The Naropa University Archive Project is preserving and providing access to over 5000 hours of recordings made at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. The library was developed under the auspices of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (the university’s Department of Writing and Poetics) founded in 1974 by poets Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg. It contains readings, lectures, performances, seminars, panels and workshops conducted at Naropa by many of the leading figures of the U.S.literary avant-garde.

The collection represents several generations of artists who have contributed to aesthetic and cultural change in the postmodern era. The Naropa University Archive Project seeks to enhance appreciation and understanding of post-World War II American literature and its role in social change, cultural criticism, and the literary arts through widespread dissemination of the actual voices of the poets and writers of this period. Current interest in Oriental religions, environmentalism, political activism, ethnic studies, and women’s consciousness is directly indebted to the work of these New American Poets, writers and musicians.

Funding for this project was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Save America’s Treasures, the GRAMMY Foundation, the Internet Archive, the Collaborative Digitization Program, and private donors. If this collection is important to you please help us preserve it with your donations.

Naropa Poetics Audio Archives

(via Dangerous Minds)

UBU Web is running the 1985 documentary Burroughs: The Movie for free. This should help tide you over until the new Burroughs documentary comes out.

(via Dangerous Minds)

Update: I’ve also seen this movie also called “Arena” with a release date of 1997. See here.

Photographer Peter Ross has been allowed to photograph William Burroughs’s stuff from a New York apartment he once lived in.

William Burroughs lived for many years in the former locker room of an 1880s YMCA, on the Bowery in New York City. The almost windowless space was known as The Bunker. When he died in 1997, his friend and mine, John Giorno, kept the apartment intact, with many of Burroughs’s possessions sitting as they were. Part of the space is now used for Buddhist teachings, and the apartment is a wonderful mix of Buddhist wall hangings and pillows and carpets and Burroughs’ personal furniture and collections.

The Morning News: William Burroughs’s Stuff

(via Kottke)

The surprising thing is that this place exists. He lived out his final days in Lawrence, KS. Did he also keep an apartment in NYC?

Update: A few more pics here (via Metafilter)

William S. Burroughs said:

Danger is a biological necessity for humans, just like sleep and dreams. If you face death, for that time you are immortal. For the Western middle classes, danger is a rarity and erupts only with a sudden, random shock. And yet we are in danger at all times, since our death exists. Is there a technique for confronting death without immediate physical danger? (quoted from Hashisheen: The End of Law)

But this is at least partially incorrect. Western middle classes, at least those of us in the United States, typically face physical danger multiple times per day. Driving is amongst the most dangerous activities in modern society – 114 people die in car crashes per day. Cars accidents deaths per year are more than double the number of murders per year. the average American spends 101 minutes driving each day. We confront death every day, and we barely even notice.

The dangerous involved in driving are commonplace, boring. New dangers though – new dangers are exciting. Perhaps Michael Skinner was more correct when he said:

Geezerz need excitement
If their lives don’t provide them this they incite violence
Common sense simple common sense

Above is a trailer for a new documentary about William S. Burroughs, Burroughs: A Man Within.

(via What a Wonderful Place to Be)

(via The Breaking Time)

Read the rest of this entry »

Two quotes on my mind tonight:

1. From The Job interviews with William S. Burroughs:

Q: Are they happy anywhere?

A: They’re certainly happier in Spain with all the poverty than they are in Sweden with all the prosperity and their high living standard.

Q: But then, Spain is a good example of a highly controlled country with a repressive government, a religious bugbear – just about everything…

A: Just about everything. They have all sorts of troubles. But you see, poverty keeps people busy. You see happiness there in the faces of the people on the streets that you do not see on Swedish streets.

This interview took place in the 70s when Spain was still under Franco. With regard to the question of “being busy” read this and consider what many (most?) of us are “busy” doing in modern post-industrial society.

2. Reality Sandwich interview with R.U. Sirius:

Q: It seems equally possible that we will be thrust into some kind of totalitarian technological hell in which our every movement is watched and our perceptions are closely monitored, a la A Scanner Darkly or 1984. It’s interesting to observe how a force as powerful as technology can simultaneously invoke great dread or great hope in people based on different perspectives of its usefulness in our lives.

A: Yeah, I think that’s actually more of a parallel vision than an opposite vision. These technologies could solve problems and not be disastrous in a physical sense, but they seem to almost inevitably bring on the death of the Western concept of privacy. The scenario could be hellish, considering the current political dynamics: authoritarian tendencies married to paranoias about security are at war with authoritarian outsider anti-imperialists who hate technology and modernity.

