Call Me Burroughs: A Life Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00IFI30AG | Format: PDF
Call Me Burroughs: A Life Description
Fifty years ago, Norman Mailer asserted, "William Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius." Few since have taken such literary risks, developed such individual political or spiritual ideas, or spanned such a wide range of media. Burroughs wrote novels, memoirs, technical manuals, and poetry. He painted, made collages, took thousands of photographs, produced hundreds of hours of experimental recordings, acted in movies, and recorded more CDs than most rock bands. Burroughs was the original cult figure of the Beat Movement, and with the publication of his novel Naked Lunch, which was originally banned for obscenity, he became a guru to the 60s youth counterculture. In Call Me Burroughs, biographer and Beat historian Barry Miles presents the first full-length biography of Burroughs to be published in a quarter century - and the first one to chronicle the last decade of Burroughs's life and examine his long-term cultural legacy.
Written with the full support of the Burroughs estate and drawing from countless interviews with figures like Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, and Burroughs himself, Call Me Burroughs is a rigorously researched biography that finally gets to the heart of its notoriously mercurial subject.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 29 hours and 33 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: February 13, 2014
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00IFI30AG
I met William Burroughs. I was working on Laurie Anderson’s concert film, Home of the Brave --- and someone had to drive the venerable Beat genius home after he completed his short stint as a performer in the movie. The segment was “Language is a Virus,” a song Anderson wrote specifically for Burroughs using his own words to express her strange and compelling thoughts about communication. So I drove a quiet, old and stoned William Burroughs back into the city from our set in Union City, New Jersey. I can say, without further ado, that there was a certain gravity in the atmosphere surrounding the writer.
But if you hadn’t known who he was before you met him, you never would’ve believed that the life recounted in CALL ME BURROUGHS by Barry Miles had been lived by this unassuming old man in the immeasurably old-fashioned suit, carrying a cane to steady his aging self. He earned that unsteadiness in adventures beyond those most of us will ever experience in our lifetimes. And Miles catches it all for you in his big, beautiful black and white tome.
There’s NAKED LUNCH. There’s the Beat poets. There’s Africa and Mexico and the time at Harvard. The end years in Lawrence, Kansas. The Cronenberg movie made from his most famous novel. There are the cut-ups and Joan and the arrow and relationships with Lucien Carr, Kerouac and Brion Gysin. CALL ME BURROUGHS gives such a blow-to-blow account of the many guises of Burroughs --- the writer, the provocateur, the gay icon, the poster boy of the Beats, the heir to the fortune that never was, the father of the writer, the inspiration of Lou Reed, Patti Smith and Kurt Cobain --- that you would expect the book to weigh 400 pounds and have its own zip code.
Barry Miles has written a cultural biography of William Burroughs at an important moment. This clear-eyed, thoughtful book solidly rings out Burroughs' generation by placing him at the crossroads (and, sometimes, in the crosshairs) of the cultural moments he strides across. Here, also, is the ethos of post-war America that Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg helped create. Miles begins with the silent movie era of Burroughs' childhood in St. Louis amidst an ever-present and caring, but sometimes out-of-touch and emotionally distant, family group. Through these early relationships and, later, his restless wanderings among colleges which finally land him in New York City just before World War II, we are introduced to the way in which Burroughs builds up his writer's palette of images, but does not use them to further any sort of self-knowledge or significant prose for a number of years. The most engaging cultural moment to which Miles introduces us is New York City during the war. It's riveting, but it isn't pretty. Burroughs and his extended group of friends are not conventional in any way and it is their seeking after a "new vision," that leads, ultimately, to the language and culture of the Beats. This is a book lover's biography (not a literary biography, in the dry, academic sense) about a man in love with words, creatively drinking (and shooting up) and imagining his way through a maze of puritanical rules and mores, out the other side to something freer, less restrictive, dangerous in many ways. Burroughs and his Beat friends celebrated, denigrated, then tore down American society's twin gods -- wealth and prestige -- and replaced them, at least for themselves and those who came of age in the 1960s, with earthier elements.
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