William S. Burroughs article

Click here for a short article about William S. Burroughs in The Wichita Eagle about his decision to live out his remaining years in Lawrence, Kansas.

According to the article, at Burroughs' funeral a University of Kansas faculty member said:

The world would not be what it is today had "Naked Lunch" [sic] not been written, or had the censors succeeded in suppressing it. . . . He stood for freedom for everyone — not, for example, just for the polite homosexuals who could mix easily in elite academic company, but for the drag queens and the hard-core leather-and-chains crowd as well. He challenged our mores and our conditioning to the core.

Huzzah to anyone who challenges our mores and conditioning!

Great interview with a Burroughs/Ginsberg contemporary

This is a killer interview with a guy who lives in Chaing-Mai (Thailand - it's a rough life but somebody has to do it) and used to trip with Burroughs and Ginsberg. This is stuff you won't read anywhere else, so it's must reading for beat aficionados. Is it true? Who knows? Is it plausible and entertaining? Check.

A quote from the article about Burroughs:

Burroughs spoke like an Oxford professor. It was only in his writing that he sounded so fucked. The stuff he spoke about was whacked out, but he spoke like a professor.

And one about Hunter S. Thompson:

He was a fun guy to know about and to observe but not to hang out with. He was way too intense. He shot a shark.

William S. Burroughs documentary

Check out this trailer for the Burroughs documentary: A Man Within.

William S. Burroughs synchronicity

I'm interested in William S. Burroughs because he was a pivotal character in Kerouac's circle of beat friends, but I've only read some snippets of his work. On my reading list are Junky and Naked Lunch, and yet I don't think about him much at this point. I'm "saving" him for later. A few days ago, Crystal and I watched the movie, Down Came a Blackbird. I recommend it, but be warned that it is not exactly uplifting. In one scene, Raul Julia's character says, "A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on," and he attributes the quote to Burroughs. My web research seems to confirm the attribution. Maybe I'll move Burroughs higher on my reading list.

I think he's represented in A Casebook on the Beat (a recent acquisition), so there's a starting point.

Oh, and, by the way, synchronistically today is William S. Burroughs' birthday. When I wrote this post and scheduled it to publish today, I didn't know that. My Yahoo! calendar reminded me of his birthday on Feb. 4, so I added this paragraph just in time for publication. Weird!

Kerouac, Hemingway, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and more at The Paris Review

During my research on the Kerouac-Hemingway connection, I discovered that all The Paris Review's writer interviews since 1953 are available online for free!

Yup! They interviewed Jack - in 1968. See The Paris Review Interviews 1960s. You'll find an interview with Allen Ginsberg on that page as well. And William Burroughs. And William Carlos Williams. All of them beat writers or of interest to a beat aficionado (which means "a fan of bullfighting," a Hemingway connection).

If you jump to The Paris Review Interviews 1950s, you'll find an interview with Hemingway.

For each decade, there are a couple dozen interviews.

It's an amazing resource. Robert Frost is there. Kurt Vonnegut.

You'll get to read James Dickey, author of Deliverance, say about Allen Ginsberg:

I certainly hope so. I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that. They damn themselves to a life of inconsequentiality when they could have been doing something more useful. They could have been garbage collectors, or grocery-store managers.

Dickey's entitled to his opinion. And so am I. The high point of his entire career was playing the hard-ass sheriff in the movie version of his novel, wherein he sneered at Jon Voight:

Don't ever do nothin' like this again. Don't come back up here.

But I digress. As you will once you start reading the writer interviews made available by The Paris Review! Huzzah to them!!

Kerouac, Krishnamurti, Burroughs, and the number 23

It struck me yesterday that my two biggest literary influences, Jack Kerouac and Jiddu Krishnamurti, have the same initials: J.K.

I don't know where thoughts like that originate, or where they go necessarily, but this particular one went to more thoughts about synchronicity and connections and then I found myself playing around with the number 23 enigma.

2 = the # of authors
10 = J's number in the alphabet
11 = K's number in the alphabet
23 = the total

So I did some net-surfing and found out that the "23 enigma," as it's called, may have first been noticed by beat author William S. Burroughs! How weird is that?

According to Wikipedia, Robert Anton Wilton, co-author of the Illuminatus! trilogy, credits Burroughs "as being the first person to notice the 23 enigma: Wilson, in an article in Fortean Times, related the following story:

I first heard of the 23 enigma from William S Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, Nova Express, etc. According to Burroughs, he had known a certain Captain Clark, around 1960 in Tangier, who once bragged that he had been sailing 23 years without an accident. That very day, Clark’s ship had an accident that killed him and everybody else aboard. Furthermore, while Burroughs was thinking about this crude example of the irony of the gods that evening, a bulletin on the radio announced the crash of an airliner in Florida, USA. The pilot was another captain Clark and the flight was Flight 23."

Read all about it here: 23 Enigma.

I first learned about the "23 enigma" from the Jim Carrey movie, The Number 23. Notice that the initial sounds of Jim and Carrey sound like "J" and "K"? Never mind, let's not go there.

I'm not a believer in numerology, per se. In fact, thanks to J.K. #2, I think beliefs are the source of all conflict on this planet. If people didn't "believe" that things are supposed to be a certain way, what purpose would violence serve in the first place? Should is a much more evil word than most people realize. Especially but not exclusively regarding religion. Like my beat friend Charlie told me yesterday about the time two LDS evangelists accosted him on the street and he pointed his finger in one's face and stridently asked, "Why do you need some fictitious person up there to tell you to love him [pointing now at the other proselytizer]?" They walked away.

For sure, humans seem to have some innate bent toward beliefs. And we love to be told what to do. Or have some external authority to blame for our actions.

All that said, I'm not so sure we aren't given clues from time to time about what our purpose is. Jack's purpose had to be writing On the Road and becoming the voice of the beat generation. The world notices individuals who find their purpose and live it.

At the bar yesterday, someone brought up Tiger Woods with the usual awe I hear whenever he's mentioned. I said something about how he was just one of those people who happened to be lucky enough to figure out what he was "born to do." I think we all have something we're "born to do." The sad thing is, most of us don't seem to figure out what it is. We stop looking somewhere along the way, beaten down by "schooling" and authorities of every stripe and the well-meaning discouragements of others whenever we dream big.

What were you born to do?

Maybe the number 23 holds a clue.

Amen.