William Burroughs

Monday, 03 December 2012

Kathy Acker interviews William S. Burroughs - part 1/3

William S. Burroughs: Reading - Junky (Abridged Version)

William S. Burroughs - A Thanksgiving Prayer

William S. Burroughs - Commissioner of Sewers

William Burroughs shooting William Shakespeare

William S Burroughs scene in Drugstore Cowboy

William Burroughs: Advice for Young People

William S. Burroughs - Naked Lunch - Hospital

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Beat Hotel
The Beat Hotel was a small, run-down hotel of 42 rooms at 9 Rue Gît-le-Cœur in the Latin Quarter of Paris, notable chiefly as a residence for members of the Beat poetry movement of the mid-20th century
It was a "class 13" hotel, meaning bottom line, a place that was required by law to meet only minimum health and safety standards. It never had any proper name - "the Beat Hotel" was a nickname given by Gregory Corso, which stuck on . The rooms had windows facing the interior stairwell and not much light. Hot water was available Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. The hotel offered the opportunity for a bath - in the only bathtub, situated on the ground floor - provided the guest reserved time in beforehand and paid the surcharge for hot water. Curtains and bedspreads were changed and washed every spring. The linen was (sometimes and in principle) changed every month.
The Beat Hotel was managed by a married couple, Monsieur and Madame Rachou, from 1933. After the death of Monsieur Rachou in a traffic accident in 1957, Madame was the sole manager until the early months of 1963, when the hotel was closed. Besides letting rooms, the establishment had a small bistro on the ground floor. Due to early experiences with working at an inn frequented by Monet and Pissarro, Madame Rachou would encourage artists and writers to stay at the hotel and even at times permit them to pay the rent with paintings or manuscripts. One unusual thing that appealed to a clientele of bohemian artists was the permission to paint and decorate the rooms rented in whichever way they wanted.

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Berlin
Berlin ( /bɜrˈlɪn/; German pronunciation: [bɛɐ̯ˈliːn] ( listen)) is the capital city of Germany and one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.5 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city and is the second most populous city proper and the eighth most populous urban area in the European Union. Located in northeastern Germany, it is the center of the Berlin-Brandenburg Metropolitan Region, which has 5.9 million residents from over 190 nations. Located in the European Plains, Berlin is influenced by a temperate seasonal climate. Around one third of the city's area is composed of forests, parks, gardens, rivers and lakes.
First documented in the 13th century, Berlin was the capital of the Kingdom of Prussia (1701–1918), the German Empire (1871–1918), the Weimar Republic (1919–1933) and the Third Reich (1933–1945).Berlin in the 1920s was the third largest municipality in the world. After World War II, the city became divided into East Berlin—the capital of East Germany—and West Berlin, a West German exclave surrounded by the Berlin Wall (1961–1989). Following German reunification in 1990, the city regained its status as the capital of Germany, hosting 147 foreign embassies.

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Boulder, Colorado
Boulder is the county seat and most populous city of Boulder County and the 11th most populous city in the U.S. state of Colorado. Boulder is located at the base of the foothills of the Rocky Mountains at an elevation of 5,430 feet (1,655 m). The city is 25 miles (40 km) northwest of Denver.
The United States Census Bureau reported that in 2010 the population of the City of Boulder was 97,385, while the population of the Boulder Metropolitan Statistical Area was 293,161.
Boulder is famous for its status as one of the most liberal cities in Colorado, its colorful Western history, being a choice destination for hippies in the late 1960s, and as home of the main campus of the University of Colorado, the state's largest university. Furthermore, the city of Boulder frequently acquires top rankings in health, well-being, quality of life, education, and art.
On November 7, 1861 legislation was passed making way for the state university to be located in Boulder and on September 20, 1875 the first cornerstone was for the first building (Old Main Building) on the C.U. campus. The university officially opened on September 5, 1877.

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City Lights Books
City Lights is an independent bookstore-publisher combination in San Francisco, California that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics. It also houses the nonprofit City Lights Foundation, which publishes selected titles related to San Francisco culture. It was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin (who left two years later). Both the store and the publishers became widely known following the obscenity trial of Ferlinghetti for publishing Allen Ginsberg's influential poem Howl and Other Poems (City Lights, 1956). Nancy Peters started working there in 1971 and retired as executive director in 2007. In 2001, City Lights was made an official historic landmark. City Lights is located at 261 Columbus Avenue, on the nexus of North Beach and Chinatown in San Francisco.
City Lights was the inspiration of Peter D. Martin, who relocated from New York City to San Francisco in the 1940s to teach sociology. He first used City Lights—in homage to the Chaplin film—in 1952 as the title of a magazine, publishing early work by such key Bay Area writers as Philip Lamantia, Pauline Kael, Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, and Ferlinghetti himself, as “Lawrence Ferling.” A year later, Martin used the name to establish the first all-paperback bookstore in the U.S., at the time an audacious idea.

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Clayton, Missouri
Clayton is an inner-ring suburb of St. Louis and the county seat of St. Louis County, Missouri. The population was 15,939 at the 2010 census. The city was organized in 1877 and is named after Ralph Clayton, who donated the land for the courthouse.
According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 2.5 square miles (6.5 km²), all of it land.
The architecture of central Clayton reflects its economic activity and eras of growth. An impressive collection of mid-century Modernist low and high rise structures contrast with earlier mansions, stores and flats.
In the St. Louis region, Clayton is well known for housing a wealthy and educated young professional, often dual-income population.
As of the census of 2000, there were 12,825 people, 5,370 households, and 2,797 families residing in the city. The population density was 5,164.4 people per square mile (1,996.7/km²). There were 5,852 housing units at an average density of 2,356.5 per square mile (911.1/km²). The racial makeup of the city was 84.94% White, 7.77% Black or African American, 0.12% Native American, 5.62% Asian, 0.03% Pacific Islander, 0.29% from other races, and 1.22% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 1.49% of the population.

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Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is an American private Ivy League research university located in New York City, New York, United States. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution. Today the university operates seven Columbia Global Centers overseas in Amman, Beijing, Istanbul, Paris, Mumbai, Santiago and Nairobi.
The university was founded in 1754 as King's College by royal charter of George II of Great Britain. After the American Revolutionary War, King's College briefly became a state entity, and was renamed Columbia College in 1784. The University now operates under a 1787 charter that places the institution under a private board of trustees, and in 1896 it was further renamed Columbia University. That same year, the university's campus was moved from Madison Avenue to its location in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, where it occupies more than six city blocks, or 32 acres (0.13 km²). The university encompasses twenty schools and is affiliated with numerous institutions, including Teachers College, Barnard College, and the Union Theological Seminary, with joint undergraduate programs available through the Jewish Theological Seminary of America as well as the Juilliard School.

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Croatia
Croatia (ⁱ/kroʊˈeɪʃə/ kroh-AY-shə; Croatian: Hrvatska pronounced [xř̩ʋaːtskaː]), officially the Republic of Croatia (Croatian: Republika Hrvatska listen (help·info)), is a unitary democratic parliamentary republic in Europe at the crossroads of Central Europe, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean. Its capital and largest city is Zagreb. The country is divided into 20 counties and the city of Zagreb. Croatia covers 56,594 square kilometres (21,851 square miles) and has diverse, mostly continental and Mediterranean climates. Croatia's Adriatic Sea coast contains more than a thousand islands. The country's population is 4.29 million, most of whom are Croats, with the most common religious denomination being Roman Catholicism.
In the early 7th century the Croats arrived in area of present-day Croatia. They organised the state into two dukedoms by the 9th century. Tomislav became the first king by 925 AD, elevating Croatia to the status of a kingdom. The Kingdom of Croatia retained its sovereignty for nearly two centuries, reaching its peak during the rule of Kings Peter Krešimir IV and Dmitar Zvonimir. Croatia entered a personal union with Hungary in 1102. In 1527, faced with Ottoman conquest the Croatian Parliament elected Ferdinand I of the House of Habsburg to the Croatian throne. In 1918, after World War I, Croatia was included in the short-lived State of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs that declared independence from Austria–Hungary and co-founded the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. A Croatian state briefly existed during World War II as a fascist puppet state. After the war, Croatia became a founding member and a federal constituent of the Second Yugoslavia, a socialist state. In June 1991, Croatia declared independence, which came into effect on 8 October of the same year. The Croatian War of Independence was fought successfully during the four years following the declaration.

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Florida
Florida (ⁱ/ˈflɒrɪdə/) is a state in the southeastern United States, bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean. Florida is the 22nd most extensive, the 4th most populous, and the 8th most densely populated of the 50 United States. The state capital is Tallahassee, its largest city is Jacksonville, and the South Florida metropolitan area is the largest metropolitan area in the southeastern U.S.
Much of Florida is situated on a peninsula between the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Straits of Florida. Its geography is marked by a coastline, by the omnipresence of water and the threat of hurricanes. Florida has the longest coastline in the contiguous United States, encompassing approximately 1,350 miles (2,170 km), and is the only state to border both the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean. Much of the state is at or near sea level and its terrain is characterized by sedimentary soils. The climate varies from subtropical in the north to tropical in the south. Its symbolic animals like the American alligator, Florida panther and the manatee, can be found in the Everglades, one of the most famous national parks in the world.

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Hamburg
Hamburg ( /ˈhæmbɜrɡ/; German pronunciation: [ˈhambʊɐ̯k], local pronunciation [ˈhambʊɪç]; Low German/Low Saxon: Hamborg [ˈhaˑmbɔːx]), officially Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, is the second-largest city in Germany, the thirteenth largest German state, and the sixth-largest city in the European Union. The city is home to over 1.8 million people, while the Hamburg Metropolitan Region (including parts of the neighbouring Federal States of Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein) has more than 4.3 million inhabitants. Situated on the river Elbe, the port of Hamburg is the second largest port in Europe (after the Port of Rotterdam) and 11th-largest worldwide.
Hamburg's official name, Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg (German: Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg), reflects Hamburg's history as a member of the medieval Hanseatic League, as a free imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire, and that Hamburg is a city-state and one of the sixteen States of Germany.
Hamburg is a major transport hub in Northern Germany and is one of the most affluent cities in Europe. It has become a media and industrial centre, with plants and facilities belonging to Airbus, Blohm + Voss and Aurubis. The radio and television broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk and publishers such as Gruner + Jahr and Spiegel-Verlag are pillars of the important media industry in Hamburg. In total, there are more than 120,000 enterprises.

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Harlem
Harlem is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan, which since the 1920s has been a major African-American residential, cultural and business center. Originally a Dutch village, formally organized in 1658, it is named after the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands. Harlem was annexed to New York City in 1873.
Harlem has been defined by a series of boom-and-bust cycles, with significant ethnic shifts accompanying each cycle. Black residents began to arrive en masse in 1904, with numbers fed by the Great Migration. In the 1920s and 1930s, the neighborhood was the focus of the "Harlem Renaissance", an outpouring of artistic and professional works without precedent in the American black community. However, with job losses in the time of the Great Depression and the deindustrialization of New York City after World War II, rates of crime and poverty increased significantly.
New York's revival in the late 20th century has led to renewal in Harlem as well. By 1995, Harlem was experiencing social and economic gentrification. Though the percentage of residents who are black peaked in 1950, the area remains predominantly black.

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Harvard University
Harvard University is an American private Ivy League research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation (officially The President and Fellows of Harvard College) chartered in the country. Harvard's history, influence, and wealth have made it one of the most prestigious universities in the world.
Harvard was named after its first benefactor, John Harvard. Although never formally affiliated with a church, the college primarily trained Congregationalist and Unitarian clergy. Harvard's curriculum and students became secular throughout the 18th century and by the 19th century had emerged as the central cultural establishment among Boston elites. Following the American Civil War, President Charles W. Eliot's forty year tenure (1869–1909) transformed the college and affiliated professional schools into a centralized research university, and Harvard became a founding member of the Association of American Universities in 1900.James Bryant Conant led the university through the Great Depression and World War II and began to reform the curriculum and liberalize admissions after the war. The undergraduate college became coeducational after its 1977 merger with Radcliffe College. Drew Gilpin Faust was elected the 28th president in 2007 and is the first woman to lead the university. Harvard has the largest financial endowment of any academic institution in the world, standing at $32 billion as of September 2011.

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Latin Quarter, Paris
Coordinates: 48°51′5.1″N 2°20′35.4″E / 48.851417°N 2.343167°E / 48.851417; 2.343167
The Latin Quarter of Paris (French: Quartier latin, IPA: [kaʁtje latɛ̃]) is an area in the 5th and parts of the 6th arrondissement of Paris. It is situated on the left bank of the Seine, around the Sorbonne.
Known for its student life, lively atmosphere and bistros, the Latin Quarter is the home to a number of higher education establishments besides the university itself, such as the École Normale Supérieure, the École des Mines de Paris (a ParisTech institute), the Schola Cantorum, and the Jussieu university campus. Other establishments such as the École Polytechnique (also a ParisTech engineering school) have relocated in recent times to more spacious settings.
The area gets its name from the Latin language, which was once widely spoken in and around the University since Latin was the international language of learning in the Middle Ages.

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Lawrence, Kansas
Lawrence is the sixth largest city in the U.S. state of Kansas and the county seat of Douglas County. Located in northeastern Kansas, Lawrence is the anchor city of the Lawrence, Kansas, Metropolitan Statistical Area, which encompasses all of Douglas County. Located 25 miles east of Topeka, Kansas, and 41 miles west of Kansas City, Missouri, it is situated along the banks of the Kansas and Wakarusa Rivers. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 87,643. Lawrence is a college town and is the home to the University of Kansas and Haskell Indian Nations University.
Lawrence was founded by the New England Emigrant Aid Company and was named for Amos Adams Lawrence who offered financial aid and support for the settlement. Lawrence was central to the Bleeding Kansas era and was the site of the Wakarusa War, the sacking of Lawrence and Quantrill’s Raid.
Early in its existence, Lawrence transitioned from being a political city to a varied one focusing on many industries including agriculture, manufacturing and education when the University of Kansas was founded in 1866 and Haskell Indian Nations University opened in 1884.

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Lexington, Kentucky
Lexington (officially Lexington-Fayette Urban County) is the second-largest city in Kentucky and the 63rd largest in the US. Known as the "Thoroughbred City" and the "Horse Capital of the World", it is located in the heart of Kentucky's Bluegrass region. In the 2010 Census the city's population was 295,803, anchoring a metropolitan area of 472,099 people and a Combined Statistical Area of 687,173 people.
Lexington ranks tenth among US cities in college education rate, with 39.5% of residents having at least a bachelor's degree. It is home to the headquarters of Tempur-Pedic, International, Lexmark International, the Kentucky Horse Park, Keeneland race course, Red Mile race course, Transylvania University, the University of Kentucky and Bluegrass Community & Technical College.
Lexington was selected as the site of the 2010 FEI World Equestrian Games.
Lexington was founded in June 1775 in what was then Virginia (17 years before Kentucky became a state in 1792). A party of frontiersmen, led by William McConnell, camped on the Middle Fork of Elkhorn Creek (today called Town Branch and rerouted under Vine Street) at the location known today as McConnell Springs. Upon hearing of the colonists' victory in the Battles of Lexington and Concord, on April 19, 1775, they named their campsite Lexington after Lexington, Massachusetts. Due to the danger of Indian attacks, permanent settlement was delayed for four years. In 1779, Colonel Robert Patterson and 25 companions came from Fort Harrod and erected a blockhouse. Cabins and a stockade were soon built, making the fort, known as Bryan Station, a place of importance. Colonists defended it against a British and American Indian attack in 1782, during the last part of the American Revolution.

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London
London ⁱ/ˈlʌndən/ is the capital city of England and the United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its founding by the Romans, who named it Londinium. London's ancient core, the City of London, largely retains its square-mile mediaeval boundaries. Since at least the 19th century, the name London has also referred to the metropolis developed around this core. The bulk of this conurbation forms the London region and the Greater London administrative area, governed by the elected Mayor of London and the London Assembly.
London is a leading global city, with strengths in the arts, commerce, education, entertainment, fashion, finance, healthcare, media, professional services, research and development, tourism and transport all contributing to its prominence. It is the world's leading financial centre alongside New York City and has the fifth-largest city GDP in the world (and the largest in Europe). London has been described as a world cultural capital. It was the world's most visited city during 2011 and London Heathrow is the world's busiest airport by number of international passengers. London's 43 universities form the largest concentration of higher education in Europe. In 2012 London will become the first city to host the modern Summer Olympic Games three times.

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Mexico City
Mexico City ( /ˈmɛksɨkoʊ ˈsɪti/; Spanish: Ciudad de México [sjuˈðað ðe ˈmexiko], also known as México D.F., or simply D.F.) is the Federal District (Distrito Federal), capital of Mexico and seat of the federal powers of the Mexican Union. It is a federal entity within Mexico which is not part of any one of the 31 Mexican states but belongs to the federation as a whole. Mexico City is the country's largest city as well as its most important political, cultural, educational and financial center.
As an "alpha" global city Mexico City is one of the most important financial centers in North America. It is located in the Valley of Mexico (Valle de México), a large valley in the high plateaus at the center of Mexico, at an altitude of 2,240 metres (7,350 ft). The city consists of sixteen boroughs.
The 2009 estimated population for the city proper was around 8.84 million people, and has a land area of 1,485 square kilometres (573 sq mi). According to the most recent definition agreed upon by the federal and state governments, the Mexico City metropolitan area population is 21.2 million people, making it the largest metropolitan area in the western hemisphere and the fifth largest agglomeration in the world.

