#LiteraryOutlaw

[kajapopko123456]

William S. Burroughs: A Man Within review by Kaja Popko

William S. Burroughs: A Man Within explores the life of a Beat writer who was arguably the grittiest and most bedeviling of the group. Despite his association with punk and grunge, Burroughs's work was lyrically plaintive and his voice provided a window to his ineffable sadness. The documentary features interviews with Burroughs and his admirers, but they frustratingly only alight on his literary significance when speaking in terms of personal influence. Leyser attempts to equate Burroughs's gun fetishism with Hunter S. Thompson's recklessness, but Burroughs's most accomplished fiction was the boiling run-off of his inner-demon-induced sweat. Burroughs epitomized the 20th-century ideal of the over-educated libertine and forever changed the conversation about sexual orientation, but his last boyfriend recounts an evening where he confessed his love, only to be laughingly dismissed. A Man Within persuasively argues that Burroughs's most dangerous addiction might have been the refusal of love.

Kaja_Popko

[zauel]

I can't believe that we are reading Of Mice and Men! It's banned all across the district!

📚🚫 Living on the edge with our reading choices this semester. Of Mice and Men is apparently too scandalous for some districts, but hey, we're rebels with a cause—literary rebellion! 🤘📖

[astroneatly]

The Johnson family minded their own business. While born and raised in Saint Louis to a father and inventor/tinkerer, and his mother, Burroughs began his life on a cotton plantation. The wetbacks he hired to do the work, while he enjoyed the strange fruits of business. It’s not peculiar that he decided that cotton would become his vocation, at least then, being a junkie without a developed interest in writing books, which could wait until he was 39 years old. He decided to grow Marijuana, and in Louisiana the laws in affect for narcotics were stern: an addict could be arrested for even having tracks marks on their arm.

Suffice it to say, Burrough’s did not last long in N’Orleans, and sought refuge in Mexico. Then, he had a wife and a son, though his fondness for masculine men brought out a favorable group of counterculturists known as the Beatniks. Burroughs was in a relationship with the poet Allen Ginsberg, and remained friends all of his life. Kerouac, and Neal Cassady too were among Burroughs garrulous group of the beat. In Mexico, Burroughs was sentenced to 5 years in a Mexico prison, for shooting his wife. Yet, Tangier became the place where Burroughs could vacillate. ‘Antaeus was the god of losers, which made Tangier an appropriate haven for all the washed-up people who gravitated there,’ where he met the Novelist and Short Story writer Paul Bowles.

Writing became a fixation for Burroughs, who from the success of Naked Lunch could develop his technique. Naked Lunch is essentially a Picaresque novel about original sin. Burroughs liked to consider his books to be instructional, composed in a collage format that he invented taking pieces of newspapers and great works of fiction and splicing them.

To sit down at a desk and peck away at his typewriter in a drugged or trancelike state was more than a professional activity- it was a lifeline, an absolute necessity, a way of connecting with the world, a way of fleeing from the world into fantasy, and a way of reconstructing the world according to Burroughs.’ #literaryoutlaw #williamsburroughs