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William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs

This nOde last updated December 30th, 2006 and is permanently morphing...
(5 Caban (Earth) / 10 K'ank'in - 57/260 - 12.19.13.16.17)

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Burroughs, William Seward

Burroughs, William Seward
Born 1914
American writer noted especially for _Naked Lunch_ (vhs/ntsc)atomjacked inventory cache (1959), a internal linksurrealist portrait of drug addiction. William Seward Burroughs was born in St. Louis, MO, heir to the Burroughs business machine fortune.

"internal linkMagic, in internal linklight of  modern physics, internal linkquantum theory and probability theory is now approaching science. We hope that a result of this will be a synthesis so that science will become more magical and magic more scientific."  - William S. Burroughs


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Celtic Cross - Hicksville


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[Film internal link_Blade Runner_ (vhs/ntsc)atomjacked inventory cache(1982) loosely based on internal link_Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep?  atomjacked inventory cacheby internal linkPhilip K. Dick; title _Blade Runner_ comes from the name of a totally unrelated William S. Burroughs novel about black market surgeons, which was itself based on a story by Alan E. Nourse.]


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Timothy Leary interviews William S. Burroughs


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The Western Lands

Bill Laswell

Working closely with Skopelitis, internal linkBill Laswell created two pivotal albums in the late 1980s -- that serve as arguable prototypical predecessors for some of Axiom's landmark releases by Baker, Skopelitis, and Material, among others -- within a short-lived but internal linkintense series of albums for the Nation and Venture subsidiaries of Virgin. The first was Material's _Seven Souls_, which featured the voice of William S. Burroughs.

About William Burroughs: The identification of control systems and devising means to destroy them has always dominated his work. Burroughs has always fought for complete freedom -- freedom from all control from invasion by internal linkalien forces from religion, sexual repression, and suppression from the American way of life and traditional family values. From programming by TV, media, and the subtext of internal linklanguage. The ugly spirit as the ugly American, the forces of greed and corruption, selfishness and stupidity.

Featuring Sly Dunbar on drums, Shankar and Simon Shaheen on violins, and with Burroughs' voice augmented by Arabic, West African, and New York hip-hop vocalists, Material's _Seven Souls_ is a sublime internal linkfusion of high-tech production with acoustic elements. Jeff Bova's synthesizers blend organically with Skopelitis' various guitars and ethnic stringed instruments to create washes of sound that breathe behind Burroughs' stark readings from the texts of "The Western Lands." Thematically, sonically, and conceptually, _Seven Souls_ -- like _Future Shock_ -- is a landmark recording for Laswell in its reflection of such a variety of perfectly united elements.


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William S. Burroughs and Husker Du overlooked by Keith Haring


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Although his cavalier lifestyle and counterculture status has overshadowed his multimedia experiments, William S. Burroughs studied with internal linkAlfred Korzybski (who formulated General Semantics and internal linkE-Prime), and was a fierce critic of Scientology's psycho-linguistic games. Burroughs' interest in epigenetic (brain) and cultural    (internal linkmemetic) internal linkevolution as the basis of contemporary advertising techniques anticipated Howard Bloom's research that the co-evolution of internal linklanguage and brain contains viral elements.

- Alex Burns


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"Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets"
 - _Nova Express_ by William S. Burroughs.

 


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The internal linkBeatles - _Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band_ 12" (1967) cover art depicts William Burroughs, second row, eleventh from left.
 
  

Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band

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internal linkPerception

Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it "creative observation." Creative viewing.
William Burroughs (b. 1914), U.S. author. Painting and Guns, "The Creative Observer" (1992).


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"internal linkEvolution did not come to a reverent halt with homosapiens. An evolutionary step that involves biologic alteration is irreversible. And it better be good, better than drugs or religion." - William Burroughs


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William S. Burroughs interviews Jimmy Page in 1975


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"If you're doin' business with a religious son of a bitch, get it in writing. His word isn't worth shit, not with the Good Lord tellin' him how to fuck you on the deal."

- William S. Burroughs


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"The control of the mass media depends on laying down lines of association...Cut/up techniques could swamp the mass media with total illusion."


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William Burroughs popularized the idea of the literary 'cutup' in the  early 1960s. His novels utilize the technique of cutting up and reworking text to create whole "new" works. Burroughs believed that the many of the messages contained within his cutup texts foreshadowed actual events. As premonitions, cutup writings became for him at least a window into a supposed other internal linkdimension.

Dimensional travel of this sort is a recurring theme in internal linkscience fiction D.I.Y. media. As materials present themselves for reworking, it is hard to read into early 60s 16mm educational films anything but evidence of a society very much into laying down the law, and asserting the centrality of the authority of government, school and home. In this regard a culture jam can open up a very real 'internal linktime corridor' into the otherzone of  past. The internal linkprocess of understanding the relationship of early media to the time they occupied is itself a valuable discipline. It is the archivist as artist and vice versa.

- David Cox on internal linkCulture Jamming

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William Seward Burroughs (February 5, 1914 - August 2, 1997) was an American author and poet.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, William Seward Burroughs was the grandson of the William Seward Burroughs who internal linkfounded the Burroughs Adding Machine company, which internal linkevolved into the Burroughs Corporation. Burroughs' mother, Laura Lee Burroughs, was the daughter of a distinguished minister whose family claimed to be descendants of Robert E. Lee.

Biography

He has long been associated with Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. One of his most famous works is The Naked Lunch. He is also well known for his later use of the cut-up technique of using pieces of various texts to create a new one (which Burroughs developed with the poet and artist internal linkBrion Gysin who introduced him to the idea), as well as what Burroughs called "word holes" - repeated phrases or sentences from which reading can continue at any other identical phrase or sentences in the text, a form of internal linkhypertext.

