Happy 110th Birthday to William.Seward Burroughs (February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) Literary Outlaw

 Iconoclast; visionary; homosexual crusader; drug advocate; teacher .US author.visual artist and elder statesman to the Beats: William.Seward Burroughs would have been 110 years old today 

Burroughs, was born in St. Louis, Missouri, USA on 5 February 1914 the grandson of the inventor of the Burroughs adding machine.Young Burroughs  went to Harvard university, graduated in 1936 with a degree in English literature .Drifting around Europe for a while, with enough monety to sustain him, came back to America,  diddled around for a spell, a brief  period in the Army just after the bombing of Pearl Harbour, but was soon discharged, influenced by other writers who advocated the complete derangement of the senses, like Genet, Rimbaud and Artoud, it was not long before he fell into drug use.

Although Burroughs the writer would rebel against his bourgeois upbringing, he was happy to receive money from his parents, Mortimer and Laura Lee Burroughs, until he was 50 years old. That allowance, about $200 a month, gave him much freedom and drug money. By the early 1940s, Burroughs had already had at least one stay in a mental institution (diagnosis, schizophrenia). His sexual obsession with a man had led him to cut off part of a finger. While living in New York, he would try heroin and quickly become addicted. In 1946, he was arrested for forging a doctor’s prescription. When his father bailed him out, Mortimer merely told his son, “It’s a terrible habit.”

Nowadays recognised  as one of the most culturally  influential and innovative artists of our time. Outsider, misfit, junky,homosexual, writer, painter, messiah, prophet, satirist, punk godfather, world and inner space traveller extrordinaire. he has been all these things.

He was  to  become one of the most influential and  prominent  voices of the Beat Generation.Alongside his friends, Allen Ginsberg, Herbert Hunke, Gegory Corso and Jack Kerouac,emerging out of the embers of the Second World War, this group of writers rejected social standards and celebrated narcotics, sexuality and Arcane religions in their witings.His novels include: Junkie, Naked Lunch, The Nova Trilogy (1961–1964), Cities of the Red Night, and The Place of Dead Roads.

A figure who looms  large through the last half of the 20th Century counterculture.Whose image greets me every morning in my  bedroom as my dreams awake.A  huge  influence to  me, it has also considered to have affected a range of popular culture, seeping into literature, painting, film and music A true iconclast of the first order, his vision has provoked, outraged, and inspired countless numbers of people.The influence of William Burroughs on popular culture has been enormous: the Beatles, the Stones, Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground, David Bowie, Keith Haring, David Cronenberg, Kurt  Cobain and Sonic Youth have all paid homage to the Beat writer in various media. 

Now my personal bookshelfs groan under the weight of his tomes, often I listen  to recordings of him reading from them, his distinctive voice, his rich elemental cadence  speaking to me about freedom, nothing short of complete liberation, this was his mission, unfortunately I am only human,  I have  not yet wrestled my way from Control, how they control  our bodies, our ideas, our imaginatuions, our spirits and our futures, but I try, and I remember that it was sweet William who first tempted me with new forms of thinking. His world was one that essentally contained no boundaries,  continents limitless with imagination. As Burroughs saw it history dissolves into a perpetual present, driven by need, control and the need to control. Throughout his life Burroughs continued to share his message, in his attempt at breaking down  the limiting structures that he saw, had been placed all around. His voice still lingers among us, with it's hypnotysing  magnetism, his almost deranged tones of prophesy and warning.

Starting with his first novel  Junky  published in 1953, recently reprinted, explored his intimate experiences with the world  of heroin, serving as a "memory excercise." He set himself  a daily schedule, helped   by injections of morphine. Originally published as a pulp paperback  under the pseudonym ' William Lee' with the lurid subtitle Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict.

 On  September 6, 1953, Burroughs accidentally killed his second wife Joan Vollmer after shooting her in the head, in a drunken  attempt to imitate William Tell's  feat of shooting an apple of his son's head. Burroughs  was charged with criminal impudence and eventually skipped bail, travelled to South America in search of a telepathy-inducing drug called Yage. These travels and his subsequent letters to Ginsberg  would serve as the basis of his 1963 book The Yage Letters.

