New Stuff: Naked Lunch

 

Author: William S. Burroughs

 

William Seward Burroughs II was an American writer and visual artist, widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular culture and literature.

Bio:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Burroughs

New Stuff: William S. Burroughs

New Stuff: William S. Burroughs

From my vaults: William S. Burroughs

Bio:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Burroughs

William S. Burroughs: A Man Within (2010)

William S. Burroughs: featuring never before seen footage as well as exclusive interviews with his closest friends and colleagues.

Although not neglecting his cultural influence (but slightly failing) this documentary does succeed in investigating William S. Burroughs' persona.

New Stuff: William S. Burroughs: A Man Within

A new documentary about the man!

William S. Burroughs: My Education. A Book of Dreams

Out in the street I don't know how to find my way back. I have money for a cab, but I don't see any cabs and wouldn't in any case know where to tell him to go. I am looking for a place to have breakfast. If I could get to some familiar landmark. Is it Paris?...Land of the Dead, probably. Pass a crowded place on several levels like Le Drugstore, and there is a hotel restaurant. I see a small cafe and go in.
  Three people behing zinc counter about three feet long and two patrons in tiny booths with coffee. The people behind the counter look dead, a gray-green color, like "The Absinthe Drinkers." There are two men and one woman. I don't know whether to sit down in a booth or get coffee at the counter. There is a stool at the end of the counter. I sit down and the stool is wobbly. I finally try another stool, which also wobbles, and the people behind the counter start laughing, and I walk out.
  I see a man in a gray suit waiting by an orange sign I figure I must be a treetcar stop but I didn't know how to ask him for directions, not beingsure of where I want to go. There is a hotel and another stop I need to make. Then I meet Brion Gysin and he says there is a hall in the vicinity where Allen and Huncke will read or have read. Then he leads the way down a long street...faster and faster. I see a clock: 6:10. We are moving always faster...now a blur of red painting, red faces from Renoir, red scarves, red geraniums...faster and faster...a blur of red...

William S. Burroughs: My Education. A Book of Dreams

In a cafe mezzanine, Clarence Darrow is seated at a table. Brion and I introduce ourselves. Darrow looks very trim and youngish. A well-kept forty-five, in a gray suit.Darrow was a belt-and-braces atheist, said already he is losing his memory a piece at a time. "When I die," he says, "I won't be any more aware of my approaching extinction than an old log rotting in the woods." Well,speak for yourself, Clarence.
  Any case, he is looking good. I notice that his thin mouth is almost at the end of his chin.

William S. Burroughs: My Education. A Book of Dreams

Mikey Portman and I have teamed up some way and we are photographs...and we say:
  "We are photographs and we will turn everyone else into photographs."
  There is a screaming child there and I am afraid to touch it to comfort it since I know it will bite me.

William S. Burroughs: My Education. A Book of Dreams

Being conceived is like you are in a car driven by the father...faster, faster, faster..onlythis time it is Mother who was driving when we crashed and in the time it took the hydraulic brakes to take hold, I had written out two hundred images...poetic images yet. But I know it was only two pages and that is the way people talk here. they exaggerate by a hundred, like putting bigger numbers on the money.
  Then I'm in a room with Ian who looks all pink and red...a beautiful terra-cotta color...and these phantoms keep coming in, look like people but are just as fraudulent and if you shove them they disappear.
  Quite a number of them came.

William S. Burroughs: My Education. A Book of Dreams

On a plane and it is going down and I know this is reality.
  No feeling of a dream...we are going down. Passengers across the aisle are all stading up now to see something I can't see because they block the view.
  However, the plane lands safely and we disembark on a city street that looks like the Main in Montreal.
  "I'm a dreamer Montreal?"