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Miami
Miami ( /maɪˈæmi/ or /maɪˈæmə/) is a city located on the Atlantic coast in southeastern Florida and the county seat of Miami-Dade County, the most populous county in Florida and the eighth-most populous county in the United States with a population of 2,500,625. The 42nd largest city proper in the United States, with a population of 408,568, it is the principal, central, and most populous city of the South Florida metropolitan area, and the most populous metropolis in the Southeastern United States. According to the US Census Bureau, Miami's metro area is the seventh most populous and fifth-largest urban area in the United States, with a population of around 5.5 million.
Miami is a major center and a leader in finance, commerce, culture, media, entertainment, the arts, and international trade. In 2010, Miami was classified as a Alpha- World City in the World Cities Study Group’s inventory. In 2010, Miami ranked seventh in the United States in terms of finance, commerce, culture, entertainment, fashion, education, and other sectors. It ranked thirty-third among global cities. In 2008, Forbes magazine ranked Miami "America's Cleanest City", for its year-round good air quality, vast green spaces, clean drinking water, clean streets and city-wide recycling programs. According to a 2009 UBS study of 73 world cities, Miami was ranked as the richest city in the United States, and the world's fifth-richest city in terms of purchasing power. Miami is nicknamed the "Capital of Latin America", is the 2nd largest U.S. city (after El Paso) with a Spanish-speaking majority, and the largest city with a Cuban-American plurality.

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Morocco
Morocco (Arabic: المغرب‎ al-Maghrib ; Berber: ⵍⵎⴻⵖⵔⵉⴱ / ⴰⵎⴻⵔⵔⵓⴽElmeɣrib / Amerruk), officially the Kingdom of Morocco, is a country located in North Africa. It has a population of about 32 million and an area of 710,850 km², including the disputed region of the Western Sahara, seen by and mostly administered by Morocco as the Southern Provinces. Morocco is part of the Maghreb region, in addition to Tunisia, Algeria, Mauritania, and Libya, with which it shares cultural, historical and linguistic ties.
Morocco is a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament. The King of Morocco holds vast executive powers, including the power to dissolve the parliament. Executive power is exercised by the government but more importantly by the king himself. Legislative power is vested in both the government and the two chambers of parliament, the Assembly of Representatives and the Assembly of Councillors. The king can also issue decrees called dahirs which have the force of law. The latest Parliamentary elections were held in November 25, 2011, and were considered by some neutral observers to be mostly free and fair. Voter turnout in these elections was estimated to be 43% of registered voters, but only about 25% of Moroccan adult citizens actually voted. The rest either chose not to vote or they were not registered as voters. The political capital is Rabat, but the largest city is Casablanca; other main cities include Marrakesh, Tetouan, Tangier, Salé, Fes, Agadir, Meknes, Oujda, Kenitra, and Nador.

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Naropa University
Naropa University is a private liberal arts college in Boulder, Colorado. Founded in 1974 by Tibetan Buddhist teacher and Oxford University scholar Chögyam Trungpa, it is named for the eleventh-century Indian Buddhist sage Naropa, an abbot of Nalanda.
Naropa describes itself as Buddhist-inspired, ecumenical and nonsectarian rather than Buddhist. Naropa promotes non-traditional activities like meditation to supplement traditional learning approaches.
Naropa was accredited by the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools in 1988, making it the first Buddhist, or Buddhist-inspired, academic institution to receive United States regional accreditation. It remains one of only a handful of such schools.
Besides spirituality, Naropa is noteworthy for having hosted a number of Beat poets under the auspices of its Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.
Naropa University was founded by Chögyam Trungpa, an exiled Tibetan tulku who was a Karma Kagyu and Nyingma lineage holder, and scholar of comparative religion at Oxford University in England. Trungpa entered the USA in 1970, established the Vajradhatu organization in 1973, and then in 1974, established Naropa Institute under the Nalanda Foundation. Initially, the Nalanda Foundation and Vajradhatu were closely linked, having nearly identical boards of directors. In subsequent years they differentiated into more independent institutions.

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Palm Beach, Florida
The Town of Palm Beach (called Palm Beach Island or the Island of Palm Beach to differentiate between the town and the county) is an incorporated town in Palm Beach County, Florida, United States. The Intracoastal Waterway separates it from the neighboring cities of West Palm Beach and Lake Worth. As of 2000, Palm Beach had a year-round population of 10,468, with an estimated seasonal population of 30,000.
Palm Beach was established as a resort by Henry Morrison Flagler, a founder of Standard Oil, who made the Atlantic coast barrier island accessible via his Florida East Coast Railway. The nucleus of the community was established by Flagler's two luxury resort hotels, the Royal Poinciana Hotel and The Breakers Hotel. West Palm Beach was built across Lake Worth as a service town and has become a major city in its own right.
Flagler's houselots were bought by the beneficiaries of the Gilded Age, and in 1902 Flagler himself built a Beaux-Arts mansion, Whitehall, designed by the New York–based firm Carrère and Hastings and helped establish the Palm Beach winter "season" by constantly entertaining. The town was incorporated on April 17, 1911.

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Santa Fe, New Mexico
Santa Fe (English pronunciation: /ˌsæntəˈfeɪ/; (Tewa: Ogha Po'oge, Navajo: Yootó) is the capital of the U.S. state of New Mexico. It is the fourth-largest city in the state and is the seat of Santa Fe County. Santa Fe (literally “holy faith” in Spanish) had a population of 67,947 in the 2010 census. It is the principal city of the Santa Fe, New Mexico Metropolitan Statistical Area which encompasses all of Santa Fe County and is part of the larger Santa Fe-Española Combined Statistical Area. The city’s full name when founded was La Villa Real de la Santa Fé de San Francisco de Asís (“The Royal Town of the Holy Faith of St. Francis of Assisi”).
The city of Santa Fe was originally occupied by a number of Pueblo Indian villages with founding dates between 1050 to 1150. One of the earliest known settlements in what today is downtown Santa Fe came sometime after 900 C.E. A Native American group built a cluster of homes that centered around the site of today’s Plaza and spread for half a mile to the south and west; the village was called Ogapoge. The Santa Fe River provided water to people living there. The Santa Fe River is a seasonal waterway which was a year round stream until the 1700s. As of 2007, the river was recognized as the most endangered river in the United States, according to the conservation group American Rivers.

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St. Louis, Missouri
St. Louis /seɪnt ˈluːɪs/ (French: Saint-Louis or St-Louis, [sɛ̃ lwi] ( listen)) is an independent city on the eastern border of Missouri, United States, and is the second-largest city in the state. With a population of 318,069 in July 2011, it was the 58th-largest U.S. city at the 2010 U.S. Census. The Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) population of 2,812,896 is the 18th-largest in the country. The Greater St. Louis combined statistical area's (CSA) population of 2,878,255 is the 16th-largest CSA in the country, the fourth-largest in the Midwest. The Greater St. Louis area is the largest metropolitan area in Missouri.
The city of St. Louis was founded in 1764 by Pierre Laclède and Auguste Chouteau, and after the Louisiana Purchase, it became a major port on the Mississippi River. Its population expanded after the American Civil War, and it became the fourth-largest city in the United States in the late 19th century. It seceded from St. Louis County in March 1877, allowing it to become an independent city and limiting its political boundaries. In 1904, it hosted the 1904 World's Fair and the 1904 Olympic Games. The city's population peaked in 1950, then began a long decline that reversed only at the beginning of the 21st century.

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Tangier
Tangier, also Tangiers (Berber: Tanja, ⵜⴰⵏⵊⴰ, archaic Berber name: Tingi, Arabic: طنجة Ṭanjah, Spanish: Tánger, French: Tanger), is a city in northern Morocco with a population of about 700,000 (2012 estimates). It lies on the North African coast at the western entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Spartel. It is the capital of the Tangier-Tetouan Region and of the Tangier-Asilah prefecture of Morocco.
The history of Tangier is very rich due to the historical presence of many civilizations and cultures starting from the 5th century BC. Between the period of being a Berber settlement and then a Phoenician town to the independence era around the 1950s, Tangier was a refuge for many cultures. In 1923, Tangier was considered as an international status by foreign colonial powers, and became a destination for many European and American diplomats, spies, writers and businessmen.
The city is currently undergoing rapid development and modernization. Projects include new 5-star hotels along the bay, a modern business district called Tangier City Center, a new airport terminal and a new football stadium. Tangier's economy is also set to benefit greatly from the new Tanger-Med port.

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Weimar Republic
The Weimar Republic (Weimarer Republik [ˈvaɪmaʁɐ ʁepuˈbliːk] ( listen)) is the name given by historians to the federal republic and parliamentary representative democracy established in 1919 in Germany to replace the imperial form of government. It was named after Weimar, the city where the constitutional assembly took place. Its official name was German Reich (Deutsches Reich)
Following World War I, the republic emerged from the German Revolution in November 1918. In 1919, a national assembly convened in Weimar, where a new constitution for the German Reich was written, then adopted on 11 August of that same year. The ensuing period of liberal democracy lapsed in the early 1930s, leading to the ascent of the nascent Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler in 1933. The legal measures taken by the Nazi government in February and March 1933, commonly known as Gleichschaltung ("coordination") meant that the government could legislate contrary to the constitution. The republic nominally continued to exist until 1945, as the constitution was never formally repealed. However, the measures taken by the Nazis in the early part of their rule rendered the constitution irrelevant. Thus, 1933 is usually seen as the end of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of Hitler's Third Reich.

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A. A. Wyn
Aaron A. Wyn (May 22, 1898 – November 3, 1967), born Aaron Weinstein, was an American publisher. He edited pulp magazines for Harold Hersey's Magazine Publishers. When Hersey departed the company in the summer of 1929, Wyn, after a brief interlude from Harold S. Goldsmith, took charge of the company. Hersey's swastika logo was dropped to be replaced by an ace symbol. The company took on the brand, Ace Magazines. The company's main pulps were Detective-Dragnet (later changed to Ten Detective Aces), Western Trails, Secret Agent X, Love Fiction Monthly, and many others. He also published comics under the Ace Comics name.
Wyn branched out into book publishing in 1945. He founded Ace Books, which specialized in genre paperback books, in 1952.
Wyn was famous for paying his authors as little as he could get away with, which prompted David McDaniel to encode a comment on Wyn into one of his The Man from U.N.C.L.E. novelization, The Monster Wheel Affair. The first letters of each chapter's title in the book's table of contents, when lined up, spell out "A.A. Wyn is a tightwad".

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Alan Ansen
Alan Ansen (January 23, 1922 – November 12, 2006) was an American poet, playwright, and associate of Beat Generation writers. He was a widely-read scholar who knew many languages. Ansen grew up on Long Island and was educated at Harvard. He worked as W. H. Auden's secretary and research assistant in 1948-49; he was the main author of the chronological tables in Auden's The Portable Greek Reader and Poets of the English Language.
He became a close friend of various Beat writers, and was the model for flamboyant characters in their fiction, including Rollo Greb in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, AJ in William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch, and Dad Deform in Gregory Corso's American Express.
Ansen lived mostly in Athens after the early 1960s, where he was part of a circle of writers that included James Merrill and Chester Kallman.

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Alan Moore
Alan Oswald Moore (born 18 November 1953) is an English writer primarily known for his work in comic books, a medium where he has produced a number of critically acclaimed and popular series, including Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and From Hell. Frequently described as the best graphic novel writer in history, he has also been described as "one of the most important British writers of the last fifty years". He has occasionally used such pseudonyms as Curt Vile, Jill de Ray, and Translucia Baboon.
Moore started out writing for British underground and alternative fanzines in the late 1970s before achieving success publishing comic strips in such magazines as 2000 AD and Warrior. He was subsequently picked up by the American DC Comics, and as "the first comics writer living in Britain to do prominent work in America", he worked on big name characters such as Batman (Batman: The Killing Joke) and Superman (Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?), substantially developed the minor character Swamp Thing, and penned original titles such as Watchmen. During that decade, Moore helped to bring about greater social respectability for the medium in the United States and United Kingdom, and has subsequently been credited with the development of the term "graphic novel" over "comic book". In the late 1980s and early 1990s he left the comic industry mainstream and went independent for a while, working on experimental work such as the epic From Hell, pornographic Lost Girls, and the prose novel Voice of the Fire. He subsequently returned to the mainstream later in the 1990s, working for Image Comics, before developing America's Best Comics, an imprint through which he published works such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the occult-based Promethea.

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Alfred Korzybski
Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski ([kɔˈʐɨpski]) (July 3, 1879 – March 1, 1950) was a Polish-American philosopher and scientist. He is remembered for developing the theory of general semantics. Korzybski's work argued that human knowledge of the world is limited both by the human nervous system and by the structure of language.
Korzybski thought that people do not have access to direct knowledge of reality; rather they have access to perceptions and to a set of beliefs which human society has confused with direct knowledge of reality. Korzybski is remembered as the author of the dictum: "The map is not the territory".
(List of Polish coats of arms Abdank coat of arms)
Korzybski was born in Warsaw, Poland which at that time was part of the Russian Empire. He was part of an aristocratic Polish family whose members had worked as mathematicians, scientists, and engineers for generations. He learned the Polish language at home and the Russian language in schools; and having a French governess and a German governess, he became fluent in these four languages as a child.

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Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg ( /ˈɡɪnzbərɡ/; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression. Ginsberg is best known for his epic poem "Howl", in which he celebrated his fellow "angel-headed hipsters" and harshly denounced what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States. This poem is one of the classic poems of the Beat Generation. The poem, which was dedicated to writer Carl Solomon, opens:
madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix...</poem> In October 1955, Ginsberg and five other unknown poets gave a free reading at an experimental art gallery in San Francisco. Ginsberg's "Howl" electrified the audience. According to fellow poet Michael McClure, it was clear "that a barrier had been broken, that a human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America and its supporting armies and navies and academies and institutions and ownership systems and power support bases." In 1957, "Howl" attracted widespread publicity when it became the subject of an obscenity trial in which a San Francisco prosecutor argued it contained "filthy, vulgar, obscene, and disgusting language." The poem seemed especially outrageous in 1950s America because it depicted both heterosexual and homosexual sex at a time when sodomy laws made homosexual acts a crime in every U.S. state. "Howl" reflected Ginsberg's own homosexuality and his relationships with a number of men, including Peter Orlovsky, his lifelong partner. Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that "Howl" was not obscene, adding, "Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemisms?"

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Anatole Broyard
Anatole Paul Broyard (July 16, 1920 – October 11, 1990) was an American writer, literary critic and editor for The New York Times. In addition to his many reviews and columns, he published short stories, essays and two books during his lifetime. His autobiographical works, Intoxicated by My Illness (1992) and Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir (1993), were published after his death.
After his death, Broyard became the center of controversy and discussions related to how he had chosen to live as an adult in New York. Of mixed race, he was criticized for "passing" as white and failing to acknowledge his black ancestry.
Broyard was born in New Orleans into a mixed-race Louisiana Creole family, the son of Paul Anatole Broyard, a carpenter and construction worker, and his wife, Edna Miller, neither of whom finished elementary school. Broyard was descended from pre-Civil War free people of color, and the first Broyard in Louisiana was a French colonist in the mid-eighteenth century. Broyard was the second of three children; he and his sister Lorraine, two years older, were light skinned with more European features. Their younger sister Shirley, who eventually married the lawyer and civil rights leader Franklin Williams, was darker and showed more of her African ancestry.

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Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol (August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American artist who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, celebrity culture and advertisement that flourished by the 1960s. After a successful career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol became a renowned and sometimes controversial artist. The Andy Warhol Museum in his native city, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, holds an extensive permanent collection of art and archives. It is the largest museum in the United States of America dedicated to a single artist.
Andy Warhol's artwork ranged in many forms of media that include hand drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, silk screening, sculpture, film, and music. He was a pioneer in computer-generated art using Amiga computers that were introduced in 1985, just before his death in 1987. He founded Interview Magazine and was the author of numerous books, including The Philosophy of Andy Warhol and Popism: The Warhol Sixties. Andy Warhol is also notable as a gay man who lived openly as such before the gay liberation movement. His studio, The Factory, was a famous gathering place that brought together distinguished intellectuals, drag queens, playwrights, Bohemian street people, Hollywood celebrities, and wealthy patrons. Warhol has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions, books, and feature and documentary films. He coined the widely used expression "15 minutes of fame". Many of his creations are very collectible and highly valuable. The highest price ever paid for a Warhol painting is US$100 million for a 1963 canvas titled Eight Elvises. The private transaction was reported in a 2009 article in The Economist, which described Warhol as the "bellwether of the art market". Warhol's works include some of the most expensive paintings ever sold.

