William Burroughs-Influenced Artist/Burroughs

Discussion in 'People' started by drummer40, Jan 19, 2011.

  1. drummer40

    drummer40 Guest

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    Hi:

    I'm still a guest here, but William Burroughs has been getting a lot of news coverage these days. Why? Because of the new movie about him and new books.

    For me, Burroughs has been a true inspiration to my writing and art.

    Without his influence, I would not be the artist that I am.

    Just thought that I'd say that.

    The following pieces I made are dedicated to him.
     
    1 person likes this.
  2. LoneDeranger

    LoneDeranger Trying to pay attention.

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    Reading Naked Lunch as a teenager in the 60s was a mind-blowing experience. Burroughs opened a lot of literary doors.
     
  3. Ddoright

    Ddoright Senior Member

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    Sorry man - wrong thread.
    /COLOR]
     
  4. AK Bones

    AK Bones Member

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    Thanks for the word brother. I love Burroughs. I must be out of touch up here. I'll look forward to checking it out. What a character!
     
  5. drummer40

    drummer40 Guest

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    Hello Hip Forum:

    Just thought I'd say hello and thank you for being here. I have been working on some new pieces of my Burroughs work.

    Here are some pieces. Would really like feedback.

    Best
    D40
     
  6. jolie1887

    jolie1887 Member

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    I really, really tried to like Burroughs. I bought a copy of Naked Lunch and attempted to read it like six different times, but I was just like, "What the fuck is this?" While I have a penchant for the strange and alternative, I just couldn't stay into it.

    I would say maybe I should read it while doped up, but that probably wouldn't get me anywhere anyway.
     
  7. RonPrice

    RonPrice Member

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    It has been 2 years since I've been at this thread; I tried to edit my post to clear up all those "extras" like the word "font" repeated dozens of times. But I had no luck.-Ron
     
  8. BlackBillBlake

    BlackBillBlake resigned HipForums Supporter

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    Seems to me that Burroughs' influence has been subtle but quite widespread. And I think that's because his work has turned out to be prophetic in many ways.


    We are now arguably living in a reality that closely resembles a 'cut-up'.
     
  9. RonPrice

    RonPrice Member

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    I'm pleased to see that my original post on Burroughs has been deleted with all its extra literary additions. I trust the following post will be a clear copy for readers who are interested.-Ron Price, Tasmania​
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------​
    [SIZE=14pt]WILLIAM BURROUGHS[/SIZE]
    [SIZE=14pt]Out on the periphery[/SIZE]
    [SIZE=14pt]William Seward Burroughs II[/SIZE][SIZE=14pt] also known by his pen name William Lee(1914-1997) was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer or performance poet. He died just before I retired after a 50 year student & paid-employment life, 1949 to 1999. He was a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author; he is also considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century."1 He was always far out on the periphery of my life associated as he was with the origins of Beat poetry from the mid-to-late ‘40s when I was but a child. But in my late middle age, the years from 50 to 60--1994 to 2004--when I began to turn to poetry in the constellation of my interests and activities, Burroughs started to appear in the backdrop of my reading. Today I saw a doco on Burroughs.2–Ron Price with thanks to 1Penguin Modern Classics 2003 edition of Junky, and 2William Burroughs, SBSONE TV, 9 June, 2:20-3:55 p.m., 9 June 2012.[/SIZE]

    [SIZE=14pt]You achieved fame and glory,[/SIZE]
    [SIZE=14pt]but at what a price with heroin[/SIZE]
    [SIZE=14pt]addiction, murder and goodness[/SIZE]
    [SIZE=14pt]knows what else under your belt.[/SIZE]

    [SIZE=14pt]You began writing when I was just[/SIZE]
    [SIZE=14pt]one year old, published your famous [/SIZE]
    [SIZE=14pt]Naked Lunch [/SIZE][SIZE=14pt]the same year I joined [/SIZE]
    [SIZE=14pt]the Baha’i Faith,1 and you graduated [/SIZE]
    [SIZE=14pt]from Harvard in 1936 right at the start [/SIZE]
    [SIZE=14pt]of the planning for the Baha’i teaching [/SIZE]
    [SIZE=14pt]Plan, a Plan I’ve been part of some 60 [/SIZE]
    [SIZE=14pt]years now(1953-2014) hard to believe![/SIZE]