William S. Burroughs: My Education. A Book of Dreams

So here P am in the Land of the Dead with Mikey Portman. We are sharing an apartment which consists of two rooms with a bathroom between them. Mikey's room is also provided with a sleeping porch. There are two beds side by side and touching each other, lumpy-looking mattresses, throw rugs, eiderdowns, cushions covered in tattered, frayed yellow and gold velvet. Looks like the madam's room in a whorehouse, lacking only an asthmatic Pekingnese. It seems an old German lady with tight lace collar and high-button, black shoes has been billeted on us for the night.
  Mikey is on the sleeping porch wrapped up in a pink blanket. I tell him he should let her sleep on one of the beds. After all, he can retire to the sleeping porch. And I have assurances she will not even remove her clothes.
  "No, I don't want her in here."
  "Well, you can stay on the porch. There are two beds."
  "I might want to sleep in here."
  No use. Death hasn't changed him a bit; the same selfish, self-centered, spoiled, petulant, weak Mikey Portman.
  Now I see a small black dog peeking out of the bathroom door, which is ajar...dog all black, shiny black...with a long pointed muzzle quivering like a dowser wand.
  "Where did that door dog come from? What is it doing here?"
  "Does it matter?" Distilled concentrate of petulant Portman.
  "Door man...door dog," I say.
  He doesn't answer. Obviously I will have to billet the old German lady in my room, which is a duplicate of his room except the beds are smaller.

William S. Burroughs: My Education. A book of Dreams

I am in my pajamas at a discontinued subway stop.
  Now with James Grauerholz rushing through subway stations with inhuman speed and agility. Jumping across tracks, down stairways, floating through turnstiles...and here we are at Johnson's store, open-air booths with counters on four sides.

William S. Burroughs: My Education. A book of Dreams

I climb to the top floor of a vast warehouse by iron stairs and ramps, a big bare room with windows I can look five hundred feet down. I have come here, of course, to soar down. Need something to break out a window. An iron bar or perhaps a barstool- - like the man who broke a glass door in the Milky Way in Amsterdam and Benn Posset shielded me with his body?

William S. Burroughs: My Education. A book of Dreams

In Hamburg a priest is smoking opium. A cobblestone alley with horse manure. End of the line, waiting for the Saint Patrick Special back to town.

William S. Burroughs: My Education. A book of Dreams

There are some aliens camped near us in blue denim suits - Martians, I think - and I visit them. They seem friendly enough and one man takes off his clothes and there is a column of bone running down from his neck and nothing else except his hipbones. He says, "Well, I really got a turkey of a body..."
  He shit sure does.
  I feel heat in my foot and look down and there is a lighted cigarette shoved under the sole of my shoe near the toe. Someone has given me a hot foot. When I extract the cigarette, I break it open and it is like a clamshell with tentacles inside. Not however moving or alive.

William S. Burroughs: My Education. A book of Dreams

  Going out the window to attend a performance I'd seen advertised on a billboard, and someone tells me that show isn't here yet. It's another show on now. I forget the name. I am afraid I will wake up in this bed and find that this is just a dream. Then I wake up in my bed in Lawrence and I realize that the dream in the gray, empty city is more real than my real life in Lawrence.

William S. Burroughs: My Education. A book of Dreams

  I'm in a room with a high ceiling and a door at one end. The room is full of light and has a feeling og being open and airy. I float up to the ceiling and bob along to the door and out.There is a porch or balcony over the room and now I am up under the porch about thirty feet off the ground. I move out from under the porch and pick up speed and direction.
  I land in a catwalk open to my left. Walking down, I see a door at the end of the walkway, about six feet wide and eight feet high. Outside the door a boy in a gray sweatsuit is working at something I can't see, with his back to me. I feel he is hostile, and I couldn't care less. The door opens and a man emerges. He is wearing a very dark blue striped suit, with a tie. He has a black moustache. He looks at me without a trace of friendliness or hostility. Just registering my presence. No one I ever saw before. Out to my left there is a ditch about thirty feet below the ramp where I am standing. Beyond that some pine trees and what looks like a cemetery...mausoleums with inscriptions embossed in white stone...

William S. Burroughs: My Education. A book of Dreams

Airport. Like a high school play, attempting to convey a special atmosphere. One desk onstage, a gray woman behind the desk with the cold waxen face of an intergalactic bureaucrat. She is dressed in a gray-blue uniform. Airport sounds from a distance, blurred, incomprehensible, then suddenly loud and clear. "Flight sixty-nine has been --" Static...fades into the distance..."Flight..."
   Standing to one side of the desk are three men, grinning with joy at their prospective destinations. When I present myself at the desk, the woman says: "You haven't had your education yet."