But I don’t think the scenario will necessarily be particularly hellish. It could easily resolve into a very liberal control system. In some interview during the ’80s, someone asked William Burroughs about Brave New World and he said (in that great Burroughs voice), “I think it would be an improvement.” I can imagine a very liberal society – pampered by machines – in which people are free to carry on wild festivities in the hippie/pagan/Burning Man traditions, or do just about whatever pleases them, and where the margins on behavior are set really wide, but if you slip over those margins, everybody immediately knows about it and your brain is instantly corrected so that you can’t do that taboo thing again. Instant rehab!

Which of course makes me think of the movie Zardoz

Online, web based dreammachine

(via Bruce Eisner, who has some additional information about Brion Gysin and dreammachines)

A novel co-written by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, two giants of the ‘Beat Generation’ of poets, writers and drug-takers, is to be published for the first time more than 60 years after it was written.

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, written in 1945, was inspired by an actual killing which led to the arrest of both authors.

The novel draws upon the stabbing in 1944 of a homosexual, David Kammerer, by Lucien Carr, a friend of the duo and another Beat leading light.

Carr served two years after admitting manslaughter, claiming Kammerer had been obsessed with him and had become violent.

Carr confessed to Kerouac and Burroughs, who helped him dispose of the knife but did not go to police. Kerouac was arrested as an accessary to the killing in 1944 and was put in a Bronx jail but he was freed after his girlfriend, Edie Parker, stood bail.

Full Story: Adam Gorightly’s Untamed Dimensions.

My friend Richard Phantastica has a blog, with posts about EsoTech, Grant Morrison, Gilles Deleuze, and William S. Burroughs. Check it out.

The other day I watched eXistenZ. Afterword, I reached into the box of old Mondo 2000s that Bill Whitcomb recently gave me, and pulled out an issue at random. It just happened to have an interview with David Cronenberg (an excerpt from Cronenberg on Cronenberg, which I was also flipping through). Here’s an interesting bit where he talks about gender:

William Burroughs doesn’t just say that men and women are different species, he says they’re different species with different wills and purposes. That’s where you arrive at the struggle between the sexes. I think Burroughs really touches a nerve there. the attempt to make men and women not different – to pretend that little girls and boys are exactly the same and it’s only social pressure, influence, and environmental factors that make them go separate ways – just doesn’t work. Anyone who has kids knows that. There is a femaleness and a maleness. We each partake of both in different proportions. But Burroughs is talking about something else: will and purpose.

If we inhabited different planets, we would see the female planet go entirely one way and the male another. Maybe that’s why we’re on the same planet, because either extremes might be worse. I think Burroughs’s comments are illuminating. Maybe they’re a bit too cosmic to deal with in daily life, but hear it reflected in all the hideous cliches of songs: “You can’t live with ‘em, and you’ve can’t live without ‘em.”

Burroughs was fascinated when I told him about a species of butterfly. They couldn’t find the male of one species and the female of another. One was huge and brightly colored, and the other was tiny and black. It took forty years before lepidopterists realized were the same species. When Burroughs talks about men and women being different species, it does have some resonance in other forms of life. But there are also hermaphrodite version of this same butterfly. they are totally bizarre. One half is huge and bright and the other halve – split right down the middle of the body – is small and dark. I can’t imagine it being able to fly. there’s no balance whatsoever.

(See also my article on Breyer P-Orridge).

I’m sure you’ve now seen his Thanksgiving prayer fortyleven times. But this is the first time I’ve ever seen this.

(Thanks Amy!)

See also: Burroughs Nike commercial details.

Update: Direct download.

In 1974 William S. Burroughs and David Bowie got together for a little chat, documented by Rolling Stone. Here’s a particularly weird part where Burroughs and Bowie talk about the alien and reptilian nature of Andy Warhol:

Burroughs: Have you ever met Warhol?

Bowie: Yes, about two years ago I was invited up to The Factory. We got in the lift and went up and when it opened there was a brick wall in front of us. We rapped on the wall and they didn’t believe who we were. So we went back down and back up again till finally they opened the wall and everybody was peering around at each other. That was shortly after the gun incident. I met this man who was the living dead. Yellow in complexion, a wig on that was the wrong colour, little glasses. I extended my hand and the guy retired, so I thought, ?The guy doesn’t like flesh, obviously he’s reptilian.’ He produced a camera and took a picture of me. And I tried to make small talk with him, and it wasn’t getting anywhere.