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Angela Carter
Angela Carter (7 May 1940 – 16 February 1992) was an English novelist and journalist, known for her feminist, magical realism, and picaresque works. In 2008, The Times ranked Carter tenth in their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Born Angela Olive Stalker in Eastbourne, in 1940, Carter was evacuated as a child to live in Yorkshire with her maternal grandmother. As a teenager she battled anorexia. After attending Streatham & Clapham High School, in south London, she began work as a journalist on the Croydon Advertiser, following in the footsteps of her father. Carter attended the University of Bristol where she studied English literature.

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Anita Pallenberg
Anita Pallenberg (born 25 January 1944, Rome, Italy) is an Italian-born actress, model, and fashion designer. She was the romantic partner of Rolling Stones multi-instrumentalist and guitarist Brian Jones and later the partner of the guitarist of the same band Keith Richards, from 1967 to 1979, by whom she has two surviving children.
Pallenberg was born on 25 January 1944 in German-occupied Rome, the daughter of Arnaldo Pallenberg, an Italian artist and Paula Wiederhold, a German secretary. Anita became fluent in four languages at an early age and studied medicine, picture restoration and graphic design. Before settling in London, she lived in Germany, her native Rome, as well as New York City, where she was involved with the Living Theatre, starring in the play Paradise Now, which featured on-stage nudity, and Andy Warhol's Factory.
Pallenberg is known for her romantic involvement with Rolling Stones band members Brian Jones, whom she met in 1965 in Munich, where she was working on a modelling assignment, and Keith Richards, for whom she left Jones in 1967 while on holiday in Morocco. She remained in a relationship with Richards until 1980 although they never married. There were rumours that she also had a brief affair with Mick Jagger during the filming of Performance, and Keith Richards states in his autobiography Life that it happened. However, Pallenberg denied the affair in March 2007 when Performance was released on DVD.

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Ann Charters
Ann Charters was born on November 10, 1936 in Bridgeport, Connecticut. She is a professor of American Literature at the University of Connecticut at Storrs and has been interested in Beat Writers since 1956 when as an undergraduate English major she attended the repeat performance of the Six Gallery Poetry reading in San Francisco where Allen Ginsberg gave his second public reading of Howl. It was here that she first met Jack Kerouac. She began collecting books written by beat writers when she was a graduate student at Columbia University, and after completing her doctorate she worked with Jack Kerouac to compile his bibliography. After his death she wrote the first Kerouac biography "Kerouac" - 1973, unique as she was the only biographer he co-operated with. She also edited his posthumous collection "Scattered Poems". She has written a literary study of Charles Olson and biographies of black entertainer Bert Williams and (with her husband) the Russian Poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. She was the general editor of the two volume encyclopedia "The Beats:Literary Bohemians in Postwar America" and has published a collection of her photographic portraits of well-known writers in the book "Beats & Company". She is also the editor of numerous volumes on Beat and 1960's American Literature, including "The Portable Beat Reader", "The Portable Sixties Reader", "Beat Down To Your Soul", "The Portable Jack Kerouac" and most recently, "Brother-Souls" (John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation) which she co-authored with her husband, Samuel Charters, a noted musicologist.

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Anthony Burgess
John Burgess Wilson (25 February 1917 – 22 November 1993) – who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess – was an English author, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic.
The dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange is Burgess's most famous novel, though he dismissed it as one of his lesser works. It was adapted into a highly controversial 1971 film by Stanley Kubrick, which Burgess said was chiefly responsible for the popularity of the book. Burgess produced numerous other novels, including the Enderby quartet, and Earthly Powers. He was a prominent critic, writing acclaimed studies of classic writers such as William Shakespeare, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway. In 2008, The Times placed Burgess number 17 on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". Burgess was an accomplished musician and linguist. He composed over 250 musical works, including a first symphony around age 18, wrote a number of libretti, and translated, among other works, Cyrano de Bergerac, Oedipus the King and Carmen.

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Arthur Rimbaud
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud (/ræmˈboʊ/ or /ˈræmboʊ/; French pronunciation: [aʁtyʁ ʁɛ̃bo]; 20 October 1854 – 10 November 1891) was a French poet. Born in Charleville, Ardennes, he produced his best known works while still in his late teens—Victor Hugo described him at the time as "an infant Shakespeare"—and he gave up creative writing altogether before the age of 20. As part of the decadent movement, Rimbaud influenced modern literature, music and art. He was known to have been a libertine and a restless soul, travelling extensively on three continents before his death from cancer just after his 37th birthday.
Arthur Rimbaud was born into the provincial middle class of Charleville (now part of Charleville-Mézières) in the Ardennes département in northeastern France. He was the second child of a career soldier, Frédéric Rimbaud, and his wife Marie-Catherine-Vitalie Cuif. His father, a Burgundian of Provençal extraction, rose from a simple recruit to the rank of captain, and spent the greater part of his army years in foreign service. Captain Rimbaud fought in the conquest of Algeria and was awarded the Légion d'honneur. The Cuif family was a solidly established Ardennais family, but they were plagued by unstable and bohemian characters; two of Arthur Rimbaud's uncles from his mother's side were alcoholics.

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Benjamin Christensen
Benjamin Christensen (28 September 1879 - 2 April 1959) was a Danish film director, screenwriter and an actor both in film and on the stage. As a director he is most well known for the 1922 film Häxan and as an actor, he is best known for his performance in the film Michael (1924), in which he plays Claude Zoret, the jilted lover of the film's title character.
Benjamin Christensen was born in Viborg and initially studied medicine, but caught the acting bug and began studies at the Det Kongelige Teater (Royal Danish Theatre) in Copenhagen in 1901. Christensen's professional acting career began in Aarhus in 1907, but after a short stint as actor he abandoned the stage in order to become a wine salesman. In 1911, Christensen made his debut as a film actor; all of his pre-directorial efforts are lost, but among such films was Scenens børn (1913), the only motion picture directed by eminent Norwegian playwright and stage director Bjørn Bjørnson.
In 1913, Christensen assumed control of the small, Hellborg-based production company for which he worked and reorganized it as Dansk-Biograf Kompagnie. The first film he directed, Det hemmelighedsfulde X (The Mysterious X, 1914), was one of the most astonishing directorial debuts in film history; although a routine spy melodrama, the camerawork, cutting and art direction were revolutionary for the period. Christensen himself played the main role, as he did in his second film, Hævnens nat (Blind Justice, 1916). Once again, Christensen portrayed a man wrongly accused of murder, and the artistic quality of his sophomore effort was equal to his first. Despite the success of his first two films, Christensen did not find acceptance within the Danish film industry, and after Blind Justice he returned to the stage.

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Bill Laswell
Bill Laswell (born February 12, 1955 in Salem, Illinois and raised in Albion, Michigan) is an American bassist, producer and record label owner.
Laswell ranks among the most prolific of modern musicians, being involved in hundreds of recordings with many collaborators from all over the world. Laswell's music draws upon many different genres, most notably funk, various world music, jazz, dub and ambient styles. He has also played or produced music from the noisier, more aggressive end of the rock spectrum, such as hardcore punk and metal.
According to music critic Chris Brazier, "Laswell’s pet concept is 'collision music' which involves bringing together musicians from wildly divergent but complementary spheres and seeing what comes out." The credo of one record label run by Laswell, and which typifies much of his work, is “Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted”. Though projects arranged by Laswell may be credited under the same name and often feature the same roster of musicians, the styles and themes explored on different albums can vary dramatically: Material began as a noisy dance music project, but subsequent releases have been centered around hip hop, jazz, or backing spoken word readings by beat generation icon William S. Burroughs. Similarly, most versions of Praxis have featured guitarist Buckethead, but have explored different permutations with each new album.

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Brion Gysin
Brion Gysin (January 19, 1916 – July 13, 1986) was a painter, writer, sound poet, and performance artist born in Taplow, Buckinghamshire.
He is best known for his discovery of the cut-up technique, used by his friend, the novelist William S. Burroughs. With the engineer Ian Sommerville he invented the Dreamachine, a flicker device designed as an art object to be viewed with the eyes closed. It was in painting and drawing, however, that Gysin devoted his greatest efforts, creating calligraphic works inspired by the cursive Japanese "grass" script and Arabic script. Burroughs later stated that "Brion Gysin was the only man I ever respected."
John Clifford Brian Gysin was born at Taplow House, England, a Canadian military hospital. His mother, Stella Margaret Martin, was a Canadian from Deseronto, Ontario. His father, Leonard Gysin, a captain with the Canadian Expeditionary Force, was killed in action eight months after his son's birth. Stella returned to Canada and settled in Edmonton, Alberta where her son became "the only Catholic day-boy at an Anglican boarding school". Graduating at fifteen, Gysin was sent to Downside School in Stratton-on-the-Fosse, near Bath, Somerset in England, a prestigious college known as "the Eton of Catholic public schools" run by the Benedictines.

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Buddhist
Buddhism is a religion and philosophy indigenous to the Indian subcontinent and encompasses a variety of traditions, beliefs, and practices largely based on teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, who is commonly known as the Buddha (meaning "the awakened one" in Sanskrit and Pāli). The Buddha lived and taught in the eastern part of Indian subcontinent some time between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE. He is recognized by Buddhists as an awakened or enlightened teacher who shared his insights to help sentient beings end ignorance (avidyā), craving (taṇhā), and suffering (dukkha), by recognizing dependent origination and sunyata, and attain Nirvana.
Two major branches of Buddhism are recognized: Theravada ("The School of the Elders") and Mahayana ("The Great Vehicle"). Theravada has a widespread following in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. Mahayana is found throughout East Asia and includes the traditions of Pure Land, Zen, Nichiren Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, Shingon, Tiantai (Tendai) and Shinnyo-en. In some classifications, Vajrayana—practiced mainly in Tibet and Mongolia, and adjacent parts of China and Russia—is recognized as a third branch, while others classify it as a part of Mahayana. There are other categorisations of these three Vehicles or Yanas.

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Chogyam Trungpa
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (Wylie: Chos rgyam Drung pa; February 28, 1939 – April 4, 1987) was a Buddhist meditation master and holder of both the Kagyu and Nyingma lineages, the eleventh Trungpa tülku, a tertön, supreme abbot of the Surmang monasteries, scholar, teacher, poet, artist, and originator of a radical re-presentation of Shambhala vision.
Recognized both by Tibetan Buddhists and by other spiritual practitioners and scholars as a preeminent teacher of Tibetan Buddhism, he was a major, albeit controversial, figure in the dissemination of Tibetan Buddhism to the West, founding Vajradhatu and Naropa University and establishing the Shambhala Training method.
Among his contributions are the translation of a large number of Tibetan texts, the introduction of the Vajrayana teachings to the West, and a presentation of the Buddhadharma largely devoid of ethnic trappings. Regarded as a mahasiddha by many senior lamas, he is seen as having embodied the crazy wisdom (Tib. yeshe chölwa) tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. Some of his teaching methods and actions were the topic of controversy during his lifetime and afterwards.

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Chris Stein
Christopher "Chris" Stein (born January 5, 1950) is co-founder and guitarist in the New Wave band, Blondie. He is also a producer and performer for the classic soundtrack of the hip hop film Wild Style.
Stein wrote "Sunday Girl" as well as writing some of Blondie's hits with Deborah Harry: "Heart of Glass", "Picture This" (with Jimmy Destri), "Dreaming", "Island of Lost Souls", "Rapture" and "Rip Her to Shreds". Stein also ran the Animal Records label between 1982 and 1984.
In 1983, Stein was diagnosed with pemphigus, a rare autoimmune disease of the skin, but he has since regained normal function. As of 2011, he was still touring and recording music with Blondie.
Stein was born in Brooklyn, New York. While leading Blondie, Stein and Harry became life partners as well as musical partners, although they never married. In the mid-1980s, she took several years off to nurse him back to health. Stein and Harry broke up in 1989, but they have continued to work together.
He married the actress Barbara Sicuranza in 1999. They have two daughters.

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Christiaan Tonnis
Christiaan Tonnis (born June 5, 1956, Saarbrücken, Germany) is a German symbolist/realist painter, draftsman, video artist and published author. He studied at the HfG Offenbach with Dieter Lincke and Herbert Heckmann(de), and lives in Frankfurt, Germany.
Tonnis’ works are "supported with psychological knowledge" His earliest drawings reflect his interest in psychoanalysis and psychopathology such as, catatonic rigidity or the postnatal psychosis depicted in his 1980–85 collection. To "show the psychic as a second face" he "uses stitchings, masks and fragments of masks—they are sometimes barely visible"
In 1986, he started to paint landscapes from literature like the "Magic Mountain (after Thomas Mann)" and portraits of writers and philosophers. E.g. "he stylizes the philosopher Wittgenstein to a sketchy Icon of a soulless prominence. An almost gruesome picture, expressive in its amply color scheme of white, grey and black, almost like a mold of a Hippocratic face"
Since 2003 his work has become more meditative: "Geometric patterns in bright colors", consistent with Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thodol) and New Testament—the series of minimalistic "Meditation pictures".

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Clive Barker
Clive Barker (born 5 October 1952) is an English author, film director and visual artist best known for his work in both fantasy and horror fiction. Barker came to prominence in the mid-1980s with a series of short stories which established him as a leading young horror writer. He has since written many novels and other works, and his fiction has been adapted into motion pictures, notably the Hellraiser and Candyman series.
Clive Barker was born in Liverpool, England, the son of Joan Rubie (née Revill), a painter and school welfare officer, and Leonard Barker, a personnel director for an industrial relations firm. Educated at Dovedale Primary School and the former Quarry Bank High School now Calderstones Quarry Bank High School, he studied English and Philosophy at Liverpool University. The Damnation Game and Volume 2 of The Books of Blood are dedicated to John Gregson^[who?].
In 2003, Barker received The Davidson/Valentini Award at the 15th GLAAD Media Awards, presented "to an openly lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender individual who has made a significant difference in promoting equal rights for any of those communities". While Barker is critical of organized religion, he has identified himself as a Christian and has stated that the Bible influences his work.

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Daniel Humair
Daniel Humair (born 23 May 1938 in Geneva) is a drummer, jazz composer and painter.
He is widely renowned and became Chevalier des Arts et Lettres in 1986.
He has played with many jazz performers notably Martial Solal, Gerry Mulligan and Eric Dolphy.
Humair is also a talented painter. He describes his own work as "figurative abstract" and has created a coherent œuvre proving his passion and knowledge of artistic painting.

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Dashiell Hammett
Samuel Dashiell Hammett ( /dəˈʃiːl/; May 27, 1894 – January 10, 1961) was an American author of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories, screenplay writer, and political activist. Among the enduring characters he created are Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon), Nick and Nora Charles (The Thin Man), and the Continental Op (Red Harvest and The Dain Curse).
In addition to the significant influence his novels and stories had on film, Hammett "is now widely regarded as one of the finest mystery writers of all time" and was called, in his obituary in The New York Times, "the dean of the... 'hard-boiled' school of detective fiction".Time magazine included Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest on a list of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005.
Hammett was born on a farm called Hopewell and Aim in St. Mary's County, in southern Maryland. His parents were Richard Thomas Hammett and Anne Bond Dashiell. His mother belonged to an old Maryland family whose name was Anglicized from the French De Chiel. Hammett was baptized a Catholic and grew up in Philadelphia and Baltimore. "Sam," as he was known before he began writing, left school when he was 13 years old and held several jobs before working for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. He served as an operative for the Pinkertons from 1915 to February 1922, with time off to serve in World War I. However, the agency's role in union strike-breaking eventually disillusioned him.

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David Bowie
David Bowie ( /ˈboʊ.i/ BOH-ee; born David Robert Jones on 8 January 1947) is an English musician, actor, record producer and arranger. A major figure for over four decades in the world of popular music, Bowie is widely regarded as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s. He is known for his distinctive voice and the intellectual depth and eclecticism of his work.
Bowie first caught the eye and ear of the public in July 1969, when his song "Space Oddity" reached the top five of the UK Singles Chart. After a three-year period of experimentation he re-emerged in 1972 during the glam rock era with the flamboyant, androgynous alter ego Ziggy Stardust, spearheaded by the hit single "Starman" and the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Bowie's impact at that time, as described by biographer David Buckley, "challenged the core belief of the rock music of its day" and "created perhaps the biggest cult in popular culture." The relatively short-lived Ziggy persona proved merely one facet of a career marked by continual reinvention, musical innovation and striking visual presentation.

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David Cronenberg
David Paul Cronenberg, OC, FRSC (born March 15, 1943) is a Canadian filmmaker, screenwriter and actor. He is one of the principal originators of what is commonly known as the body horror or venereal horror genre. This style of filmmaking explores people's fears of bodily transformation and infection. In his films, the psychological is typically intertwined with the physical. In the first half of his career, he explored these themes mostly through horror and science fiction, although his work has since expanded beyond these genres. He has been called "the most audacious and challenging narrative director in the English-speaking world."
Born in Toronto, Canada, Cronenberg was the son of Esther (born Sumberg), a musician, and Milton Cronenberg, a writer and editor. His family has been described as "a nurturing middle class family." He began writing as a child and wrote constantly. He attended high school at Harbord Collegiate Institute. A keen interest in science, especially botany and lepidopterology, led him to enter the Honours Science program the University of Toronto in 1963, but he switched to Honors English Language and Literature later in his first year. Cronenberg's fascination with the film Winter Kept Us Warm (1966) by classmate David Secter sparked his interest in film. He began frequenting film camera rental houses, learning art of filmmaking and made two 16mm films (Transfer and From the Drain). Inspired by the New York underground film scene, he founded the Toronto Film Co-op with Iain Ewing and Ivan Reitman. After taking a year off to travel in Europe, he returned to Canada in 1967, graduating from University College at the top of his class.

