POSTCARD 26 (WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS) ~

William S. Burroughs
February 5, 1914 (St. Louis, Missouri.) ~ August 2, 1997
Happy Birthday
You would be
100

artist : al rossi
1953
william burroughs as "william lee"




"Burroughs never managed to recover from his addiction at all, and died in 1997 physically dependent on the synthetic opiate methadone. I find this a delicious irony: the great hero of freedom from social restraint, himself in bondage to a drug originally synthesised by Nazi chemists, and dubbed "Dolophine" in honour of the Fuhrer; the fearless libertarian expiring in the arms of an ersatz Morpheus, actively promoted by the federal government as a "cure" for heroin addiction. In the prologue to Junky and the introduction to The Naked Lunch, Burroughs writes of his own addiction as if it were a thing of the past, but this was never the case. In a thin-as-a-rake's progress that saw him move from America to Mexico, to Morocco, to France, to Britain, back to New York, and eventually to small-town Kansas, Burroughs was in flight either from the consequences of his chemical dependency, or seeking to avoid the drugs he craved."

— Will Self, "William Burroughs - the Original Junkie"
The Guardian, UK, 31 Jan '14

(Twelve, 2014)
736 pages

LAW ~

William Burroughs

the master groveler putting the screws on a snitch

EARTH ~

Today, even the very best, are only working for themselves. They pal with those that they recognize in themselves, publish cronies, invite what appeals to themselves. Zero wonder. Zero chance. Zero invention, and it shows everywhere. Obama still shows at the White House Correspondents' Dinner the other night he can ridicule with decency and include himself in an unflattering portrait. And at the very same hour, know Bin Laden has been targeted and is about to be snuffed out. Navy Seals. Head shot. We live in systematic murder. Ordered by the President of the United States, the guy joking. And a few days before all of this, he was being insulted left and right by high powered clowns with a feeding-frenzy media attention. Racists every one of them; and still the man laughs, orders a killing, orders the burial of the killing in the North Arabian Sea. Yes? No? Maybe? Who cares? In the sphere of the usual day now: jobs, travel, debt, sorrow, loss, indifference; a simple bird call might shatter your spine. No novelist, except maybe Burroughs, had this blueprint down before today with quite the same gristle and devil may care. And brilliant as he was, it's ugly after all. Merely genius darkly philosophizing. Lots and lots and lots of angry men out there. Before any of that, was floral or even ice, morning and night, planetary, and a pair of eyes each day awakening.





barred owl, western USA