Burroughs: The Movie (1983) | Directed by Howard Brookner

I watched the film here

I found this documentary really interesting. It's quite a personal look into Burroughs' life, and how his experiences feed into his writing.

It was good to also see footage of him and how he came across, as well as accounts from friends and fellow writers.

The film gave a better picture of his family background, where he grew up, as well as his travels as photos were shown and in some cases, Burroughs himself revisited certain places. It also described the event involving the shooting of his wife, as well as his strained relationship with his son, Burroughs Jr.

What I still felt a little unclear on were his motivations for writing? Unless it was a cathartic/confessional activity for him??

What I like a lot about his writing is the observations, and conversations that could be lifted from real life. How they are sometimes funny in a warped way, and how they have a strange accuracy.

It also covered his cut-up writing technique. He would cut up and rearrange his own typings, or newspaper articles to form sentences and new words completely.

I liked the mention of his 'montage' work (collages, essentially) which he kept in scrapbooks. He mentions painting, and Cézanne a fair bit. He quotes a friend by saying "writing is atleast 50 years behind painting", I guess the experimental tendencies of some painters are what he likes. This could inform his more experimental approaches to writing.

I also read somewhere that he got into painting and visual art himself later in life. This would also be interesting to look at.

I really enjoyed the clips of his spoken word performances that were part of his 'reading tours'. His old craggly voice brought the scenes to life, and his drawled accent fit well with the dated phrasing and slang.

These reading tours often took place in 'punk bars', as Burroughs described. Often to a younger crowd. I suppose this fits with Burroughs attitude and conduct - self-indulgent, sometimes shocking, going against the grain, abrasive in manner.

Spoken Word + Interview | William S. Burroughs

"...the cemetery is full of my contemporaries"

Videowest | William S. Burroughs

I liked this weird little video. I'm not sure what to make of Burroughs yet, I'm still finding a lot of things out. He is sort of like an antihero. Should he be celebrated? Would it be wrong to dismiss him?

Who said writers had to be inherently good people?

Old timey jive-talking junky grandad who's seen and done some right things in his time...

Naked Lunch | William S. Burroughs

I'm halfway through reading this book right now. I will update this as I go along.

Observations

• Junk (drug) terminology, 50s slang

• Burroughs' reportage. Observations, rich descriptions of people and landscapes (made up or real)

Imagery

• Bugs (insects, centipede, long slug, could this relate to his time as an exterminator?)

Pg. 23 'Her hideous galvanized need (hunger of insects in dry places)'

•  Flesh, mutation, physical deformation/change (flesh, ooze, Mugwumps, fluid)

Pg. 19 '...dissolving the body's decent skin, you expect at any moment a great glob of protoplasm will flop right out and surround the junk'

Pg. 22 'lusts and hungers of larval organs stirring in the tentative ectoplasmic flesh of junk kick'

Pg. 23 'looking down at her bloody haunch with the cold blank eyes of a meat trader'

'When I grabbed the Rube's thigh the flesh came up like wax and stayed there, and a slow drop of pus oozed out the hole'

Pg. 66 'Misshapen overcoat of flesh that turned from brown to green and then colorless...fell off into globs on the floor'

Pg. 89 'his flesh turns to viscid, transparent jelly that drifts away in a green mist, unveiling a monster black centipede'

• Illness and Disease (fictional and real, the junk sickness, addiction)

Pg. 67 'Bang-utot'

• The sickness of the world (ecological damage, corruption...)

Pg. 19 '...into the East River, down through condoms and orange peels, mosaic of floating newspapers, down into the silent black ooze with gangsters in concrete...'

Pg. 25 'On through the peeled landscape, dead armadillos in the road and vultures over the swamp and cypress stumps'

Pg. 92 '...smell of the jungle and salt water and the rotting river and dried excrement and sweat and genitals'

Pg. 93 'The City is visited by epidemics of violence, and the untended dead are eaten by vultures in the streets'

• Drug Use

Pg. 93 - notes about a paragraph Burroughs' wrote during Yage intoxication. He makes notes on the effects of the drug.

Pg. 113 - 'The junky sits with needle poised to the message of blood, and the conman palpates the mark with fingers of rotten ectoplasm

• Homosexuality/repression

Pg. 113 - 'There's a boy across the river with an ass like a peach; alas I was no swimmer and lost my Clementine'

William S. Burroughs | Initial Research pt. 2

Regarding the death of Joan Vollmer, Burroughs said the following (from the 1985 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 life long struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.

Travels to Tangier

Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, Tangier, 1957

• Due to legal issues, Burroughs was live in many of the cities he most wanted to. After drifting from friend to friend, and visiting his parents in Florida, they offered continued financial support and he decided to head to Tangier, Morocco.

• It seemed like the perfect location for Burroughs - drugs were freely available, his parents would continue to fund his stay, and he rented a room in a house owned by a man who employed a number of homosexual prostitutes. Burroughs had a distrust of women, and the social structure of Tangier aligned with this value of his.