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Debbie Harry
Deborah Ann "Debbie" Harry (born July 1, 1945) is an American singer-songwriter and actress, best known for being the lead singer of the punk rock and new wave band Blondie. She has also had success as a solo artist, and in the mid-1990s she performed and recorded as part of The Jazz Passengers. Her acting career spans over thirty film roles and numerous television appearances.
Harry was born in Miami, Florida, and adopted by Catherine Harry and Richard Smith, gift shop proprietors in Hawthorne, New Jersey. She attended Hawthorne High School, where she graduated in 1963. She graduated from Centenary College in Hackettstown, New Jersey, with an Associate of Arts degree in 1965.^{[citation needed]} Before starting her singing career she moved to New York City in the late 1960s and worked as a secretary at BBC Radio's office there for one year. Later, she was a waitress at Max's Kansas City, a go-go dancer in Union City, New Jersey, discothèque,^{[citation needed]} and a Playboy Bunny.
Deborah Harry began her musical career in the late '60s with the folk rock group The Wind in the Willows, that recorded one album for Capitol Records. Harry then joined The Stilettos, with Elda Gentile and Amanda Jones, in 1974. The Stilettos included her eventual boyfriend and Blondie guitarist Chris Stein. When Harry and Stein left the Stilettos, they formed Angel and the Snake, with Tish and Snooky Bellomo. Shortly thereafter, Harry and Stein formed Blondie, naming it for the term of address men often yelled at Harry when she bleached her hair. Blondie quickly became regulars at Max's Kansas City and CBGB in New York City. After a debut album in 1976, commercial success followed in the late 1970s to the early 1980s, first in Australia and Europe, then in the United States.

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Dennis Cooper
Dennis Cooper (born 1953) is an American novelist, poet, critic, editor and performance artist.
Cooper grew up the son of a wealthy businessman in Arcadia, California. His first forays into literature came early, focusing on imitations of Rimbaud, Verlaine, de Sade, and Baudelaire. As he began his teenage years, he wrote poetry and stories on scandalous and often extreme subjects. At the age of fifteen, he began to plan an ambitious novel cycle. This project, which took Cooper nearly twenty years to realize, would later become known as The George Miles Cycle. Cooper was an outsider and the leader of a group of poets, punks, stoners, and writers. After high school he attended Pasadena City College and, later, Pitzer College, where he had a poetry teacher who was to inspire him to pursue his writing outside of institutions of higher learning.
In 1976 Cooper went to England to become involved in the nascent punk scene. In the same year he began Little Caesar Magazine which included among other things an issue on and dedicated to Rimbaud. In 1978 with the success of the magazine, Cooper was able to found Little Caesar Press which featured the work of, among others, Brad Gooch, Amy Gerstler, Elaine Equi, Tim Dlugos, Joe Brainard, and Eileen Myles.

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Dennis Hopper
Dennis Lee Hopper (May 17, 1936 - May 29, 2010) was an American actor, filmmaker and artist. As a young man, Hopper became interested in acting and eventually became a student of the Actors' Studio. He made his first television appearance in 1954 and appeared in two films featuring James Dean, Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Giant (1956). During the next 10 years, Hopper appeared frequently on television in guest roles, and by the end of the 1960s had played supporting roles in several films.
He directed and starred in Easy Rider (1969), winning an award at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay as co-writer. Journalist Ann Hornaday wrote: "With its portrait of counterculture heroes raising their middle fingers to the uptight middle-class hypocrisies, Easy Rider became the cinematic symbol of the 1960s, a celluloid anthem to freedom, macho bravado and anti-establishment rebellion." Film critic Matthew Hays notes that "no other persona better signifies the lost idealism of the 1960s than that of Dennis Hopper."

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Doctors of Madness
Doctors of Madness were a British protopunk art rock band formed in 1974 in a cellar in Brixton, south London by the composer and lead singer/guitarist Richard Strange, known as ‘Kid’ Strange. Active as a recording and touring band until late 1978, they found mainly cult level success and recognition that was not enough to sustain them, but they were later cited as a pivotal influence on the early British punk rock movement and the reappraisal prompted their albums to be re-released in 2002 on CD. Indeed their support acts during their heyday included The Sex Pistols (Middlesbrough 1976), The Jam (London Marquee on several occasions 1976), Joy Division (as "Warsaw" Manchester 1976) and Simple Minds (as "Johnny and the Self Abuser"s (Falkirk 1976). Furthermore Richard 'Kid' Strange was best man at Dave Vanian's (of the Damned) wedding. Julian Cope of Teardrop Explodes, Spiritualized, the comedian Vic Reeves and Richard Jobson of The Skids, now a film maker, have all acknowledged their appreciation of the Doctors of Madness music.

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Frank Zappa
Frank Vincent Zappa (December 21, 1940 – December 4, 1993) was an American composer, singer-songwriter, electric guitarist, recording engineer, record producer and film director. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Zappa wrote rock, jazz, orchestral and musique concrète works. He also directed feature-length films and music videos, and designed album covers. Zappa produced almost all of the more than 60 albums he released with the band The Mothers of Invention and as a solo artist. While in his teens, he acquired a taste for percussion-based avant-garde composers such as Edgard Varèse and 1950s rhythm and blues music. He began writing classical music in high school, while at the same time playing drums in rhythm and blues bands; he later switched to electric guitar.
He was a self-taught composer and performer, and his diverse musical influences led him to create music that was often impossible to categorize. His 1966 debut album with The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!, combined songs in conventional rock and roll format with collective improvisations and studio-generated sound collages. His later albums shared this eclectic and experimental approach, irrespective of whether the fundamental format was one of rock, jazz or classical. His lyrics—often humorously—reflected his iconoclastic view of established social and political processes, structures and movements. He was a strident critic of mainstream education and organized religion, and a forthright and passionate advocate for freedom of speech, self-education, political participation and the abolition of censorship.

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Genesis P-Orridge
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, who was born Neil Andrew Megson, is an English singer-songwriter, musician, writer and performance artist. In the latter capacity he was the founder of the COUM Transmissions artistic collective, which operated form 1969 through to the 1975, while as a musician, P-Orridge fronted the pioneering industrial band Throbbing Gristle from 1975 through to 1980, and then the acid house band Psychic TV from 1981 through to 1999.
Born in Manchester, P-Orridge moved around the country as a child, first to Essex and then to Warwickshire. Here he attended the privately-run Solihull School, where he developed an interest in art, occultism and the avant-garde. Studying at the University of Hull, P-Orridge dropped out, and briefly moved into a hippy commune in North London. Adopting his nom-de-guerre, he returned to Hull, where he founded COUM Transmissions in 1969, which operated out of a communal warehouse which he named the Ho-Ho Funhouse.
P-Orridge's early confrontational performance work in COUM Transmissions in the late 1960s and early 1970s along with the industrial band Throbbing Gristle, which dealt with subjects such as prostitution, pornography, serial killers, occultism, and P-Orridge's own exploration of gender issues, generated controversy. Later musical work with Psychic TV received wider exposure. P-Orridge is credited on over 200 releases.

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Graham Masterton
Graham Masterton (born 16 January 1946 in Edinburgh) is a British horror author. Originally editor of Mayfair and the British edition of Penthouse, Graham Masterton's first novel The Manitou was released in 1976. This novel was adapted in 1978 for the film The Manitou. Further works garnered critical acclaim, including a Special Edgar award by the Mystery Writers of America for Charnel House and a Silver Medal by the West Coast Review of Books for Mirror. He is also the only non-French winner of the prestigious Prix Julia Verlanger for his novel Family Portrait, an imaginative reworking of the Oscar Wilde novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Masterton was also the editor of Scare Care, a horror anthology published for the benefit of abused children in Europe and the USA.
Masterton's novels often contain visceral sex and horror. In addition to his novels Masterton has written a number of sex instruction books, including How To Drive Your Man Wild In Bed and Wild Sex for New Lovers. A number of his novels have also been adapted into films.

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Grant Morrison
Grant Morrison (born 31 January 1960) is a Scottish comic book writer, playwright and occultist. He is known for his nonlinear narratives and counter-cultural leanings, as well as his successful runs on titles like Animal Man, Doom Patrol, JLA, The Invisibles, New X-Men, Fantastic Four, Action Comics, All-Star Superman, and Batman.
Grant Morrison was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1960. His first published works were Gideon Stargrave strips for Near Myths in 1978 (when he was about 17), one of the first British alternative comics. His work appeared in four of the five issues of Near Myths and he was suitably encouraged to find more comic work. This included a weekly comic strip Captain Clyde, an unemployed superhero based in Glasgow, for The Govan Press, a local newspaper, plus various issues of DC Thomson's Starblazer, a science fiction version of that company's Commando title.
Morrison spent much of the early 1980s touring and recording with his band The Mixers, writing the occasional Starblazer for D. C. Thompson and contributing to various UK indie titles. In 1982 he submitted a proposal involving the Justice League of America and Jack Kirby's New Gods entitled Second Coming to DC Comics, but it was not commissioned. After writing The Liberators for Dez Skinn's Warrior in 1985, he started work for Marvel UK the following year. There he wrote a number of comic strips for Doctor Who Magazine, his final one a collaboration with a then-teenage Bryan Hitch, as well as a run on the Zoids strip in Spider-Man and Zoids. 1986 also saw publication of Morrison's first of several two- or three-page Future Shocks for 2000AD.

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Gregory Corso
Gregory Nunzio Corso (March 26, 1930 – January 17, 2001) was an American poet, youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers (with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs).
Corso's first volume of poetry The Vestal Lady on Brattle was published in 1955 (with the assistance of students at Harvard, where he had been auditing classes). Corso was the second of the Beats to be published (after only Kerouac's The Town and the City), despite being the youngest. His poems were first published in the Harvard Advocate. In 1958, Corso had an expanded collection of poems published as number 8 in the City Lights Pocket Poets Series: Gasoline & The Vestal Lady on Brattle. Of his many notable poems are: "Bomb" (a "concrete poem" formatted in typed paper slips of verse, arranged in the shape of a mushroom cloud), "Elegiac Feelings American" of the recently deceased Jack Kerouac, and "Marriage", a humorous meditation on the institution, perhaps his signature poem. And later in life, "The Whole Mess Almost".

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Gus Van Sant
Gus Green Van Sant, Jr. (born July 24, 1952) is an American film director, screenwriter, painter, photographer, musician, and author. He is a two time nominee of the Academy Award for Best Director — for Good Will Hunting (1997) and Milk (2008), both of which were also nominated for Best Picture — and won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for his film Elephant (2003). He lives in Portland, Oregon.
His early career was devoted to directing television commercials in the Pacific Northwest. In his films, he has dealt with themes concerning homosexuality and other marginalized subcultures.
His filmography as writer and director includes a 1994 adaptation of Tom Robbins' 1976 novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which features a diverse cast (Keanu Reeves, Roseanne Barr, Uma Thurman, and k.d. lang, with cameos by William S. Burroughs and Heather Graham, among others); and My Own Private Idaho (1991), also starring Reeves as well as River Phoenix.
He wrote the screenplays for most of his early movies, and wrote one novel, Pink. A book of his photography has also been published, called 108 Portraits.

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Hal Willner
Hal Willner (born 1957, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American music producer working in recording, films, TV and live events. He is best known for assembling tribute albums and events featuring a wide variety of artists and musical styles (jazz, classical, rock, Tin Pan Alley). His first tribute album was Amarcord Nino Rota in 1981.
In the late 1970s he worked under record producer Joel Dorn, credited as Associate Producer on Leon Redbone's albums Double Time and Champagne Charlie, and The Neville Brothers' Fiyo on the Bayou. Willner was music supervisor of Saturday Night Live from 1981–1990, occasionally returning in subsequent years. He was also a producer of the TV program Sunday Night hosted by David Sanborn.
Willner has produced albums for Marianne Faithfull, Lou Reed, Bill Frisell, William S. Burroughs, Gavin Friday, Lucinda Williams, Laurie Anderson and Allen Ginsberg, among others. He produced a live tribute concert to Tim Buckley, that ultimately launched the career of Tim's son Jeff. He has released one album under his own name: Whoops, I'm an Indian, which featured audio samples from 78 rpm records from the early-mid 20th century.

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Harold Chapman
Harold Stephen Chapman (born 26 March 1927 in Deal) is a photographer noted for chronicalling the 1950s in Paris.
He has produced a large body of work over many years, but his most significant period was from the mid 1950s to the early 1960s, when he lived in a backstreet Left Bank guesthouse in Paris later nicknamed (by Verta Kali Smart) ‘the Beat Hotel’. There he chronicled in detail the life and times of his fellow residents – among them Allen Ginsberg and his lover Peter Orlovsky, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Sinclair Beiles, Brion Gysin, Harold Norse, and other great names of Beat Generation poetry and art. When the Beat Hotel finally closed its doors in 1963, Chapman was the last guest to leave. The extraordinary collection of photographs he had taken there were to become the mainstay of his reputation, a unique record both artistic and historic.
Yet increasingly his other work attracts worldwide attention, and could yet prove a greater legacy. Portraits, landscapes, bizarre objets trouvés and, especially, distinctive enigmatic street scenes (often involving incongruous background advertising), combine his two characteristic emotions – pervasive moody anxiety and quirky wit.

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Heart attack
Myocardial infarction (MI) or acute myocardial infarction (AMI), commonly known as a heart attack, results from the interruption of blood supply to a part of the heart, causing heart cells to die. This is most commonly due to occlusion (blockage) of a coronary artery following the rupture of a vulnerable atherosclerotic plaque, which is an unstable collection of lipids (cholesterol and fatty acids) and white blood cells (especially macrophages) in the wall of an artery. The resulting ischemia (restriction in blood supply) and ensuing oxygen shortage, if left untreated for a sufficient period of time, can cause damage or death (infarction) of heart muscle tissue (myocardium).
Classical symptoms of acute myocardial infarction include sudden chest pain (typically radiating to the left arm or left side of the neck), shortness of breath, nausea, vomiting, palpitations, sweating, and anxiety (often described as a sense of impending doom). Women may experience fewer typical symptoms than men, most commonly shortness of breath, weakness, a feeling of indigestion, and fatigue.A sizeable proportion of myocardial infarctions (22–64%) are "silent", that is without chest pain or other symptoms.

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Henry Miller
Henry Valentine Miller (December 26, 1891 – June 7, 1980) was an American writer and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of "novel" that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is distinctly always about and expressive of the real-life Henry Miller and yet is also fictional. His most characteristic works of this kind are Tropic of Cancer (1934), Black Spring (1936), and Tropic of Capricorn (1939). He also wrote travel memoirs and essays of literary criticism and analysis.
Miller was born to tailor Heinrich Miller and Louise Marie Neiting, in the Yorkville section of Manhattan, New York City, of German parents. As a child he lived at 662 Driggs Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, known in that time (and referred to frequently in his works) as the Fourteenth Ward. As a young man, he was active with the Socialist Party (his "quondam idol" was the Black Socialist Hubert Harrison).^{[citation needed]} He briefly—for only one semester—attended the City College of New York. Although he was an exceptional student,^{[citation needed]} he was willing neither to be anchored nor to submit to the traditional college system of education.

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Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse (German pronunciation: [maʁˈkuːzə]; July 19, 1898 – July 29, 1979) was a German Jewish philosopher, sociologist and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Active in the United States after 1934, his intellectual concerns were the dehumanizing effects of capitalism and modern technology. Celebrated as the "Father of the New Left," his best known works are Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964). His Marxist scholarship inspired many radical intellectuals and political activists in the 1960s and '70s, both in the U.S. and internationally.
Herbert Marcuse was born in Berlin to Carl Marcuse and Gertrud Kreslawsky and raised in a Jewish family. In 1916 he was drafted into the German Army, but only worked in horse stables in Berlin during World War I. He then became a member of a Soldiers' Council that participated in the aborted socialist Spartacist uprising. He completed his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Freiburg in 1922 on the German Künstlerroman after which he moved back to Berlin, where he worked in publishing. In 1924 he married Sophie Wertheim, a mathematician. He returned to Freiburg in 1928 to study with Edmund Husserl and write a Habilitation with Martin Heidegger, which was published in 1932 as Hegel's Ontology and Theory of Historicity. This study was written in the context of the Hegel renaissance that was taking place in Europe with an emphasis on Hegel's ontology of life and history, idealist theory of spirit and dialectic. With his academic career blocked by the rise of the Third Reich, in 1933 Marcuse joined the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research.