He would later claim that he would never have become a writer, if  it was not for the guilt that he suffered after this unfortunate incident. Attributing his descent into writing to Joan’s death, Burroughs explains in his introduction to Queer, “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.”  One of Burroughs first works Junky was  published in 1953, recently reprinted, exploring his intimate experiences with the world  of heroin, serving as a "memory excercise." He set himself  a daily schedule, helped   by injections of morphine. Originally published as a pulp paperback  under the pseudonym ' William Lee' with the lurid subtitle Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict.

 The son that he had with Joan, Billy Jr was sent to live with his grandparents, Burroughs Sadly ever saw him, and Billy Jr, subsequently drank himself to death in 1981.
In 1956, Burroughs tried to cure his drug addiction with the help of a London Physician  named John Dent. It did not work, and he would spend the rest of his life reliant on methadone, but after living for a spell in Tangiers, where he had headed inspired by the works of the writer Paul Bowles, he wrote one of his most enduring works Naked Lunch.

A collage of disturbing, bizzarre and for some obscene images, of hallucinatory intensity, written whilst under the influence of various drugs. It  would become  his most famous and read book. It was here that he came  under the influence of the painter Brion Gysin, from whom he learnt the cut-up style, a technique  that would dominate his work for the rest of his life, with ideas and images repeating over and over again,  helping produce the works The Soft Machine (1961) The Ticket that Exploded (1962) and Nova Express(1963).

'All was enveloped in a flaming chromosphere..... Swirling within the incadescence of solar energy were sprays of blood.... Perception was heaving .....

WB - Nova Express

He would travel extensively, moving to Paris to live at the famous Beat Hotel, where he joind a younger generation, which included the poet Gregory Corso,and a motly accumulation of misfits and outsiders, a feral crew of miscreants, living lives of excess, coming and going as they pleased, like the rats that scurried through it, a place that endeared itself to Burroughs,  perhaps because of its wildness and the fact that it's front doors were never locked at all. Whilst here  he undertook his most important work, his  second novel The Soft Machine  was assembled and written while he was at the hotel.
In the early 1960's Burroughs moved to London, where he would spend 6 years, supporting  himself and his continual addiction  by publishing extensively in  small literary presses and the burgenining underground scene, as  his avant garde reputation grew internationally, as the emerging hippy counterculture discovered his early work.

He also retained the impeccable manners he grew up with. In London, Burroughs would wear three-piece suits and stand up when women entered the room. Those manners didn’t soothe, however, the embarrassments that his parents suffered.By the early ’60s, Burroughs’ parents had moved to Florida, escaping not just Midwestern winters but also, perhaps, hometown gossip and newspaper articles about their son.  

Burroufgs  during this period was quietly going about his own business in St James, living at  Dalmery Court, 8 Duke Street, an unimposing place, near Picadilly, that I've visited once or twice as an act of homage. Not that much to see though. During his stay he took on the Church of Scientology, turning up outside their headquarters to take photographs, observe and simply annoy them. It worked they subsequently moved.
His  primal books releasing his anti-government ramblings, political  undercurrents coarsing through his work, libertarian, anarchistic, alternative models of thinking.Way beyond consensual reality.

In the 1970's he would move back to America,  first moving to New York, from where he would undertake extensive reading tours,becoming associated with other cultural players like Andy Warhol, John Giorno, Lou Reed and Patti Smith, Keith Karingand a galaxy of other famous names. He became this notorious literary celebrity, lovingly embraced by young new wavers and became a sort of Godfather  to the emerging Punk movement.
In 1981 he settled in Lawrence, Kansa, spending his time painting wonderful beautiful abstract picturesy, some used with the aid of shotguns, collaborating with  many from Bill Laswell, Michael Franti and his Disposable Heroes of Hipocricy and Ministry. Appearing in films, including a seminal appearance  in Guy Van Sants 1980 film the Drugstore cowboy.