    [SIZE=14pt]You also received a $200/month sum from [/SIZE]
    [SIZE=14pt]your parents until you published The Ticket [/SIZE]
    [SIZE=14pt]That Exploded[/SIZE][SIZE=14pt] and Nova Express…...It was [/SIZE]
    [SIZE=14pt]then[/SIZE][SIZE=14pt] that I started travelling for the Canadian [/SIZE]
    [SIZE=14pt]Baha’i community in 1962…You published[/SIZE]
    [SIZE=14pt]Junkie: Confessions of Drug Addict [/SIZE][SIZE=14pt]right at [/SIZE]
    [SIZE=14pt]the start [/SIZE][SIZE=14pt]of the Kingdom of God on Earth in [/SIZE]
    [SIZE=14pt]1953--little [/SIZE][SIZE=14pt]did anyone know about it: either [/SIZE]
    [SIZE=14pt]your book or that [/SIZE][SIZE=14pt]Kingdom.....I trust you are [/SIZE]
    [SIZE=14pt]now enjoying some of [/SIZE][SIZE=14pt]that freedom from the [/SIZE]
    [SIZE=14pt]slings and arrows of an [/SIZE][SIZE=14pt]outrageous fortune,[/SIZE]
    [SIZE=14pt]a fortune which plagued you on & on during[/SIZE]
    [SIZE=14pt]your life in that tempestuous 20th century!!!![/SIZE]

    [SIZE=14pt]1 [/SIZE][SIZE=14pt]In 1959....[/SIZE][SIZE=14pt]Burroughs wrote a total of 18 novels and novellas, 6 collections of short stories & four collections of essays. There are now 5 books of his interviews and letters which have been published for those who want to get 'into' him seriously. [/SIZE][SIZE=14pt]He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, & made many appearances in films. “The greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift,” he was sometimes called. Norman Mailer declared him to be: "the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius."[/SIZE]

    [SIZE=14pt]Ron Price[/SIZE]
    [SIZE=14pt]10/6/'12 to 21/9/'14.[/SIZE]
     
  10. BlackBillBlake

    BlackBillBlake resigned HipForums Supporter

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    Don't quit your day job.
     
  11. RonPrice

    RonPrice Member

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    Thank you, BlackBillBlake, for your clever and, I found, humorous post. You would enjoy life in Australia, BBB, a land where self-put-downs and the put downs of others is an art form. These put-downs also lies at the core of Australian humour which I have come to enjoy in my 43 years of life Downunder. Your 'encouraging words' have solicited the following on Burroughs:
    =======================================
    ACQUIRING PRECISE DEFINITION

    Part 1:

    William Burroughs' writes in his novel Naked Lunch: There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing . . . . I am a recording instrument. . . . I do not presume to impose "story" "plot" "continuity". . .(1) For me the idea of what is in front of my senses includes memory & imagination. Story, plot & continuity are unquestionably already there. I do not impose them. But I do recreate them. Many, Robert Creeley informs us, see Burroughs’ and Kerouac’s approach to writing back in the 1950s as an example of “a loss of coherence in contemporary American prose.” Warren Tallman makes a similar point in his analysis of some of Kerouac’s writings:

    "In conventional fiction the narrative continuity is always clearly discernible. But it is impossible to create an absorbing narrative without at the same time enriching it with images, asides, themes and variations—impulses from within. It is evident that in much recent fiction—Joyce, Kafka, Virginia Woolf, and Faulkner are obvious examples—the narrative line has tended to weaken, merge with, and be dominated by the sum of variations. Each narrative step in Faulkner's work is likely to provoke many side-winding pages before a next narrative step is taken. More, a lot of Faulkner's power is to be found in the side-windings. In brief, what happens in jazz when the melody merges with the improvisations and the improvisations dominate, has been happening in fiction for some time now."