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Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter Stockton Thompson (July 18, 1937 – February 20, 2005) was an American journalist and author who wrote The Rum Diary (1998), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 (1973), The Curse of Lono (1983), and Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1966).
He is credited as the creator of Gonzo journalism, a style of reporting where reporters involve themselves in the action to such a degree that they become central figures of their stories. He is known also for his lifelong use of alcohol, LSD, mescaline, and cocaine (among other substances); his love of firearms; his inveterate hatred of Richard Nixon; and his iconoclastic contempt for authoritarianism. While suffering a bout of health problems, he committed suicide in 2005 at the age of 67.
Thompson was born in Louisville, Kentucky, the first of three sons, to Jack Robert Thompson (September 4, 1893, Horse Cave, Kentucky – July 3, 1952, Louisville), a public insurance adjuster and World War I veteran, and Virginia Ray Davison (1908, Springfield, Kentucky – March 20, 1998, Louisville), a librarian. His parents were introduced to each other by a friend from Jack's fraternity at the University of Kentucky in September 1934, and were married on November 2, 1935.

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Ian Curtis
Ian Kevin Curtis (15 July 1956 - 18 May 1980) was an English musician, best known as the lead singer and lyricist of the post-punk band Joy Division. Joy Division released their debut album, Unknown Pleasures, in 1979 and recorded their follow-up, Closer, in 1980. Curtis, who suffered from epilepsy and depression, committed suicide on 18 May 1980, on the eve of Joy Division's first North American tour, resulting in the band's dissolution and the subsequent formation of New Order.
Curtis was known for his bass-baritone voice, dance style and songwriting filled with imagery of desolation, emptiness and alienation.
In 1995, Curtis's widow Deborah published Touching from a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division, a biography of the singer. His life and death have been dramatised in the films 24 Hour Party People (2002) and Control (2007).
Curtis was born at the Memorial Hospital in Stretford, Lancashire. He grew up in Hurdsfield, an area of Macclesfield, and from an early age he exhibited talent as a poet. Proof of his ability was his admission at the age of 11 to The King's School, Macclesfield with a scholarship. Despite this, he was not a dedicated student and did not further his education beyond O-level.

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Irvine Welsh
Irvine Welsh (born 27 September 1958 in Leith, Edinburgh) is a contemporary Scottish novelist, best known for his novel Trainspotting. His work is characterised by raw Scottish dialect, and brutal depiction of the realities of Edinburgh life. He has also written plays, screenplays, and directed several short films.
Irvine Welsh was born in Leith, the port area of the Scottish capital Edinburgh. His family moved to Muirhouse, in Edinburgh, when he was four, where the family stayed at local housing schemes. His mother worked as a waitress. His father was a dock worker in Leith until bad health forced him to become a carpet salesman; he died when Welsh was 25. Welsh left Ainslie Park High School when he was 16 and then completed a City and Guilds course in electrical engineering. He became an apprentice TV repairman until an electric shock persuaded him to move on to a series of other jobs. He left Edinburgh for the London punk scene in 1978, where he played guitar and sang in The Pubic Lice and Stairway 13, the latter a reference to the Ibrox disaster. A series of arrests for petty crimes and finally a suspended sentence for trashing a North London community centre inspired Welsh to correct his ways. He worked for Hackney London Borough Council in London and studied computing with the support of the Manpower Services Commission.

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Ivy Lee
Ivy Ledbetter Lee (July 16, 1877 – November 9, 1934) is considered by some to be the founder of modern public relations. The term Public Relations is to be found for the first time in the preface of the 1897 Yearbook of Railway Literature.
Ivy Lee was born near Cedartown, Georgia on July 16, 1877 as the son of a Methodist minister, James Wideman Lee, who founded an important Atlanta family. He studied at Emory College and then graduated from Princeton. He worked as a newspaper reporter and stringer. He was a journalist at the New York American, the New York Times, and the New York World. He got his first job in 1903 as a publicity manager for the Citizens' Union. He authored the book The Best Administration New York City Ever Had. He later took a job with the Democratic National Committee. Lee married Cornelia Bartlett Bigalow in 1901. They had three children: Alice Lee in 1902, James Wideman Lee II in 1906, and Ivy Lee, Jr. in 1909.
Together with George Parker, he established the United States' third public relations firm, Parker and Lee, in 1905. The new agency boasted of "Accuracy, Authenticity, and Interest." They made this partnership after working together in the Democratic Party headquarters handling publicity for Judge Alton Parker's unsuccessful presidential race against Theodore Roosevelt.

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J. G. Ballard
James Graham "J. G." Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) was an English novelist, short story writer, and prominent member of the New Wave movement in science fiction. His best-known books are Crash (1973), adapted into a film by David Cronenberg, and the semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun (1984), made into a film by Steven Spielberg, based on Ballard's boyhood in the Shanghai International Settlement and internment by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Second World War.
The literary distinctiveness of his work has given rise to the adjective "Ballardian", defined by the Collins English Dictionary as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard’s novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments."
Ballard was diagnosed with prostate cancer in June 2006, from which he died in London in April 2009.
In 2008, The Times included Ballard on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

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Jack Black (author)
Jack Black was a late-19th-century/early-20th-century hobo and professional burglar, living out the dying age of the Wild West. Born in 1871 near Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, he was raised from infancy in the U.S. state of Missouri. He wrote You Can't Win (Macmillan, 1926) a memoir or sketched autobiography describing his days on the road and life as an outlaw. Black's book was written as an anti-crime book urging criminals to go straight but is also his statement of belief in the futility of prisons and the criminal justice system, hence the title of the book. Jack Black was writing from experience, having spent thirty years (fifteen of which were spent in various prisons) as a traveling criminal and offers tales of being a cross-country stick-up man, home burglar, petty thief, and opium fiend.
Jack Black is an essentially anonymous figure (even his actual name is uncertain) who is recognized through association with William S. Burroughs. Although his philosophy on life was especially influential to Burroughs, who associated with similar characters in his early adulthood and mirrored the style of You Can't Win with his first published book, Junkie, Black's writings also had a profound effect on the writings and lives of all the Beat Generation.

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Jack Kerouac
Jean-Louis "Jack" Kerouac ( /ˈkɛruːæk/ or /ˈkɛrɵæk/; March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969) was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic spirituality, jazz, promiscuity, Buddhism, drugs, poverty, and travel. His writings have inspired other writers, including Ken Kesey, Bob Dylan, Richard Brautigan, Curtis Meanor, Morrissey, Thomas Pynchon,Lester Bangs, Tom Robbins, Will Clarke, Ben Gibbard, Haruki Murakami, Jacquelyn Landgraf.^{[citation needed]} Kerouac became an underground celebrity and, with other beats, a progenitor of the hippie movement, although he remained antagonistic toward some of its politically radical elements. In 1969, at age 47, Kerouac died from internal bleeding due to long-standing abuse of alcohol. Since his death Kerouac's literary prestige has grown and several previously unseen works have been published. All of his books are in print today, among them: On the Road, Doctor Sax, The Dharma Bums, Mexico City Blues, The Subterraneans, Desolation Angels, Visions of Cody and Big Sur.

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Jack Mabley
Jack Mabley (1915–2006) was an American newspaper reporter and columnist.
John Arnold Mabley was born on October 26, 1915 in Binghamton, New York State to Clarence Ware Mabley (born Clarence Ware Mable) and Mabelle née Howe, a concert pianist.
After studying journalism at the University of Illinois he started on a long career as a reporter and columnist for several Chicago newspapers prior to taking up a long-standing post as the well-respected columnist of the Chicago Tribune, writing some 8000 columns on a wide range of issues. In his later years he became columnist of the suburban Chicago Daily Herald from which he finally retired in 2004 at around 90 years of age.
In addition to his journalistic career, Jack operated a corporate communications business from his adopted home town of Chicago, hosting a nightly radio show. He also served as president of the Chicago suburb of Glenview for a number of years.
The Jack Mabley Developmental Center in Dixon, IL, a state run residential home for the mentally disabled, is named after him in honour of his generous support and fundraising activities. He had created the Forgotten Children's Fund, which raised money for the centre. His autobiography entitled "Halas, Hef, the Beatles and Me" was published in 1967.

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James Grauerholz
James Grauerholz (born December 14, 1953 in Coffeyville, Kansas) is a writer and editor. He is most famous as the bibliographer and literary executor of the estate of William S. Burroughs.

He was born in Kansas and attended the University of Kansas for a year before dropping out and traveling to New York City. By his own admission, he was fascinated with Beat Generation literature and authors.
Grauerholz became acquainted with Burroughs in the 1970s while befriending Allen Ginsberg in New York City. Ginsberg recommended Grauerholz to Burroughs as a possible assistant and their working relationship began in this simple manner, yet grew to be a major factor in the popularization of Burroughs and his works. Grauerholz became Burroughs' friend and business manager until the author's death in 1997.
His influence on Burroughs' later work is significant^{[citation needed]} as he helped edit a trilogy of novels — Cities of the Red Night (1981), The Place of Dead Roads (1985) and The Western Lands (1987) — as well as act as his business manager. He spearheaded the author reading tours Burroughs often gave to audiences in the 1980s and 1990s and wrote editorial copy for a compilation of stories Interzone. He quit working for Burroughs and returned to Kansas in the early 1980s, and this quickly led Burroughs to relocate to the Midwestern university town of Lawrence, Kansas, to work more closely with Grauerholz again.^{[citation needed]} Up until Burroughs' death in 1997, Grauerholz supported him, getting him reading engagements, commercial advertisements (Nike shoes), parts in films (Drugstore Cowboy) as well as recording Burroughs readings. He looked after William's physical needs as well, taking him to a methadone clinic in Kansas City weekly, as well as providing him with companionship and acting as a kind of social secretary to the many people that came to Kansas to meet Burroughs.

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Jean Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (/ˈsɑːtrə/; French pronunciation: [saʁtʁ]; 21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism, and one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy and Marxism. His work, in addition to being influential to existentialism and Marxism, has also influenced sociology, critical theory, and literary studies, and continues to influence these disciplines. Sartre has also been noted for his relationship with the prominent feminist theorist Simone de Beauvoir.
He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature but refused it, saying that he always declined official honours and that, "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution."
Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris as the only child of Jean-Baptiste Sartre, an officer of the French Navy, and Anne-Marie Schweitzer. His mother was of Alsatian origin and the first cousin of Nobel Prize laureate Albert Schweitzer. (Her father, Charles Schweitzer, was the older brother of Albert Schweitzer's father, Louis Théophile.) When Sartre was only a year old, his father died of a fever. Anne-Marie moved back to her parents' house in Meudon, where she raised Sartre with help from her father, a professor of German, who taught Sartre mathematics and introduced him to classical literature at a very early age. When he was twelve, Satre's mother remarried, and the family moved to La Rochelle, where he was frequently bullied.

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Jew
The Jews (Hebrew: יְהוּדִים‎‎ ISO 259-3 Yhudim Israeli pronunciation [jehuˈdim]), also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and an ethnoreligious group, originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation.Converts to Judaism, whose status as Jews within the Jewish ethnos is equal to those born into it, have been absorbed into the Jewish people throughout the millennia.
In Jewish tradition, Jewish ancestry is traced to the Biblical patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the second millennium BCE. The modern State of Israel defines itself as a Jewish state in its Basic Laws, and Israel's Law of Return states: "Every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh." Israel is the only country where Jews are a majority of the population. Jews achieved political autonomy twice before in ancient history. The first of these periods lasted from 1350 to 586 BCE, and encompassed the periods of the Judges, the United Monarchy, and the Divided Monarchy of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, ending with the destruction of the First Temple. The second was the period of the Hasmonean Kingdom spanning from 140 to 37 BCE. Since the destruction of the First Temple, most Jews have lived in diaspora. A minority in every country in which they live (except Israel), they have frequently experienced persecution throughout history, resulting in a population that has fluctuated both in numbers and distribution over the centuries.

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Jimmy Page
James Patrick "Jimmy" Page, OBE (born 9 January 1944) is an English guitarist, songwriter, and record producer. He began his career as a studio session guitarist in London and was subsequently a member of The Yardbirds from 1966 to 1968, after which he founded the English rock band Led Zeppelin.
Jimmy Page is viewed by critics, fans and fellow musicians alike as one of the most influential and important guitarists and songwriters in rock music.Rolling Stone magazine has described him as "the pontiff of power riffing & probably the most digitally sampled artist in pop today after James Brown." In 2010, Jimmy Page was ranked No.2 in Gibson's list of "Top 50 Guitarists of All Time" and, in 2007, No.4 on Classic Rock Magazine's "100 Wildest Guitar Heroes". Page was ranked third in Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" in 2011. He has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice; once as a member of The Yardbirds (1992), and once as a member of Led Zeppelin (1995).

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Joan Vollmer
Joan Vollmer (February 4, 1923 – September 6, 1951) was the most prominent female member of the early Beat Generation circle. While a student at Barnard College, she became the roommate of Edie Parker (later married to Jack Kerouac). Their apartment became a gathering place for the Beats during the 1940s, where Vollmer was often at the center of marathon, all night discussions. In 1946, she began a relationship with William S. Burroughs, later becoming his common-law wife. In 1951, Burroughs killed Vollmer by shooting her in the head in what was apparently a drunken attempt at playing William Tell.
Joan Vollmer was born in Loudonville, an affluent suburb of Albany, New York. She left her upper-middle class family to attend college in New York City in the early 1940s, and soon afterward became married to Paul Adams, a law student who was drafted during World War II, and therefore overseas during most of the early Beat years. Vollmer met Edie Parker at the West End Bar and the two moved in together in the first of a series of apartments in New York's Upper West Side that they shared with the writers, hustlers and drug addicts that later became known as the Beats. These included: William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, Herbert Huncke, Vickie Russell (a prostitute and addict who appears as "Mary" in Burroughs' novel Junkie), and Hal Chase, a Columbia University graduate student from Denver.

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John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer, music theorist, writer, and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential American composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.
Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4′33″, which is performed in the absence of deliberate sound; musicians who present the work do nothing aside from being present for the duration specified by the title. The content of the composition is not "four minutes and 33 seconds of silence," as is sometimes assumed, but rather the sounds of the environment heard by the audience during performance. The work's challenge to assumed definitions about musicianship and musical experience made it a popular and controversial topic both in musicology and the broader aesthetics of art and performance. Cage was also a pioneer of the prepared piano (a piano with its sound altered by objects placed between or on its strings or hammers), for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert pieces. The best known of these is Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48).

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John Giorno
John Giorno (born 1936) is an American poet and performance artist. He founded the not-for-profit production company Giorno Poetry Systems and organized a number of early multimedia poetry experiments and events, including Dial-A-Poem. He became prominent as the subject of Andy Warhol's film Sleep (1963). He is also an AIDS activist and fundraiser, and a long-time practitioner of the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism.
Giorno was born in New York. He graduated from Columbia University in 1958, where he was a "college chum" of physicist Hans Christian von Baeyer. In 1962, while in his early twenties he briefly worked in New York as a stockbroker. In 1962 he met Andy Warhol during Warhol's first New York Pop Art solo exhibit at Eleanor Ward's Stable Gallery. They became lovers and Warhol remained an important influence for Giorno's developments on poetry, performance and recordings. Giorno and Warhol are said to have remained very close until 1964, after which time their meetings were rare. Their relationship was revived somewhat in the last year before Warhol's death. Inspired by Warhol, and subsequent relationships with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, Giorno began applying Pop Art techniques of appropriation of found imagery to his poetry, producing The American Book of the Dead in 1964 (published in part in his first book, Poems, in 1967). Meetings with William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin in 1964 contributed to his interest in applying cut up and montage techniques to found texts, and (via Gysin) his first audio poem pieces, one of which was played at the Paris Museum of Modern Art Biennale in 1965.

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John Rechy
John Francis Rechy (born March 10, 1934 in El Paso, Texas) is an American author. In his novels he has written extensively about homosexual culture in Los Angeles and wider America, and is among the pioneers of modern LGBT literature. Drawing on his own background, he has also contributed to Chicano literature, especially with his novel The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez, which is taught in several Chicano literature courses in the United States. His work has often faced censorship due to its sexual content, particularly (but not solely) in the 1960s and 1970s, but books such as City of Night have been best sellers, and he has many literary admirers.
Rechy is the author of the following novels and other works:
According to Rechy, "City of Night began as a letter to a friend of mine after I had been to New Orleans. I wrote City of Night because they were my experiences hustling, and it began as a letter. I didn't think of it as a book. But it should begin in El Paso . . . . in Texas". It is a story of a lonely male hustler who desperately seeks to find love on the bright neon streets of New York City, Los Angeles, and New Orleans.