In spite of courting controversy throughout  his whole career, he was not without his supporters. American novelist and poet Jack Kerouac, for example, called Burroughs the "greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift."  While American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film-maker, actor, and political activist Norman Mailer declared him "the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius.”  

While I adore Burroughs’ novels, my interest in Burroughs’ work also lies in his semiotic and cut-up collaborations with Brion Gysin. Originating during their stay at the Beat Hotel in Paris, Burroughs and Gysin experimented with the cut-up technique as a means to transcend, as Burroughs would say, Control and access an unrestricted, unmediated truth, culminating with their text The Third Mind.

While Burroughs’ life story and sexual/narcotic proclivities have had their own legacy, the “cut-up” method that he developed in the 1960s with his friend Brion Gysin has proved his most generative legacy. Writers, musicians and artists of all kinds have adopted this chance procedure, which involves the cutting and splicing of language--or image, or sound--to produce unexpected conjunctions and scramble consensus reality. “The cut-up is actually closer to the facts of perception than representational painting,” Burroughs wrote of the method. “Take a walk down a city street and put down what you have just seen on canvas . . . consciousness is a cut up.”

Gysin and Burroughs

 William S. Burroughs on his Cut-Up Method of Writing

Here  iis a link  to  an essay  on The  Cut Up Method:-

 https://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/burroughs-cutup.html

Later in his life, Burroughs enjoyed his status as a Downtown, New York forefather, recording an album with poet John Giorno and Laurie Anderson. He also collaborated with director Robert Wilson and musician Tom Waits on a play The Black Rider, a mythical tale vaguely reminiscent of Burroughs’ wife’s death.n 1990 he released the spoken word album Dead City Radio with musical back up from producers Hal Wilmer and Nelson Lyon and alternative rock band Sonic Youth. In 1992 he recorded with the Kurt Cobain, a piece called The Priest They Called him.

At the end of his life he was living in a two bedroom cottage, with his beloved feline companians,taking gentle stroolls around his garden, a lover of men and science fiction, visited by admirers on his front porch. Despite his struggles with his addictions, his rage, with an 'ugly spirit' that he knew well, was able to quote Prspero, finding some kind of peace "But his rough magic, I here abjure."
For Burroughs the war on drugs were totally unachievable,  one that the world was incapable of winning.Burroughs considered  opiates to be depressents. They work on the back of the brain, suppressing the emotional and social centres of thought. This was for him was part of the addiction. An addict does not need society, feels no love or hate, gripped by this illness, that cannot be escaped, hooked in junk time, their mind and body becomes regulated  by their sickness, their addiction. But for Burroughs addiction was a general conditin limited to drugs. Politics, religion, the family, love are all forms of addiction. In the post-Bomb society, all the mainstays of ther social order have lost their meaning, and bankrupt nation states are run by control addicts.
Burroughs finally died on  August 2, 1997 at the age of 83 on in Lawrence,Kansas ,USA from a heart attack, still reliant on a methadone maintenence programe, but had survived most of his peers.His work  continues to inspire, influence, writers, lyricists and artists  of all kinds across the globe. Leaving behind a  solid body of work, his legacy still evolving, regarded as one of the greatest writers of our time. His final written words were "Love? What is it? Most natural  painkiller what there is. LOVE."

William Burroughs remains one of the most complex and controversial American writers of the twentieth century.This agent;s  words are still shared, El Hombre Invisible, is still visible for all. Remembered for his lifelong subversion of the moral, political and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism. A writer who has been many things to many people.You get what you want from Burroughs, more importantly, you get what you need, and that can sometimes be uncomfortable.Happy birthday William Burroughs.

 "How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity. I want real freedom, to live in gross abandonment, to walk the forbidden paths... to burn the bridges and roads meant to contain me."- William S. Burroughs,