.
Biographer Ted Morgan argues that: "Since the single most important thing about Graham Greene is his view as a crippled Catholic, the only thing that matters most about Burroughs is his belief in the magical realm.The same impulse that made him curse is, when he sees it, the source of his writings... To Bury it behind everyday reality there is the reality of the spirit world, psychic visits, condemnation, mastery and ghostly beings. "
Burroughs was unshakeable in his insistence that his own writing had a magical purpose. This is especially true when it comes to the use of cut-up techniques. Burroughs insists that the technique has a magical function, which states "cut-ups are not for artistic purposes". Burroughs uses his cut-ups for "political warfare, scientific research, personal therapy, magical prophecies, and magic" - an important notion is that cut-ups allow users to "break the barriers that surround consciousness". As Burroughs himself states:
I would say that my most interesting experience with previous techniques is the realization that when you make cut-ups, you do not get random alignment of random words, that they do mean something, and often these meanings refer to some future events. I've made a lot of cut-ups and then recognize that the cut-ups are referring to something I read later in the newspaper or book, or something that happened... Maybe events have been written and recorded before and when you cut out the words front leak.
In the last decade of his life, Burroughs became deeply involved in the magic movement of chaos. Burrough's magical techniques - cut-ups, playbacks, etc. - have been incorporated into the magic of chaos by practitioners such as Phil Hine, Dave Lee and Genesis P-Orridge. P-Orridge in particular has been known and studied under Burroughs and Brion Gysin for more than a decade. This caused Burroughs to contribute material to the book Between Spaces: Selected Ritual & amp; Essay From the Templum Nigri Solis Archive , published by Templum Nigri Solis , the "Australasian Chaos Sorcery" group. Through this connection, Burroughs personally knows many of the main lights of the chaos magic movement, including Hine, Lee, Peter J. Carroll, Ian Read and Ingrid Fischer, and Douglas Grant, North American head of the magic group of The Illuminates of Thanateros (IOT ). Burroughs' involvement with this movement deepened, as he contributed artwork and other materials to the magic books of chaos, discussed the IOT meeting in Austria, and was finally fully initiated into The Illuminates of Thanateros. As a close friend of Burrough, James Grauerholz stated: "William is very serious about his studies, and initiation into the IOT... Our old friend, Douglas Grant, is the prime mover."
Death
Burroughs died August 2, 1997 in Lawrence, Kansas of a complication of a heart attack he had suffered the previous day. He was buried in a family plot at Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis. Louis, Missouri, with markers with full names and "American Writer" tombstones. His grave was to the right of the white granite obelisk of William Seward Burroughs I (1857-1898).
Posthumous works
Since 1997, several posthumous collections by Burroughs have been published. A few months after his death, a collection of posts covering his entire career, Word Virus , was published (according to the introduction to the book, Burroughs himself approved the content before his death). Apart from some previously released pieces, Word Virus also includes what was promoted as one of the few surviving fragments of And Hippos Was Boiled in Their Tanks , a novel by Burroughs and Kerouac (published in 2008). The collection of journal entries written during the last months of Burroughs' life was published as a book Last Words in 2000. Burroughs memoir by Burroughs titled Evil River by Viking Press has been postponed several times; after initially announced for the 2005 release, online booksellers showed the 2007 release, complete with ISBN number (ISBN: 0670813516), but remained unpublished. In December 2007, Ohio State University Press released Everything Lost: Latin American Journal William S. Burroughs . Edited by Oliver Harris, this book contains transcriptions of journal entries created by Burroughs during the time of writing Queer and The Yage Letters , with cover art and review information. In addition, the restored editions of a number of texts have been published in recent years, all containing additional material and essays on the works. The complete Kerouac/Burroughs Manuscript And The Boiled Hippos in Their Tanks was published for the first time in November 2008.
Style and literary period
Burroughs main works can be divided into four different periods. Date refers to the time of writing, not the publication, which in some cases not until a few decades later:
- Initial work (early 1950s): Junkie , Queer and The Yage Letters relatively straight linear narratives, written in and about Burroughs' time in Mexico City and South America.
- The cut-up period (mid-1950s to mid-1960s): Although published before Burroughs invented the cut-up technique, Naked Lunch is a collection of fragments from " routine "of The Word Hoard - manuscripts written in Tangier, Paris, London, as well as some other texts written in South America such as" The Composite City ", merging with cut-ups and folding of fiction as well taken from The Word Hoard : Software , Nova Express , Exploding Ticket , also referred to as the "Nova Trilogy "or" Cut-Up Trilogy ", described by Burroughs in an attempt to create" mythology for the age of space ". Interzone also originated from the mid-1950s
- Experiments and subversions (mid-1960s to mid-1970s): This period saw Burroughs continue experimental writing with increased political content and branching into multimedia like movies and sound recordings. The only major novel written in this period is The Wild Boys , but he also writes dozens of published articles, short stories, memo books and other works, some in collaboration with Brion Gysin. The main anthologies representing work from this period are The Burroughs File , The Adding Machine and Exterminator! .