But then he saw my shoes. I was wearing a pair of gold-and-yellow shoes, and he says, ?I adore those shoes, tell me where you got those shoes.’ He then started a whole rap about shoe design and that broke the ice. My yellow shoes broke the ice with Andy Warhol.

I adore what he was doing. I think his importance was very heavy, it’s becoming a big thing to like him now. But Warhol wanted to be cliche, he wanted to be available in Woolworth’s, and be talked about in that glib type of manner. I hear he wants to make real films now, which is very sad because the films he was making were the things that should be happening. I left knowing as little about him as a person as when I went in.

Burroughs: I don’t think that there is any person there. It’s a very alien thing, completely and totally unemotional. He’s really a science fiction character. He’s got a strange green colour.

Bowie: That’s what struck me. He’s the wrong colour, this man is the wrong colour to be a human being. Especially under the stark neon lighting in The Factory. Apparently it is a real experience to behold him in the daylight.

Burroughs: I’ve seen him in all light and still have no idea as to what is going on, except that it is something quite purposeful. It’s not energetic, but quite insidious, completely asexual. His films will be the late-night movies of the future.

Full Story: Teenage Wildlife.

(via Waking hte Midnight Sun).

See also: Williams S. Burroughs interviews Jimmy Page.

Burroughs Book Covers.

(via Posthuman Blues).

Russian scientists from the city of Novosibirsk, Siberia, made a sensational report at the international conference devoted to new methods of treatment and rehabilitation in narcology. The report was called “Methods of painful impact to treat addictive behavior.”

Siberian scientists believe that addiction to alcohol and narcotics, as well as depression, suicidal thoughts and psychosomatic diseases occur when an individual loses his or her interest in life. The absence of the will to live is caused with decreasing production of endorphins – the substance, which is known as the hormone of happiness. If a depressed individual receives a physical punishment, whipping that is, it will stir up endorphin receptors, activate the ‘production of happiness’ and eventually remove depressive feelings.

Full Story: Pravda.

(Thanks Danny Chaoflux).

William S. Burroughs:

Danger is a biological necessity for humans, just like sleep and dreams. If you face death, for that time you are immortal. For the Western middle classes, danger is a rarity and erupts only with a sudden, random shock. And yet we are in danger at all times, since our death exists. Is there a technique for confronting death without immediate physical danger? (quoted from Hashisheen: The End of Law)

Here’s my play list for the working to aid new initiates (see also: Meet Murphison).

1. Shpongle – Divine Moments of Truth (music)

2. Jason Louv and Chris Arkenberg on the R.U. Sirius Show, discussing the relevance of magic to atheists.

3. Grant Morrison describing how to make a sigil (from his DisinfoCon lecture).

4. Genesis P. Orridge explaining the true purpose of the TOPY sigils

5. Psychic TV – Meet Every Situation Head-on (music)

6. Israel Regardie’s description of the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram.

7. William S. Burroughs spoke word “Ah Pook the Destroyer”

PDF of Ali’s Smile/Naked Scientology, William S. Burroughs’s collection of anti-Scientology materials.

Dr. Menlo’s looking for the exact “A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on” William S. Burroughs quote. There are a few permutations of it on the web, and I’ve yet to find a single actual citation. Did he say it in an interview? Was it in one of his books?

Leave Doc a comment.

Update 2: The Cynics Lexicon (Google Books link) sources the sources the quote to Friends magazine as opposed to Friend. I’m guess it was this magazine.

Update: At last, a textual citation. Wikiquote lists the quote as “A paranoid man is a man who knows a little about what’s going on” and cites Friend magazine in 1970.

(Thanks to Joseph Matheny for the Wikiquote link!)

This is the most detailed description of the commercial I could find online. I recall once finding a more detailed description, without commentary, but I can’t find it now. It may actually have been in a book about Nike, not online.

In the first scene of the ad, a child wearing Nikes and playing basketball with friends runs over to a tiny hand-held television sitting on the ground and turns it on. Burroughs appears on the screen saying, “hey, I’m talking to you,” while the boy runs off. This scene emphasizes most of the major themes of the commercial. Burroughs appears on a TV on the TV and is thus contained by technology. The commercial’s repeated refrain–”the purpose of technology is not to confuse the brain but to serve the body”–highlights a conflict between mastering and serving technology, and Burroughs is clearly the subject rather than master of technology. The boy, however, who turns on the diminutive TV, small enough to be easily be handled by child, is in control of technology and thereby of Burroughs as well. Furthermore, the child runs off, back to his sports despite Burroughs’ command, showing contempt for the older generation and particularly for its failure to master technology in relation to sports.