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John Zorn
John Zorn (born September 2, 1953 in New York City) is an American avant-garde composer, arranger, record producer, saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist. Zorn is a prolific artist: he has hundreds of album credits as performer, composer, or producer. He has had experience with a variety of genres including jazz, rock, hardcore punk, classical, extreme metal, klezmer, film, cartoon, popular, and improvised music. Zorn brings these styles to his work, which he refers to with the label avant-garde/experimental.
Zorn has stated: "All the various styles are organically connected to one another. I'm an additive person - the entire storehouse of my knowledge informs everything I do. People are so obsessed with the surface that they can't see the connections, but they are there."
Zorn has led the punk jazz band Naked City and the klezmer-influenced quartet Masada, composed Masada Songbooks (written concert music for classical ensembles), and has produced music for film and documentary.
Zorn established himself within the New York City downtown music movement in the mid 1970s and has since composed and performed with a wide range of musicians working in diverse musical areas. By the early 1990s Zorn was working extensively in Japan, attracted by that culture's openness about borrowing and remixing ingredients from elsewhere, before returning to New York as a permanent base in the mid-1990s. Zorn has undertaken many tours of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, often performing at festivals with varying ensembles to display his diverse output.

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Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745) was an Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for the Whigs, then for the Tories), poet and cleric who became Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin.
He is remembered for works such as Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal, A Journal to Stella, Drapier's Letters, The Battle of the Books, An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, and A Tale of a Tub. Swift is probably the foremost prose satirist in the English language, and is less well known for his poetry. Swift originally published all of his works under pseudonyms—such as Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff, M.B. Drapier—or anonymously. He is also known for being a master of two styles of satire: the Horatian and Juvenalian styles.
Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, Ireland. He was the second child and only son of Jonathan Swift (1640-1667) and his wife Abigail Erick (or Herrick), of Frisby-on-the-Wreake. His father, a native of Goodrich, Herefordshire, accompanied his brothers to Ireland to seek their fortunes in law after their Royalist father's estate was brought to ruin during the English Civil War. Swift's father died at Dublin before he was born, and his mother returned to England. He was left in the care of his influential uncle, Godwin, a close friend and confidante of Sir John Temple, whose son later employed Swift as his secretary.

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Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski; 3 December 1857 Berdichev, Ukraine – 3 August 1924) was a Polish novelist who wrote in English, after settling in England.
Conrad is regarded as one of the great novelists in English, though he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties (and then always with a marked Polish accent). He wrote stories and novels, predominantly with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit by the demands of duty and honour. Conrad was a master prose stylist who brought a distinctly non-English tragic sensibility into English literature. While some of his works have a strain of romanticism, he is viewed as a precursor of modernist literature. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many authors.
Films have been adapted from or inspired by Conrad's Victory, Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, An Outcast of the Islands, The Rover, The Shadow Line, The Duel, Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, and Almayer's Folly.

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Kathy Acker
Kathy Acker (née Karen Lehmann; April 18, 1947 – November 30, 1997) was an American experimental novelist, punk poet, playwright, essayist, postmodernist and sex-positive feminist writer. She was strongly influenced by the Black Mountain School, William S. Burroughs, David Antin, French critical theory, philosophy, and pornography.
The daughter of Donald and Claire (Weill) Lehman, a wealthy Jewish family, Kathy Acker was born in New York City on April 18. There is some question as to her year of birth, however: the Library of Congress lists her birth year as 1948, a few sources have listed 1947, but most obituaries state that she was born in 1944. The pregnancy was unplanned, and Donald Lehman abandoned the family before Kathy was born; Acker’s relationship with her domineering mother even into adulthood was fraught with hostility and anxiety because Acker felt unloved and unwanted. Her mother soon remarried, a union that Acker later characterized as an essentially passionless marriage to an ineffectual man, and Acker was raised in her mother and stepfather’s respectable upper-middle-class Jewish home on New York’s Upper East Side.

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Keith Haring
Keith Haring (May 4, 1958 – February 16, 1990) was an artist and social activist whose work responded to the New York City street culture of the 1980s.
Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Haring grew up in Kutztown with his mother, Joan Haring, and his father, Allen Haring, a cartoonist. He also had three younger sisters, Kay, Karen and Kristen. Keith's parents wanted to name all their children with names that started with K. Haring was interested in art from an early age. From 1976 to 1978 he studied commercial art at The Ivy School of Professional Art, an art school in Pittsburgh. He soon lost interest in commercial art and moved on to study Fine Arts.
At age 19, in 1978, Haring moved to New York City, where he was inspired by graffiti art, and studied at the School of Visual Arts.
Haring achieved his first public attention with chalk drawings in the subways of New York (see public art). These were his first recognized pieces of pop art. The exhibitions were filmed by the photographer Tseng Kwong Chi. Around this time, "The Radiant Baby" became his symbol. His bold lines, vivid colors, and active figures carry strong messages of life and unity. Starting in 1980, he organized exhibitions in Club 57. He participated in the Times Square Exhibition and drew, for the first time, animals and human faces. In 1981 he sketched his first chalk drawings on black paper and painted plastic, metal and found objects.

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Keith Richards
Keith Richards (born 18 December 1943) is an English musician and songwriter, and a founder member of The Rolling Stones. Rolling Stone magazine said Richards has created "rock's greatest single body of riffs", and has named him the 4th greatest guitarist of all time. Fourteen songs written by Richards and songwriting partner Mick Jagger, The Rolling Stones' lead vocalist, are listed among Rolling Stone magazine's "500 Greatest Songs of All Time". Richards' notoriety for illicit drug use stems in part from several drug busts during the late 1960s and 1970s.
Keith Richards is the only child of Bert Richards and Doris Dupree Richards. He was born at Livingston Hospital in Dartford, Kent. His father was a factory worker injured in World War II during the Normandy invasion.
Richards' paternal grandparents were socialists and civic leaders whose family originated from Wales. His maternal grandfather, Augustus Theodore Dupree, who toured Britain with a jazz big band, "Gus Dupree and his Boys", fostered Richards' interest in guitar.

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Ken Kesey
Kenneth Elton "Ken" Kesey ( /ˈkiːziː/; September 17, 1935 – November 10, 2001) was an American author, best known for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), and as a counter-cultural figure who considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s. "I was too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a hippie," Kesey said in a 1999 interview with Robert K. Elder.
Ken Kesey was born in La Junta, Colorado, to dairy farmers Frederick A. Kesey and Geneva Smith. In 1946, the family moved to Springfield, Oregon. Kesey was a champion wrestler in both high school and college in the 174 pound weight division, and he almost qualified to be on the Olympic team until a serious shoulder injury stopped his wrestling career. He graduated from Springfield High School in 1953. An avid reader and filmgoer, the young Kesey took John Wayne, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Zane Grey as his role models (later naming a son Zane) and toyed with magic, ventriloquism, and hypnotism.

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Kiefer Sutherland
Kiefer William Frederick Dempsey George Rufus Sutherland (born 21 December 1966) is a British-Canadian actor, producer and director. He is perhaps best known for his portrayal of Jack Bauer on the Fox series 24 for which he won an Emmy Award, a Golden Globe award, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and two Satellite Awards. He currently stars as Martin Bohm in the Fox drama Touch.
Sutherland was born in London, the son of Donald Sutherland and Shirley Douglas, both of whom are successful Canadian actors. He has Scottish ancestry from both parents, and is the grandson of Canadian politician Tommy Douglas, widely credited for bringing universal health care to Canada.
He received his first given name from Warren Kiefer, the Italian director who gave his father his first movie role.
His family moved to Corona, California and in 1970, his parents divorced. In 1975, Sutherland moved with his mother to Toronto. He attended elementary school at Crescent Town Elementary School, St. Clair Junior High East York, and John G. Althouse Middle School in Toronto. He attended five different high schools including St. Andrew's College, Martingrove Collegiate Institute, Harbord Collegiate Institute, Silverthorn Collegiate Institute, Malvern Collegiate Institute and Annex Village Campus. He also spent a semester at Regina Mundi Catholic College in London (Ontario) and attended weekend acting lessons at Sir Frederick Banting Secondary School.

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Krist Novoselic
Krist Anthony Novoselic II ( /ˌnoʊvəˈsɛlɪtʃ/; Croatian: Novoselić; born May 16, 1965) is an American rock musician, best known for being the bassist and co-founder of the grunge band Nirvana. After Nirvana ended, Novoselic formed Sweet 75 and then Eyes Adrift, releasing one album with each band. From 2006 to 2009 he played in punk band Flipper, also recording an album, and in 2011 contributed bass and accordion to the song "I Should Have Known", from the Foo Fighters' record Wasting Light.
Apart from his musical endeavors, Novoselic has been active politically, including the creation of the political action committee JAMPAC. From November 2007 until September 2010, Novoselic wrote a weekly column on music and politics for Seattle Weekly's website. Since 2008 he has been board chair of the electoral reform organization FairVote.
Novoselic was born to Croatian immigrants Kristo and Marija Novoselić in Compton, California. He lived there for one year before his parents relocated to the Los Angeles Croatian neighborhood of San Pedro, where he remained for most of his childhood. He has two brothers, Robert Alan Novoselic and Dillon Malloy Novoselic, and in 1973, Novoselic's sister Diana was born. The Novoselic family moved to Aberdeen, Washington in 1979, due to rising property prices in California. In 1980, his parents sent him to live with relatives in Zadar, Croatia, then part of SFR Yugoslavia. There, Novoselic attended the gymnasium. Novoselic was already interested in bands like Led Zeppelin, Devo, Black Sabbath, Van Halen, and Aerosmith. He also enjoyed rock bands like Zabranjeno Pusenje, Prljavo Kazaliste and Azra. While in Yugoslavia, he picked up an interest in punk rock, and discovered bands like the Sex Pistols and the Ramones. He has cited Paul McCartney, Geezer Butler, John Entwistle, and Gene Simmons as the fundamental influences of his bass playing.

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Kurt Cobain
Kurt Donald Cobain (February 20, 1967 – April 5, 1994) was an American singer-songwriter, musician and artist, best known as the lead singer and guitarist of the grunge band Nirvana. Cobain formed Nirvana with Krist Novoselic in Aberdeen, Washington in 1985 and established it as part of the Seattle music scene, having its debut album Bleach released on the independent record label Sub Pop in 1989.
After signing with major label DGC Records, the band found breakthrough success with "Smells Like Teen Spirit" from its second album Nevermind (1991). Following the success of Nevermind, Nirvana was labeled "the flagship band" of Generation X, and Cobain hailed as "the spokesman of a generation". Cobain, however, was often uncomfortable and frustrated, believing his message and artistic vision to have been misinterpreted by the public, with his personal issues often subject to media attention. He challenged Nirvana's audience with its final studio album In Utero (1993).
During the last years of his life, Cobain struggled with heroin addiction, illness and depression. He also had difficulty coping with his fame and public image, and the professional and lifelong personal pressures surrounding himself and his wife, musician Courtney Love. On April 8, 1994, Cobain was found dead at his home in Seattle, the victim of what was officially ruled a suicide by a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head. The circumstances of his death at age 27 have become a topic of public fascination and debate. Since their debut, Nirvana, with Cobain as a songwriter, has sold over 25 million albums in the U.S. alone, and over 50 million worldwide.

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Lauren Hutton
Lauren Hutton (born November 17, 1943) is an American model and actress. She is best known for her starring roles in the movies American Gigolo and Lassiter, and also for her fashion modeling career.
Hutton was born Mary Laurence Hutton in Charleston, South Carolina. Known as Mary Hall in high school, she graduated from Chamberlain High School in Tampa, Florida in 1961.^{[citation needed]} She was among the first students to attend the University of South Florida in Tampa in 1960,^{[citation needed]} but she later transferred to Tulane University, where she graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in 1964.^{[citation needed]}
Hutton was a Playboy Bunny at age 20. The statuesque Hutton became a top fashion model, cover girl and commercial spokesperson. Though advised to correct the slight gap in her teeth, she retained this 'imperfection,' which gave her on-camera persona a down-home sensibility that other, "more ethereal models lacked." In her heyday, Hutton was known as "the fresh American face of fashion." In 1974, Hutton signed a million-dollar contract as the face of Revlon cosmetics. At age 40, Hutton was fired by Revlon, but made an unprecedented comeback as a model several years later.^{[citation needed]}

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Laurie Anderson
Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson (born June 5, 1947) is an American experimental performance artist, composer and musician who plays violin and keyboards and sings in a variety of experimental music and art rock styles. Initially trained as a sculptor, Anderson did her first performance-art piece in the late 1960s. Throughout the 1970s, Anderson did a variety of different performance-art activities. She became widely known outside the art world in 1981 when her single "O Superman" reached number two on the UK pop charts. She also starred in and directed the 1986 concert film Home of the Brave.
Anderson is a pioneer in electronic music and has invented several devices that she has used in her recordings and performance art shows. In 1977, she created a tape-bow violin that uses recorded magnetic tape on the bow instead of horsehair and a magnetic tape head in the bridge. In the late 1990s, she developed a talking stick, a six-foot-long baton-like MIDI controller that can access and replicate different sounds.

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Lester Bangs
Leslie Conway "Lester" Bangs (December 13, 1948 – April 30, 1982) was an American music journalist, author, and musician. He wrote for Creem and Rolling Stone magazines and was known for his leading influence in rock music criticism.
Bangs was born in Escondido, California, the son of Norma Belle (née Clifton) and Conway Leslie Bangs, a truck driver. His parents were both from Texas, his father from Enlow and his mother from Pecos County. His mother was a devout Jehovah's Witness; his father died in a fire when Bangs was young. In 1969, Bangs began writing freelance after reading an ad in Rolling Stone soliciting readers' reviews. His first piece was a negative review of the MC5 album, Kick Out The Jams, which he sent to Rolling Stone with a note requesting that if the magazine were to pass on publishing the review, that he receive a reason for their decision; however, no reply was forthcoming as the magazine did indeed publish the review.
Bangs wrote about Janis Joplin's death by drug overdose, "It's not just that this kind of early death has become a fact of life that has become disturbing, but that it's been accepted as a given so quickly". In 1973, Jann Wenner fired Bangs from Rolling Stone, a negative review of Canned Heat being the final event. He moved to Detroit to edit and write for Creem. After leaving Creem, he wrote for The Village Voice, Penthouse, Playboy, New Musical Express, and many other publications.

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Lou Reed
Lewis Allan "Lou" Reed, born March 2, 1942, is an American rock musician, songwriter, and photographer. He is best known as guitarist, vocalist, and principal songwriter of The Velvet Underground, and for his solo career, which has spanned several decades. Though the Velvet Underground were a commercial failure in the late 1960s, the group has gained a considerable cult following in the years since its demise and has gone on to become one of the most widely cited and influential bands of the era. As the Velvet Underground's principal songwriter, Reed wrote about subjects of personal experience that rarely had been examined so openly in rock and roll, including sexuality and drug culture.
After his departure from the group, Reed began a solo career in 1971. He had a hit the following year with "Walk on the Wild Side", although he subsequently lacked the mainstream commercial success its chart status seemed to indicate. Reed's work as a solo artist frustrated critics wishing for a return of the Velvet Underground. In 1975, Reed released a double album of feedback loops, Metal Machine Music, upon which he later commented, "No one is supposed to be able to do a thing like that and survive."

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Lucien Carr
Lucien Carr (March 1, 1925, New York City – January 28, 2005) was a key member of the original New York City circle of the Beat Generation in the 1940s; later he worked for many years as an editor for United Press International.
Carr was born in New York City; his parents, Russell Carr and Marian Gratz Carr, were both offspring of socially prominent St. Louis families. After his parents separated in 1930, young Lucien and his mother moved back to St. Louis; Carr spent the rest of his childhood there.
At the age of 14, Carr met David Kammerer (b. 1911), a man who would have a profound influence on the course of his life. Kammerer was a teacher of English and a physical education instructor at Washington University in St. Louis. Kammerer was a childhood friend of William S. Burroughs, another scion of St. Louis wealth who knew the Carr family. Burroughs and Kammerer had gone to primary school together, and as young men, they traveled together and explored Paris’s night life: Burroughs said Kammerer “was always very funny, the veritable life of the party, and completely without any middle-class morality.” Kammerer met Carr when he was leading a youth group of which Carr was a member, and quickly became infatuated with the teenager.

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Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold (24 December 1822 – 15 April 1888) was a British poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to both Tom Arnold, literary professor, and William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator. Matthew Arnold has been characterized as a sage writer, a type of writer who chastises and instructs the reader on contemporary social issues.
The Reverend John Keble, who would become one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement, stood as godfather to Matthew. "Thomas Arnold admired Keble's 'hymns' in The Christian Year, only reversing himself with exasperation when this old friend became a Romeward-tending 'High Church' reactionary in the 1830s." In 1828, Arnold's father was appointed Headmaster of Rugby School and his young family took up residence, that year, in the Headmaster's house. In 1831, Arnold was tutored by his uncle, the Reverend John Buckland, at Laleham, Middlesex. In 1834, the Arnolds occupied a holiday home, Fox How, in the Lake District. William Wordsworth was a neighbour and close friend. In 1836, Arnold was sent to Winchester College, but in 1837 he returned to Rugby School where he was enrolled in the fifth form. He moved to the sixth form in 1838 and thus came under the direct tutelage of his father. He wrote verse for the manuscript Fox How Magazine produced by Matthew and his brother Tom for the family's enjoyment from 1838 to 1843. During his years as a Rugby student, he won school prizes for English essay writing, and Latin and English poetry. His prize poem, "Alaric at Rome," was printed at Rugby.