He attended Harvard University and graduated in 1936. He summarized his college experience in the prologue to Junkie, "I hated the University and I hated the town it was in. Everything about the place was dead. The University was a fake English setup taken over by the graduates of fake English public schools..."

In 1944, Burroughs began living with Joan Vollmer in an apartment they shared with Kerouac and Edie Parker, Kerouac's first wife. Burroughs divorced his first wife, IIse Krabbe, and married Vollmer in 1946. Their son, William S. Burroughs, Jr., was born in internal link1947 in Texas. On September 6, 1951 in Mexico City, Burroughs accidentally shot and killed his wife during a drunken attempt to imitate William Tell's feat of shooting an apple off his son's head and was charged with criminal imprudence. He was forced to leave Mexico in 1952 as a result of the shooting. He toured South America for several months, then settled in Tangier, Morocco. It was in Tangier that he and Brion Gysin developed the aforementioned 'cut-up technique'.

In 1956, Burroughs attempted to cure his ongoing drug addiction with the help of John Dent, a London physician. After completing treatment, he moved to the legendary "Beat Hotel" in Paris, eventually accumulating a trunkful of fragmentary, hallucinatory manuscripts. With the help of Ginsberg and Kerouac these were edited into Naked Lunch and sold to Olympia Press publisher Maurice Girodias. The trunk manuscripts eventually became three other novels, The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express.

After it was published, Naked Lunch was internal linkprosecuted as obscene by the state of Massachusetts, followed by other states, forcing the book to be published in Italy. In 1966 the Massachusetts Supreme Court declared the work "not obscene" based on criteria developed, largely, to internal linkdefend the book. This opened the door for others works like Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, internal linkJames Joyce's internal linkUlysses, and D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, to be published in the United States.

Burroughs moved to London in the early 1960s and published extensively in small underground magazines, also working on a large manuscript that was published in two parts, "The Wild Boys" and "Port of Saints." He also interacted with like-minded writers such as Alexander Trocchi and Jeff Nuttall.

In the 1970s he moved back to New York City where he was sought out by a diverse cast of New York cultural players, including Andy Warhol and Mick Jagger. He began giving public readings to increasingly internal linkenthusiastic audiences.

In the internal link1980s and 1990s Burroughs became pop culture icon appealing to internal linkpunk rock artists, appearing with recording artists ranging from Laurie Anderson to Ministry, and in films such as Gus Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy. In 1990, he collaborated with director Robert Wilson and musician Tom Waits to create The Black Rider, a play which opened at the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg on March 31, 1990, to critical acclaim, and was later performed all over Europe and the USA. Through the 1990s, Burroughs also produced several spoken word recordings of his written material.

He has been called one of the greatest writers of the 20th century - others consider his writing overrated.

William S. Burroughs died at his home in Lawrence, Kansas, at 6:50 p.m., August 2, 1997 from the complications of the previous day's heart attack.

Quotes

'internal linkLanguage is a virus from outer space'.

'When I become death, death is the seed from which I grow.'

"Words, colors, internal linklight, sound, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! ... internal linkSteal anything in sight...."

General procedure: Read and learn all you can about problem. Look at problem from a point of internal linkzero preconception. Devise variations and alternative solutions. Check back to see if your solution has workable advantage over solutions previously arrived at . . . 'To carry the method a step further than solution of purely technical problem where purpose is implicit in the artifact: devising more efficient gun, tool, boat, signal system, medical or interrogation procedure.

I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive The Sickness. . . When I speak of drug addiction I do not refer to keif, marijuana or any preparation of hashish, mescaline, Banisteriopsis caapi, LSD6, Sacred internal linkMushrooms or any other drugs of the internal linkhallucinogen group. . . . There is no evidence that the use of any hallucinogen results in physical dependence...

I think all novelists particularly are engaged in the creation of Tulpas. That is exactly what they are doing. Ahh.... they are trying to create characters that have an existence apart from the novel, apart from the page.

Works

* Minutes To Go (1950)
* Junkie (1953) (ISBN 0142003166) - (often called Junky) published under the pen name of William Lee
* Naked Lunch (1959) (ISBN 0802132952)
* The Soft Machine (1961) (ISBN 0802133290)
* The Ticket That Exploded (1962) (ISBN 0802151507)
* Nova Express (1964) (ISBN 0802133304)
* The Last Words of Dutch Schultz (1970) (ISBN 1559702117)
* The Job (1970) (ISBN 0140118829)
* The Wild Boys (1971) (ISBN 0802133312)
* Exterminator (1973) (ISBN 0140050035)
* Port of Saints (1975) (ISBN 0912652640)
* Ah Pook is Here, Nova Express, Cities of the Red Night (1981) (ISBN 0312278462)
* The Place of Dead Roads (1983) (ISBN 0312278659)
* Queer (1985) (ISBN 0140083898)
* The Western Lands (1987) (ISBN 0140094563)
* Interzone (1990) (ISBN 0140094512)
* The Adding Machine: Selected Essays (1993) (ISBN 1559702109)
* My Education: A Book of Dreams (1996) (ISBN 0140094547)
* The Ghost of Chance (1997) (ISBN 1852424575)
* Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs (2001) (ISBN 0802137784)

Recordings

* Call Me Burroughs (1965) - The English Bookshop, Paris (reissued in 1995 by Rhino Word Beat)
* Nothing Here Now But The Recordings (1981) - LP Industrial Records IR0016
* Dead City Radio (1990) - Island Records
* Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales (1993) - Island Records (features the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy)
* The Priest They Called Him (1995) - Burroughs' voice and Kurt Cobain playing guitar
* Material: Seven Souls. An album recorded with Bill Laswell.


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internal linkUsenet: alt.fan.william-burroughs

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