Burroughs then continues to appear on TV screens throughout the commercial’s series of quick-cut images of young athletes and of high-tech computer graphics of Nike designs. The athletes themselves are portrayed primarily as body parts, intensifying the focus on humans as athletic machines, or on TVs which shake when they appear on the screen, again emphasizing that technology can’t contain or control the young and powerful. The TV screens containing Burroughs are either shown in a stack (stable and unshaking, unlike those containing the youthful athletes) or placed on the playing fields, in which case they are doused with dirt as a baseball player slides into second base, swept off the street by a hockey stick, tossed aside with sand as a longjumper lands, splashed and shorted out by water as a jogger runs through a puddle. This re-emphasizes contempt for the older generation and shows that it’s the strength, athletic limit-breaking, and mastery of new technology (i.e., the computer-designed Nike shoes) that sets the young above the old. This then identifies the next major theme of the commercial: both Burroughs and the athletes are rebels. Burroughs’ narration admiringly speaks of the ability “to make anything possible” and to do “more that what was done [or] thought possible…put the beyond within reach.” So the mastery of technology (again, Nike shoes) has made the young into limit breakers that previous generations of rebels may admire but cannot themselves equal.

Burroughs’ admiration throughout the abuse and contempt he receives comes off sounding obsequious. In the final scene of the commercial, after the static caused by the runner disappears, Burroughs takes off his hat and bows his head in an image both of obeisance and emphasized baldness, age, and fragility.

From: BEAT, BEATNIK, OR DIET BEAT: THE CHOICE OF A NEW GENERATION by Mitchell J. Smith.

This week we chat on the many flavors of trance induction that is not catalyzed by our friendly chemical co-horts. That’s right kids, you can blast your bio-suit in the beyond in ways the government has not even considered outlawing (yet). Some of the most popular and harmless techniques come in the many tools of the NLP set as was inspired by the brilliant Milton Erickson and his brand of hypnosis appropriately called Ericksonian Hypnosis. We also discuss sigil theory and the surrealist, post-modernist tools old Uncle Bill Burroughs brought to the table in the course of his prolific lifestylings. You can’t talk about naturally induced trance states without chatting up the whirling dervishes and shamans and you sure as hell can’t talk about shamans without discussing Eliade. Did you know you can achieve gnosis by using pain, exhaustion and starvation. Holy Shit children!!! So lift your eyes to the ethyr and your finger to the man, drift away from their nonsense, petty control structures and into a heaven of your own design. God speed!

Download MP3 from Viking Youth Power Hour.

Sweet bumper sticker designs by Bruce Sterling.

(via Posthuman Blues).

While this is listed as part 2 of episode 45, this is actually the first part of that talk with Tayler Ellwood and Lupa. It’s confusing, but in the long run our math makes more sense than your argument against it.

Yes, before we got into chips, dips, chains and whips we spoke intently on makin’ the magic with Anime, video games, and a little bit about how fucking great Tom Waits really is. We discuss technologies such as William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s Dream Machine and how that has led to the development of Light & Sound machines, WinAmp visualizers and other eye and ear candy like binaural tones. We also take an up close and personal look at Britany Spears, the Linda Fox to our Divine Invasion.
Here it is, take it with a table spoon of butter.

Mp3.

On Viking Youth Power Hour.

Wes is brilliant. I haven’t read this whole article yet, but from what I’ve read this promises to be a great insight into his work.

It is my intention that these tracks represent the most available Philip K Nixon tracks, as they form the materials out of which I have hopefully constructed a weapon. This weapon works to destroy conditioning.

To understand why I believe this construct is important, I’m going to need to get into some depth. I’ve dug into my files and bookshelves and pulled together the sources listed at the end of this article to help me articulate what has been until now mostly a metalinguistic experience. Working with collage and cut-ups does something seriously uncouth to the analytical brain. Coming down from this neurolinguistic high required serious grounding, and reading through what others have said has proved to be an excellent form of psychic reintegration.

Full Article: Mutato Nomine.

The New York Public Library is expected to announce today that it has purchased the Burroughs archive for its Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature. The acquisition will make the Berg Collection, which also includes Kerouac’s literary and personal archive, perhaps the premier institution for the study of the Beats.

Full Story: New York Times.

Torrent: 4 mp3s (78.68 megs).

This may be abridged… it’s four 45 minute files. Seems a little short. I can’t find any information about this on the web, except that it was released in 1995 and parts of it are on the Naked Lunch Criterion Collection.