The Beat Hotel, Paris

• Burroughs moved to Paris in 1959 when Naked Lunch was still looking for a publisher. Tangier had became an unhealthy environment for him, so he moved to Paris with Ginsberg to talk to publishing houses. Burroughs brought with him legal issues that followed him from Tangier, involving smuggling drugs. The publication of Naked Lunch helped to suspend his sentence.

• The Beat Hotel was a boarding house hotel where Burroughs and others spent several months after Naked Lunch there. International rights to the book were soon sold, and Burroughs used the advance money (approx. $24,000 today) to buy drugs.

Move to London

• Burroughs left Paris to take up a progressive heroin withdrawal treatment in London with Dr. Dent using the drug apomorphine. Burroughs ended up relapsing, but ended up working in London for six years.

• He supported himself and his addiction by writing pieces for small literary presses..

(There is much more, including his return to the U.S., his short-lived teaching jobs, his residence in The Bunker in NY. He continued writing, and continued his heavy drug use well into his 80's.)

William S. Burroughs | Initial Research

Known for writing... Naked Lunch (1959), Junky (1953), Queer (1951-53)

• A prominent figure of the Beat Generation, regarded as a postmodernist author writing in the genre of 'paranoid fiction'.

Context

• The Beat Generation were a group of authors who had an influence on American culture (post-WW2) - mostly published/made popular in the 1950s. Beat culture involved the following: rejection of standard narrative values (e.g. reliable narrators?), spiritual exploration/exploration of American and Eastern religion, rejection of materialism, explicit portrayal of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, sexual liberation

Howl (by Allen Ginsberg), Naked Lunch (by W. Burroughs), and On the Road (by Jack Kerouac are the most well-known examples of Beat literature. Howl and Naked Lunch were part of obscenity trials, that pushed the boundaries of publishing rules in the U.S.

Some aspects of the Beat movement morphed into the counterculture groups of the 1960s (e.g. hippie - although there were some differences to each group.)Life

• A lot of Burroughs' work is semi-autobiographical, infleunced by his experiences as a herion addict and his heavy drug use, his travels (London, Tangier, Mexico..), as well as his homosexuality which he kept a secret until adulthood.

• Burroughs came from a wealthy family, and grew up in St Louis, Missouri. He attended a boarding school for the wealthy in Mexico, where he kept journals of his attachment to another boy at the time. After high school, he left home to go to Harvard to do an arts degree. While at H.U., he made trips to New York City where he was introduced to the gay subculture there. He spent a brief time in Vienna, Austria to study - where he also became involved in the LGBT culture there.

• He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1942, where he became dejected at not being classified as an officer. He was discharged when his mother noticed his depression.
Following this stint in the army, he moved to Chicago and held many jobs, such as an exterminator.

Joan Vollmer, Drug Use

• 1944 - Burroughs began living with Joan Vollmer Adams (married to a G.I. at this time, with a young daughter) sharing an apartment with Jack Kerouac and his wife Edie Parker.

• He became addicted to morphine, eventually selling heroin in Greenwich Village to support this addiction. Vollmer also became an addict, choosing Benzedrine. Because of those she associated with and her drug problem, her husband divorced her after returning from war.

• Burroughs was urged by friends to move in with Vollmer and her daughter. A string of events led to them marrying (Vollmer nearly losing custody of her child during time at a mental facility, which prompted Burroughs to return to NYC.) Never formally married, Vollmer lived as his common-law wife.

Move to Mexico, Vollmer's Death

• The pair (along with their child, and Vollmer's daughter) moved to Mexico for Burroughs to escape detention from prison. With no heroin, and his Benzedrine abuse, Burroughs began openly pursuing other men (as his libido returned.) Vollmer turned to drinking heavily because of this.

• At a bar with friends one night, Burroughs took his gun from a bag and pursuaded Vollmer to carry out a 'William Tell act'. Vollmer, suffering from withdrawals and alcoholism by now, agreed. Burroughs missed the glass on Vollmer's head, killing her immediately.

Haruki Murakami | Initial Research

Bio

• Born Jan, 1949• Contemporary Japanese writer
• Only child, parents both taught Japanese literature
• Grew up influenced by Western culture, reading works by European and American writers (Franz Kafka, Charles Dickens, Jack Kerouac, amongst others...)

Themes and ideas

• Surreal
• Melancholy tone
• 'Kafkaesque' - themes of alienation, loneliness

• Memory (are memories true? reliable?) - alternate realities? rewritten histories..
• (relating to above) Time
• Contrast of surreal with mundane everyday?

Life events, influences

• His fiction seen by Japanese critics as 'un-Japanese' - influenced by Western writers

• Said that his early works focus on individual darkness/melancholy, while later works focus on that of a collective society, or throughout history

Works of note

• Norwegian Wood (1987)
• Kafka on the Shore (2002) 
• 1Q84 (2009-2010)