- Red Night Trilogy (mid-1970s to mid-1980s): Books The City of the Red Night , The The Dead Roads and The Western Lands place comes from Burroughs in the mature final stage, creating complete mythology.
Burroughs also produced many essays and a large collection of autobiographical material, including a book with a detailed record of his own dream ( My Education: The Dream Book ).
Reaction to criticism and criticism
Some literary critics treat Burroughs' work roughly. For example, Anatole Broyard and Philip Toynbee wrote devastating reviews of some of his most important books. In a short essay entitled "Reviewing Review", Burroughs answers his criticism in this way:
Critics constantly complain that authors are lacking in standards, but they themselves do not seem to have standards other than personal prejudices for literary criticism.... Such a standard exists. Matthew Arnold devised three criteria for criticism: 1. What did the writer try to do? 2. How well did he manage to do it?... 3. Is the work fair "very serious"? That is, does it touch the basic issues of good and evil, life and death and human condition. I will also apply fourth criterion... Write about what you know. More authors fail because they try to write about things they do not know other than for other reasons.
Burroughs clearly points out here that he prefers to be evaluated against these criteria over which are reviewed based on the reviewers' personal reaction to a particular book. Always a contradictory figure, Burroughs still criticizes Anatole Broyard for reading the writer's intentions into his works where nothing, which makes it contradictory to New Criticism and the old school represented by Mathew Arnold.
Burroughs.27_Photography "> Burroughs' Photography
Burroughs uses photography extensively throughout his career, both as a recording medium in his writing plan, and as a significant dimension of his own art practice, where photographs and other images are featured as important elements in cut-up. With Ian Sommerville, he experimented with photographic potential as a form of memory device, photographing, and reproducing his own picture in an increasingly complex time-frame setting. (See: Patricia Allmer and John Sears (ed.) Take Shots: The Photography of William S. Burroughs , London: Prestel and The Photographers' Gallery, 2014).
Legacy
Burroughs is often referred to as one of the greatest and most influential writers of the 20th century, notably by Norman Mailer quoting Burroughs, "The only American novelist alive today who might be considered a genius", appears in many Burroughs publications. Others consider their concepts and attitudes more influential than prose. The leading admirers of Burroughs' work have included British critics and biographers Peter Ackroyd, rock critic Lester Bangs, philosopher Gilles Deleuze and author J.Gardard, Angela Carter, Jean Genet, William Gibson, Alan Moore, Kathy Acker and Ken Kesey. Burroughs had a profound influence on the German writer Carl Weissner, who besides being a German translator was a novelist in himself and often wrote cut-up texts in a similar way to Burroughs.
Burroughs continues to be named as influences by contemporary fiction writers. Both the New Wave and, above all, the science-fiction cyberpunk school are indebted to him. Admirers from the late 1970s - early 1980s neighborhoods of this subgenre include William Gibson and John Shirley, just two names. First published in 1982, the English slip fiction magazine Interzone (which later evolved into a more traditional science fiction magazine) rewarded him with his choice of name. He is also cited as a major influence by musicians Roger Waters, David Bowie, Patti Smith, Genesis P-Orridge, Ian Curtis, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Tom Waits and Kurt Cobain.
Drugs, homosexuality, and death, common among Burroughs themes, have been taken by Dennis Cooper, whom Burroughs says, "Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born author." Cooper, in return, writes, in his essay 'King Junk', 'along with Jean Genet, John Rechy, and Ginsberg, [Burroughs] helped make homosexuality look cool and virtuous, giving gay liberation a delicious edge.' Splatterpunk writer Poppy Z. Brite has often referred to this aspect of Burroughs work. Burroughs's writings continue to be referenced many years after his death; for example, a November 2004 TV episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation includes a malicious character named Dr. Benway (named after an immoral doctor who appears in a number of Burroughs works.) This is an echo of the hospital scene in the movie Repo Man, made during the lifetime of Burroughs, where Dr. Benway and Mr. Lee (pen name Burroughs) is composed.
Burroughs was quoted by Robert Anton Wilson as the first to notice "23 Enigma":
I first heard about 23 Enigma from William S. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, Nova Express, etc. According to Burroughs, he had known certain Captain Clark, around 1960 in Tangier, who once boasted that he had sailed 23 years without an accident. On that very day, Clark's ship had an accident that killed him and someone else was riding. Furthermore, while Burroughs thinks of a rough example of the irony of the gods that night, a radio bulletin announces the crash of a plane in Florida, USA. The pilot was another Captain Clark and his flight was Flight 23.
Appearance on media
In music
Burroughs appeared on the cover of The Beatles' eighth studio album, Sgt. Lost Pepper Club Band. Burroughs participates in b
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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