    Part 2:

    This is also true of my poetry. There is some narrative, autobiographical, continuity which is clear, but there are also variations, improvisations, sidewindings, impulses from within. The earlier senses of 'form' in poetry are not important to me. I have rejected them as irrelevant; or perhaps, better, I have introduced my own prose-poem form. There is a conceptual focus in my individual poems and the literal activity of the writing itself is very often a focus.

    The objects which occur to me at any given moment of composition, what we might call objects of recognition, can be, must be, are, treated exactly as they occur to my senses. Ideas, imaginations, abstractions, conceptions, preconceptions from outside this sensory apparatus, world, paradigm are, for me, introduced to enrich the sensory, the intellectual, picture. They are handled as a series of additions to a field in such a way that a series of tensions are created, are made to hold , and to hold exactly inside the content and the context of the poem. This content and context has forced itself into being through me, through my writing as the poet.

    It is in the nature of my writing that this thinking, this approach to the writing of poetry, finds its most active, accurate, definition. The final section a poem by John Wieners' "A Poem for Painters” expresses this idea so well. I have rewritten, recrafted, this poem, but Wieners begins by saying that his poem contains:

    Part 3:

    Only the score of a man’s struggle
    to stay with what is his own,
    what lies within him to do,
    without which he is nothing.

    I come to this same struggle
    knowing the waste and leaving
    the rest up to love and its often
    twisted faces where my hands
    often claw, sometimes touching
    tenderly and sometimes drawing
    back as I see blood running there.

    It is not the blood of my veins,
    but some inner blood that knows
    no colour, heat or cold, but has
    coagulated for years twisting,
    trying, clawing in a million hidden
    ways that only some unknown me
    some me that no one knows, yet,
    is trying to acquire precise definition.

    Ron Price
    16/5/'05 to 23/9/'14.


    (1) [SIZE=12pt] Robert Creeley, The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1989.[/SIZE]
     
  12. More Full Life

    More Full Life Members

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    I love Naked Lunch and I'm reading The Ticket That Exploded at the moment :daisy: I didn't know that there was a new film out. I must see this!
     
  13. ElEyeJaw

    ElEyeJaw Banned

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  14. ElEyeJaw

    ElEyeJaw Banned

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  15. More Full Life

    More Full Life Members

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  16. ElEyeJaw

    ElEyeJaw Banned

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    He mentioned his "love" for underaged males quite often on many occaisons. His friend Allen Ginsberg was also a NAMBLA member.
     
  17. More Full Life

    More Full Life Members

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    I'm not really qualified to comment on this issue with any authority, because what you're telling me is all new information. However, I have just read a quote from Allen which stated "I joined NAMBLA in defense of free speech."

    As for Old Bill, I have read a quote where he admitted to Andy Warhol that he liked boys between the ages of 14 and 25. However, whether he had any intimate relations with anyone under the age of consent is not documented. There is one claim from a male who was almost eighteen years old (over the age of consent) who willingly slept with him and although, to me, this is quite seedy and odd, I wouldn't call it immoral as they were over the age of consent and only 6 months away from being an adult.

    I guess in some ways this new information makes me think slightly less of Bill, but I don't think that it made him a bad man.
     
  18. ElEyeJaw

    ElEyeJaw Banned

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    If someone is joinging NAMBLA? It's not got anything to do with freespeech.......but sexual proclivities more than likely. If I were to join NORML or the NRA, would you assume I did so out of some motivation, which implies I merely support someone's desire to own guns or smoke pot, or would you assume I joined because I smoke pot and own guns? Think about it.
     
  19. More Full Life

    More Full Life Members

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    You're probably right. I just thought about how sometimes people can do elaborate things to make a point. I mean, someone with such a high profile as Allen must have known that he would tarnish his name by joining. But yeah, the chances are that you're right.
     

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