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Maurice Girodias
Maurice Girodias (12 April 1919 – 3 July 1990) was the founder of the Olympia Press. At one time he was the owner of his father's Obelisk Press, and spent most of his productive years in Paris.
Girodias was born Maurice Kahane in Paris, France, the son of Manchester-born Jack Kahane and a French heiress, Marcelle (née Girodias). His father was Jewish and his mother was Catholic. Girodias lived a relatively idyllic childhood, until the Depression forced his father to take up a new profession in Paris, namely publishing risqué books in English for the consumption of foreign tourists, who because of censorship could not obtain such materials at home. French censorship laws had a loophole allowing English works to be published without domestic confiscation.
Kahane's venture (Girodias later took his mother's birth name to hide his partially Jewish background from the Nazis) was called the Obelisk Press. It published notorious works by Frank Harris, Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, as well as several pieces of light erotica written by Kahane himself.

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Neal Cassady
Neal Leon Cassady (February 8, 1926 – February 4, 1968) was a major figure of the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the psychedelic movement of the 1960s. He served as the model for the character Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road.
Cassady was born to Maude Jean Scheuer and Neal Marshall Cassady in Salt Lake City, Utah. After his mother died when he was ten, he was raised by his alcoholic father in Denver, Colorado. Cassady spent much of his youth living on the streets of skid row with his father, or spending time in reform school.
As a youth, Cassady was repeatedly involved in petty crime. He was arrested for car theft when he was 14, for shoplifting and car theft when he was 15, and for car theft and fencing when he was 16.
In 1941, the 15-year old Cassady met Justin W. Brierly, a prominent Denver educator. Brierly was well known as a mentor of promising young men, and, impressed by Cassady's intelligence, Brierly took an active role in Cassady's life over the next few years. He helped admit Cassady to East High School where he taught, encouraged and supervised his reading, and found employment for him. Cassady continued his criminal activities, however, and was repeatedly arrested from 1942 to 1944; on at least one of these occasions, he was released by law enforcement into Brierly's safekeeping. In June 1944, Cassady was arrested for receipt of stolen property, and served eleven months of a one-year prison sentence. He and Brierly actively exchanged letters during this period even through Cassady's intermittent incarcerations; these represent Cassady's earliest surviving letters. Brierly, apparently a closeted homosexual, is also believed to have been responsible for Cassady's first homosexual experience.

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Nick Cave
Nicholas Edward "Nick" Cave (born 22 September 1957) is an Australian musician, songwriter, author, screenwriter, composer and occasional film actor.
He is best known for his work as a frontman of the critically acclaimed rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, established in 1983, a group known for its eclectic influences and musical styles. Before that, he had fronted the group The Birthday Party in the early 1980s, a band renowned for its highly gothic, challenging lyrics and violent sound influenced by free jazz, blues, and post-punk. In 2006, he formed the garage rock band Grinderman that released its debut the following year. Cave's music is generally characterised by emotional intensity, a wide variety of influences and lyrical obsessions with religion, death, love and violence.
Upon Cave's induction into the ARIA Hall of Fame, ARIA Awards committee chairman Ed St John said, “Nick Cave has enjoyed—and continues to enjoy—one of the most extraordinary careers in the annals of popular music. He is an Australian artist like Sidney Nolan is an Australian artist—beyond comparison, beyond genre, beyond dispute."

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Norman Mailer
Norman Kingsley Mailer (January 31, 1923 - November 10, 2007) was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.
Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, John McPhee, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, which superimposes the style and devices of literary fiction onto fact-based journalism. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. In 1955, Mailer, together with John Wilcock, Ed Fancher and Dan Wolf, first published The Village Voice, which began as an arts and politics oriented weekly newspaper distributed in Greenwich Village. In 2005, he received the lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation.
In 1992, Mailer received the annual Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award presented by the Tulsa Library Trust.
Norman Kingsley Mailer was born to a well-known Jewish family in Long Branch. His father, Isaac Barnett Mailer, was a South African-born accountant, and his mother, Fanny Schneider, ran a housekeeping and nursing agency. Mailer's sister, Barbara, was born in 1927. His second sister, Norma, was born in 1930. Raised in Brooklyn, New York, he graduated from Boys' High School and entered Harvard University in 1939, where he studied aeronautical engineering. At Harvard, he became interested in writing and published his first story at the age of 18, winning Story magazine's college contest in 1941. As an undergraduate, he was a member of The Signet Society. After graduating in 1943, he was drafted into the U.S. Army. In World War II, he served in the Philippines with the 112th Cavalry. He was not involved in much combat and completed his service as a cook, but the experience provided enough material for The Naked and the Dead.

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Oswald Spengler
Oswald Manuel Arnold Gottfried Spengler (29 May 1880 – 8 May 1936) was a German historian and philosopher whose interests also included mathematics, science, and art. He is best known for his book The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes), published in 1918 and 1922, where he proposed a new theory, according to which the lifespan of civilizations is limited and ultimately they decay. In 1920 Spengler produced Prussiandom and Socialism (Preußentum und Sozialismus), which argued for an organic, nationalist version of socialism and authoritarianism. He wrote extensively throughout World War I and the interwar period, and supported German hegemony in Europe. Some National Socialists (such as Goebbels) held Spengler as an intellectual precursor but he was ostracised after 1933 for his pessimism about Germany's and Europe's future, his refusal to support Nazi ideas of racial superiority, and his critical work The Hour of Decision.
Oswald Spengler was born in 1880 in Blankenburg (then in the Duchy of Brunswick, German Empire) at the foot of the Harz mountains, the eldest of four children, and the only boy. His family was conservative German petite bourgeoisie. His father, originally a mining technician, who came from a long line of mineworkers, was a post office bureaucrat. His childhood home was emotionally reserved, and the young Spengler turned to books and the great cultural personalities for succor. He had imperfect health, and suffered throughout his life from migraine headaches and from an anxiety complex.

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Patti Smith
Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith (born December 30, 1946) is an American singer-songwriter, poet and visual artist, who became a highly influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses.
Called the "Godmother of Punk", her work was a fusion of rock and poetry. Smith's most widely known song is "Because the Night", which was co-written with Bruce Springsteen and reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1978. In 2005, Patti Smith was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture, and in 2007, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. On November 17, 2010, she won the National Book Award for her memoir Just Kids. She is also a recipient of the 2011 Polar Music Prize.

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Paul Bowles
Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 – November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931.
In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the next fifty-two years, the remainder of his life.
Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.

wn.com/Paul_Bowles
Paul Di Filippo
Paul Di Filippo (born October 29, 1954 in Providence, Rhode Island) is an American science fiction writer. He has been published in Postscripts. He is also a regular reviewer for print magazines Asimov's Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Science Fiction Eye, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Interzone, and Nova Express, as well as online at Science Fiction Weekly. He is a member of the Turkey City Writer's Workshop. Along with Michael Bishop, Di Filippo has published a series of novels under the pseudonym Philip Lawson.

wn.com/Paul_Di_Filippo
Peter Ackroyd
Peter Ackroyd CBE (born 5 October 1949, East Acton in west London) is an English biographer, novelist and critic with a particular interest in the history and culture of London. For his novels about English history and culture and his biographies of, among others, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot and Sir Thomas More he won the Somerset Maugham Award and two Whitbread Awards. He was awarded a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2003.
Ackroyd grew up on a council estate and was raised in a "strict" Roman Catholic household. He first knew that he was gay when he was seven. He was educated at St. Benedict's, Ealing and at Clare College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with a double first in English literature. In 1972, he was a Mellon Fellow at Yale University.
The result of his Yale fellowship was Notes for a New Culture, written when Ackroyd was only 22 and eventually published in 1976. The title, an echo of T. S. Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), was an early indication of Ackroyd's penchant for exploring and re-examining the works of other London-based writers.

wn.com/Peter_Ackroyd
Philip Glass
Philip Glass (born January 31, 1937) is an American composer. One of the highest profile composers writing "classical" music today, he is often said to be one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century. His music is also often controversially described as minimalist, along with the work of the other "major minimalists" La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Steve Reich.
He has lately distanced himself from the "minimalist" label, describing himself instead as a composer of "music with repetitive structures." Though his early mature music shares much with what is normally called "minimalist", he has since evolved stylistically. Currently, he describes himself as a "Classicist", pointing out that he is trained in harmony and counterpoint and studied such composers as Franz Schubert, Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with Nadia Boulanger.
Glass is a prolific composer: he has written works for the musical group which he founded, the Philip Glass Ensemble (with which he still performs on keyboards), as well as operas, musical theatre works, ten symphonies, eleven concertos, solo works, chamber music including string quartets and instrumental sonatas, and film scores. Three of his film scores have been nominated for Academy Awards.

wn.com/Philip_Glass
Philip Toynbee
Theodore Philip Toynbee (25 June 1916 – 15 June 1981) was a British writer and communist. He wrote experimental novels, and distinctive verse novels, one of which was an epic called Pantaloon, a work in several volumes, only some of which are published. He also wrote memoirs of the 1930s, and reviews and literary criticism, the latter mainly via his employment with The Observer newspaper.
He was born in Oxford; his father was the historian Arnold J. Toynbee, and his maternal grandfather was Gilbert Murray. He was educated at Rugby School, where he became rebellious, reacting against the public school system. Inspired by the example of Esmond Romilly, later a friend, he ran away, returned shortly and was expelled. He later wrote a memoir of Romilly, and Jasper Ridley (1913–1944), entitled Friends Apart. Through Romilly, Toynbee met Jessica Mitford, who became a close friend after Esmond died in WWII. He was also influenced by bookshop owner and would be encourager of the young radical element David Archer, whom he met through David Gascoyne.

wn.com/Philip_Toynbee
Poppy Z. Brite
Poppy Z. Brite (born Melissa Ann Brite on May 25, 1967 in New Orleans, Louisiana, and now using the name Billy Martin in daily life) is an American author. Brite initially achieved notoriety in the gothic horror genre of literature in the early 1990s after publishing a string of successful novels and short story collections. Brite's recent work has moved into the related genre of dark comedy, of which many are set in the New Orleans restaurant world. Brite's novels are typically standalone books but may feature recurring characters from previous novels and short stories. Much of Brite's work features openly bisexual and gay characters. Brite is a transgender man and prefers to be referred to with male pronouns and terms.
Brite is best known for writing gothic and horror novels and short stories. Brite's trademarks have included using gay men as main characters, graphic sexual descriptions in the works, and an often wry treatment of gruesome events. Some of Brite's better known novels include Lost Souls (1992), Drawing Blood (originally titled Birdland) (1993), and Exquisite Corpse (1996); he has also released short fiction collections: Swamp Foetus (also published as Wormwood, 1993), Are You Loathsome Tonight? (also published as Self-Made Man, 1998), Wrong Things (with Caitlin R. Kiernan, 2001), and The Devil You Know (2003). Brite's "Calcutta: Lord of Nerves" was selected to represent the year 1992 in the story collection The Century's Best Horror Fiction.

wn.com/Poppy_Z._Brite
R. H. Barlow
Robert Hayward Barlow (May 18, 1918 – January 1 or 2, 1951) was an American author, avant-garde poet, anthropologist and historian of early Mexico, and expert in the Nahuatl language.
Barlow spent much of his youth at Fort Benning, Georgia, where his father, Colonel E. D. Barlow, was stationed; around 1932 Col. Barlow received a medical discharge and settled his family in the small town of DeLand, in central Florida. Family difficulties later forced Barlow to move to Washington, D.C., and Kansas.
Barlow had been a friend of writers H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard since he was 13. He collaborated with Lovecraft on six stories, and Lovecraft made several extended visits to the young Barlow at his home in De Land, Florida.
Barlow attempted to bind and distribute Lovecraft's story The Shunned House (1928) but bound only a few copies (Arkham House distributed some bound versions of the original Barlow project as late as the 1970s).
Barlow aided significantly in the preservation of Lovecraft's manuscripts by typing texts in exchange for autograph manuscripts.

wn.com/R._H._Barlow
Robert Anton Wilson
Robert Anton Wilson (born Robert Edward Wilson, January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007), known to friends as "Bob", was an American author and polymath who became at various times a novelist, philosopher, psychologist, essayist, editor, playwright, poet, futurist, civil libertarian and self-described agnostic mystic. Recognized as an episkopos, pope, and saint of Discordianism, Wilson helped publicize the group through his writings, interviews, and strolls.^{[clarification needed]}
Wilson described his work as an "attempt to break down conditioned associations, to look at the world in a new way, with many models recognized as models or maps, and no one model elevated to the truth". His goal being "to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone but agnosticism about everything" (cf. solipsism, acatalepsia, Pyrrhonism).
"Is", "is." "is"—the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don't know what anything "is"; I only know how it seems to me at this moment.

wn.com/Robert_Anton_Wilson
Robert E. Lee
Robert Edward Lee (January 19, 1807 – October 12, 1870) was a career military officer who is best known for having commanded the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia in the American Civil War.
The son of Revolutionary War officer Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee III and a top graduate of the United States Military Academy, Robert E. Lee distinguished himself as an exceptional officer and combat engineer in the United States Army for 32 years. During this time, he served throughout the United States, distinguished himself during the Mexican-American War, served as Superintendent of the United States Military Academy, and married Mary Custis.
When Virginia declared its secession from the Union in April 1861, Lee chose to follow his home state, despite his personal desire for the Union to stay intact and despite the fact that President Abraham Lincoln had offered Lee command of the Union Army. During the Civil War, Lee originally served as a senior military adviser to President Jefferson Davis. He soon emerged as a shrewd tactician and battlefield commander, winning numerous battles against larger Union armies. His abilities as a tactician have been praised by many military historians. His strategic vision was more doubtful, and both of his invasions of the North ended in defeat. Union General Ulysses S. Grant's campaigns bore down on Lee in 1864 and 1865, and despite inflicting heavy casualties, Lee was unable to force back Grant. Lee would ultimately surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. By this time, Lee had been promoted to the commanding officer of all Confederate forces; the remaining armies soon capitulated after Lee's surrender. Lee rejected the starting of a guerrilla campaign against the North and called for reconciliation between the North and South.

wn.com/Robert_E._Lee
Robert Wyatt
Robert Wyatt (born Robert Wyatt-Ellidge, 28 January 1945, Bristol) is an English musician, and founding member of the influential Canterbury scene band Soft Machine, with a long and distinguished solo career. He is married to English painter and songwriter Alfreda Benge.
Wyatt's mother was Honor Wyatt, a journalist with the BBC; his father, George Ellidge, was an industrial psychologist who joined the family only when Wyatt was about six. This extended family also included his half brother, actor Julian Glover, Honor Wyatt's son. Wyatt attended the Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys, Canterbury and as a teenager lived with his parents in Lydden near Dover, where he was taught the drums by visiting American jazz drummer George Neidorf.
In 1962, Wyatt and Neidorf moved to Majorca where they stayed near the poet Robert Graves. The following year, Wyatt returned to England and joined the Daevid Allen Trio with Daevid Allen and Hugh Hopper. Allen subsequently left for France and Wyatt and Hopper formed The Wilde Flowers with Kevin Ayers, Richard Sinclair and Brian Hopper. Wyatt was initially the drummer in the Wilde Flowers, but following the departure of Ayers, he also became lead singer.

wn.com/Robert_Wyatt
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett (13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, who lived in France for most of his adult life and wrote in both English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.
Beckett is widely regarded as among the most influential writers of the 20th century. Strongly influenced by James Joyce, he is considered one of the last modernists. As an inspiration to many later writers, he is also sometimes considered one of the first postmodernists. He is one of the key writers in what Martin Esslin called the "Theatre of the Absurd". His work became increasingly minimalist in his later career.
Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation". He was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984.
The Becketts were members of the Anglican Church of Ireland. The family home, Cooldrinagh in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock, was a large house and garden complete with tennis court built in 1903 by Samuel's father, William. The house and garden, together with the surrounding countryside where he often went walking with his father, the nearby Leopardstown Racecourse, the Foxrock railway station and Harcourt Street station at the city terminus of the line, all feature in his prose and plays. Beckett's father was a quantity surveyor and his mother a nurse.

wn.com/Samuel_Beckett
Soft Machine
Soft Machine were an English rock band from Canterbury, named after the book The Soft Machine by William S. Burroughs. They were one of the central bands in the Canterbury scene, and helped pioneer the progressive rock genre. Though they achieved little commercial success, they are considered by Allmusic to be "one of the more influential bands of their era, and certainly one of the most influential underground ones."
Soft Machine (billed as The Soft Machine up to 1969) were formed in mid-1966 by Robert Wyatt (drums, vocals), Kevin Ayers (bass, guitar, vocals), Daevid Allen (guitar) and Mike Ratledge (organ) plus, for the first few gigs only, American guitarist Larry Nowlin. Allen, Wyatt and future bassist Hugh Hopper had first played together in the Daevid Allen Trio in 1963, occasionally accompanied by Ratledge. Wyatt, Ayers and Hopper had been founding members of the Wilde Flowers, later incarnations of which would include future members of another Canterbury band, Caravan.

wn.com/Soft_Machine
Sophie Dahl
Sophie Dahl (born 15 September 1977), born Sophie Holloway, is an English author and former fashion model. She was born in London, the daughter of actor Julian Holloway and writer Tessa Dahl. Her maternal grandparents were author Roald Dahl and actress Patricia Neal. Her paternal grandparents were actor Stanley Holloway and actress and chorus dancer Violet Lane. She was the inspiration for Sophie, the main character in her maternal grandfather's book The BFG.
Dahl was discovered by Isabella Blow, a Vogue stylist. Blow referred Dahl to Sarah Doukas of the Storm Model Agency in London. Dahl appeared in campaigns for Versace, Alexander McQueen, Patrick Cox, Pringle, Godiva, Banana Republic, and Gap, amongst others. She was featured prominently in many large-circulation magazines, including Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Marie Claire and the British, Italian and American versions of Vogue. Dahl worked with several well-known photographers, including Richard Avedon, David Bailey, Peter Lindbergh, Bruce Weber and Steven Meisel. She appeared in several high-fashion editorials for magazines such as Harpers Bazaar, Elle, Visionaire, and W, and was featured on the covers of British and Italian Vogue. In 2000, Dahl achieved a degree of notoriety when Tom Ford and Steven Meisel cast her in an advertisement for the Yves Saint-Laurent perfume brand Opium. The ad featured a photograph of her posing nude on black satin. It was removed from UK billboards after complaints were made to the Advertising Standards Authority.

wn.com/Sophie_Dahl
Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag (/ˈsɒntɑːɡ/; January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was an American essayist, literary icon, and political activist whose works include On Photography, Against Interpretation, The Way We Live Now, and Regarding the Pain of Others.
Sontag, born Susan Rosenblatt, was born in New York City to Jack Rosenblatt and Mildred Jacobsen, both Jewish. Her father managed a fur trading business in China, where he died of tuberculosis in 1939, when Susan was five years old. Seven years later, her mother married Nathan Sontag. Susan and her sister, Judith, were given their stepfather's surname, although he never adopted them formally. Sontag did not have a religious upbringing. She claimed not to have entered a synagogue until her mid-twenties.

wn.com/Susan_Sontag
Sylvère Lotringer
Sylvère Lotringer (born 1938) is a literary critic and cultural theorist. A younger contemporary of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio and Michel Foucault, he is best known for synthesizing French theory with American literary, cultural and architectural avant-garde movements through his work with Semiotext(e) ; and for his interpretations of French theory in a 21st century context. An influential interpreter of Jean Baudrillard's theories, Lotringer invented the concept "extrapolationist" as a means of describing the hyperbolic world-views espoused by Baudrillard and Paul Virilio. Lotringer is a Professor of Foreign Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.
Sylvère Lotringer was born in Paris, he is the son of Polish-Jewish immigrants who fled Warsaw for France in 1930. His early life was marked by the Nazi occupation of Paris, which — like his contemporaries Georges Perec and Sarah Kofman — he spent as a "hidden child" with documents forged by the French Resistance.

wn.com/Sylvère_Lotringer
Ted Morgan (writer)
Ted Morgan (born March 30, 1932) is a French-American writer, biographer, journalist, and historian. He was born Comte St. Charles Armand Gabriel de Gramont in Geneva. He is the son of Gabriel Antoine Armand, Comte de Gramont (1908–1943), a hero of the French Resistance who became a French diplomat. Gramont is an old French noble family, whose name is connected to the city Gramont, Agramont in Spanish, in the south French province of Lower Navarre.
After his father's death in a training flight, Morgan began to lead two parallel lives. He attended Yale University (where he was a member of Manuscript Society) and worked as a reporter. But he was still a member (albeit a reluctant one) of the French nobility. He was drafted into the French Army where he served for two years from 1955 to 1957 during the Algerian War, initially as a second lieutenant with a Senegalese regiment of Colonial Infantry and then as a propaganda officer. He subsequently wrote in frank detail of his brutalizing experiences while on active service in the bled (Algerian countryside) and of the atrocities committed by both sides during the Battle of Algiers.

wn.com/Ted_Morgan_(writer)
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. (born May 8, 1937) is an American novelist. He is a MacArthur Fellow noted for his dense and complex novels, and both his fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, styles and themes, including (but not limited to) the fields of history, science, and mathematics. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon won the 1974 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon served two years in the United States Navy and earned an English degree from Cornell University. After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he began composing the novels for which he is best known: V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity's Rainbow (1973), and Mason & Dixon (1997). Pynchon is also known for being very private; very few photographs of him have ever been published, and rumors about his location and identity have circulated since the 1960s.

wn.com/Thomas_Pynchon
Thomas Starzl
Thomas E. Starzl (born March 11, 1926) is an American physician, researcher, and is an expert on organ transplants. He performed the first human liver transplants, and has often been referred to as "the father of modern transplantation."
Starzl was born on March 11, 1926 in Le Mars, Iowa, the son of newspaper editor and science fiction writer Roman Frederick Starzl. Originally intending to become a priest in his teenage years, Starzl's plans changed drastically when his mother died from breast cancer. He attended Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in biology. Starzl attended Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago, where in 1950 he received a Master of Science degree in anatomy and in 1952 earned both a Ph.D. in neurophysiology and an M.D. with distinction.
Starzl was a surgeon and researcher in the then nascent field of organ transplantation at the University of Colorado from 1962 until his move to the University of Pittsburgh in 1981, where he has remained since. He made an exceptional mark on the medical community creating new surgical techniques. He reportedly worked up to three days straight on organ transplantation procedures as he was the only one who could perform them.

wn.com/Thomas_Starzl
Timothy Leary
Timothy Francis Leary (October 22, 1920 – May 31, 1996) was an American psychologist and writer, known for his advocacy of psychedelic drugs. During a time when drugs such as LSD and psilocybin were legal, Leary conducted experiments at Harvard University under the Harvard Psilocybin Project, resulting in the Concord Prison Experiment and the Marsh Chapel Experiment. Both studies produced useful data, but Leary and his associate Richard Alpert were fired from the university.
Leary believed LSD showed therapeutic potential for use in psychiatry. He popularized catchphrases that promoted his philosophy, such as "turn on, tune in, drop out", "set and setting", and "think for yourself and question authority". He also wrote and spoke frequently about transhumanist concepts involving space migration, intelligence increase and life extension (SMI²LE), and he developed the eight-circuit model of consciousness in his book Exo-Psychology (1977).
During the 1960s and 1970s, Leary was arrested regularly and was held captive in 29 different prisons throughout the world. President Richard Nixon once described Leary as "the most dangerous man in America".

wn.com/Timothy_Leary
Tom Waits
Thomas Alan "Tom" Waits (born December 7, 1949) is an American singer-songwriter, composer, and actor. Waits has a distinctive voice, described by critic Daniel Durchholz as sounding "like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car." With this trademark growl, his incorporation of pre-rock music styles such as blues, jazz, and vaudeville, and experimental tendencies verging on industrial music, Waits has built up a distinctive musical persona. He has worked as a composer for movies and musical plays and has acted in supporting roles in films including Paradise Alley and Bram Stoker's Dracula; he also starred in the 1986 film Down by Law. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his soundtrack work on One from the Heart.
Lyrically, Waits' songs frequently present atmospheric portrayals of grotesque, often seedy characters and places—although he has also shown a penchant for more conventional ballads. He has a cult following and has influenced subsequent songwriters despite having little radio or music video support. His songs are best-known through cover versions by more commercial artists: "Jersey Girl", performed by Bruce Springsteen, "Ol' '55", performed by the Eagles, and "Downtown Train", performed by Rod Stewart. Although Waits' albums have met with mixed commercial success in his native United States, they have occasionally achieved gold album sales status in other countries. He has been nominated for a number of major music awards and has won Grammy Awards for two albums, Bone Machine and Mule Variations. In 2011, Waits was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

wn.com/Tom_Waits
Tristan Tzara
Tristan Tzara (French pronunciation: [tʁistɑ̃ dzaˈʁa]; Romanian pronunciation: [trisˈtan ˈt͡sara]; born Samuel or Samy Rosenstock, also known as S. Samyro; April 16 [O.S. April 4] 1896 – December 25, 1963) was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement. Under the influence of Adrian Maniu, the adolescent Tzara became interested in Symbolism and co-founded the magazine Simbolul with Ion Vinea (with whom he also wrote experimental poetry) and painter Marcel Janco. During World War I, after briefly collaborating on Vinea's Chemarea, he joined Janco in Switzerland. There, Tzara's shows at the Cabaret Voltaire and Zunfthaus zur Waag, as well as his poetry and art manifestos, became a main feature of early Dadaism. His work represented Dada's nihilistic side, in contrast with the more moderate approach favored by Hugo Ball.

wn.com/Tristan_Tzara
Wilhelm Reich
Wilhelm Reich (March 24, 1897 – November 3, 1957) was an Austrian-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, known as one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry. He was the author of several notable books, including The Mass Psychology of Fascism and Character Analysis, both published in 1933.
Reich worked with Sigmund Freud in the 1920s and was a respected analyst for much of his life, focusing on character structure rather than on individual neurotic symptoms. He tried to reconcile Marxism and psychoanalysis, arguing that neurosis is rooted in the physical, sexual, economic, and social conditions of the patient, and promoted adolescent sexuality, the availability of contraceptives, abortion, and divorce, and the importance for women of economic independence. His work influenced a generation of intellectuals, including Saul Bellow, William S. Burroughs, Paul Edwards, Norman Mailer, and A. S. Neill, and shaped innovations such as Fritz Perls's Gestalt therapy, Alexander Lowen's bioenergetic analysis, and Arthur Janov's primal therapy.

wn.com/Wilhelm_Reich
Will Self
William Woodard "Will" Self (born 26 September 1961) is an English journalist, novelist and short story writer. His fictional style is known for being satirical, grotesque, and fantastical. He is a prolific commentator on contemporary British life, with regular appearances on Newsnight and Question Time. He has also appeared on the comedy panel show Have I Got News for You, though he has since declared that he will not make any further appearances on the show.
Self was raised, in his words, in "an effortlessly dull" North London suburb (East Finchley, although he sometimes lays claim to Hampstead Garden Suburb) by "intellectually snobbish parents". His father was Peter Self, Professor of Public Administration at the London School of Economics and Professor of Urban Research at the Australian National University, and his mother a Jewish American immigrant who worked as a publisher's assistant. Through his father, Self is a descendant of minister Nathaniel Woodard. Despite the intellectual encouragement given by his parents, Self was an emotionally confused and self-destructive child, harming himself with cigarette ends and knives before getting into drugs in his teenage years. His parents separated when he was 9, and divorced when he was 18.

wn.com/Will_Self
William Gibson
William Ford Gibson (born March 17, 1948) is an American-Canadian speculative fiction novelist who has been called the "noir prophet" of the cyberpunk subgenre. Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" in his short story "Burning Chrome" (1982) and later popularized the concept in his debut novel, Neuromancer (1984). In envisaging cyberspace, Gibson created an iconography for the information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s. He is also credited with predicting the rise of reality television and with establishing the conceptual foundations for the rapid growth of virtual environments such as video games and the World Wide Web.
Having changed residence frequently with his family as a child, Gibson became a shy, ungainly teenager who often read science fiction. After spending his adolescence at a private boarding school in Arizona, Gibson evaded the draft during the Vietnam War by emigrating to Canada in 1968, where he became immersed in the counterculture and after settling in Vancouver eventually became a full-time writer. He retains dual citizenship. Gibson's early works are bleak, noir near-future stories about the effect of cybernetics and computer networks on humans—a "combination of lowlife and high tech". The short stories were published in popular science fiction magazines. The themes, settings and characters developed in these stories culminated in his first novel, Neuromancer, which garnered critical and commercial success, virtually initiating the cyberpunk literary genre.

wn.com/William_Gibson
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II ( /ˈbʌroʊz/; also known by his pen name William Lee; (1914-02-05)February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997(1997-08-02)) was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century." His influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote 18 novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays. Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearances in films.
He was born to a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri, grandson of the inventor and founder of the Burroughs Corporation, William Seward Burroughs I, and nephew of public relations manager Ivy Lee. Burroughs began writing essays and journals in early adolescence. He left home in 1932 to attend Harvard University, studying English, and anthropology as a postgraduate, and later attending medical school in Vienna. After being turned down by the Office of Strategic Services and U.S. Navy in 1942 to serve in World War II, he dropped out and became afflicted with the drug addiction that affected him for the rest of his life, while working a variety of jobs. In 1943 while living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the mutually influential foundation of what became the countercultural movement of the Beat Generation.

wn.com/William_S._Burroughs

Kathy Acker interviews William S. Burroughs - part 1/3

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published: 14 Jul 2011

author: MagivangaMagazine23

William S. Burroughs: Reading - Junky (Abridged Version)

Junky: Read By William S. Burroughs Art By: www.youtube.com Many thanks to rusterpus for s...

published: 02 Apr 2011

author: WSBurroughsArchive

William S. Burroughs on Dreams (EKF)

Excerpts from a lecture by William S. Burroughs on public discourse, recorded at the Jack ...

published: 11 Jan 2009

author: tentakler

William S. Burroughs - A Thanksgiving Prayer

published: 06 Oct 2009

author: williamburroughsVEVO

Words of Advice For Young People

William S. Burroughs tells it like it is....

published: 03 Dec 2006

author: BaronSCameron

William S. Burroughs - Commissioner of Sewers

William S. Burroughs - Commissioner of Sewers Commissioner of Sewers is an in-depth portra...

published: 21 Dec 2010

author: DickHeaddr

William Burroughs shooting William Shakespeare

William Burroughs shooting session. Video by Andrea Di Castro. Lawrence, Kansas,1995....

published: 08 Jun 2009

author: andreadi1953

William S Burroughs scene in Drugstore Cowboy

My favorite scene of this well done 1988 film set in Portland, OR. William S. Burroughs po...

published: 08 Sep 2008

author: S. Adam Bernstein

William Burroughs: Advice for Young People

William Burroughs: Advice for Young People...

published: 09 Nov 2009

author: KingHotPants

William S. Burroughs - Naked Lunch - Hospital

Artist: William S. Burroughs Album - Naked Lunch (Audio Recording 1995) Track Title: Hospi...

published: 16 Oct 2009

author: hagelt18

William S. Burroughs - Junkie

William S. Burroughs Junkie...

published: 05 Mar 2008

author: bleedgrey29

William S. Burroughs - Is Everybody In?

Writer William S. Burroughs reads poetry by Jim Morrison over music provided by The Doors ...

published: 02 Aug 2008

author: Alberkowski

Words of Advice: William S. Burroughs on the Road

A portrait of the American Beat Generation writer William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) based o...

published: 16 Mar 2012

author: Docutainment

William S. Burroughs / Spare Ass Annie： Annie And Other Tales

...

published: 17 Dec 2009

author: fxxkfear

Cut-Ups

I have always liked the voice of William S. Burroughs and I’ve always wanted to do somethi...

published: 02 Dec 2008

author: Matti Niinimäki

William Burroughs Junky

William Burroughs Junky...

published: 08 Feb 2009

author: Dean Noble

William Burroughs Posca Portrait.

published: 06 Nov 2011

author: Jeice2

Animation: William Burroughs - Junky

A stop motion animation created using a scanner....

published: 03 Mar 2012

author: Dorothy Cronshaw

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photo: AP / Lefteris Pitarakis

File - Kenyan Paulo Nzili, right, with Wambugu Wa Nyingi, left, stand outside the Royal Courts of Justice, in central London, Thursday, April 7, 2011, as four elderly Kenyans who claim that they were severely beaten and tortured by British officers during an anti-colonial rebellion in the 1950s are taking their case to court in London.

Archive sheds light on dark British past

Al Jazeera

30 Nov 2012

- For historians, it represents a treasure trove of boundless rewards and an opportunity to revisit some of the most enduring myths about Britain's colonial past ... After the foreign office finally admitted the existence of the secret files, William Hague, the foreign secretary, appointed Tony Badger, an eminent Cambridge historian, to oversee the transfer of the documents into the public domain ... It's far too easy to bury bad news ... Share....(size: 22.4Kb)

photo: USAF / Senior Airman Patrice Clarke

File - U.S. Army Capt. Peggy Hu, Zabul Provincial Reconstruction Team civil affairs, speaks with a local child during a routine patrol in the local area Nov. 21, 2012, in Afghanistan.

'Taliban attackers' target US Afghanistan base

BBC News

02 Dec 2012

There have been "multiple explosions" near an airfield at a US base in eastern Afghanistan, Nato has said. Afghan intelligence officials told the BBC seven suicide attackers targeted the base in Jalalabad, and witnesses said that gunfire was heard ... Counter claims ... There were no Nato casualties in the attack, officials said ... ....(size: 1.7Kb)

photo: UN / Shareef Sarhan

File- A view of the outer perimeter of Palestine Stadium, severely damaged by Israeli air strikes in Gaza City earlier this week, 19 November, 2012.

The End of Jewish Power

WorldNews.com

02 Dec 2012

Article by WN.com Guest Writer Gilad Atzmon. Israel suffered a humiliating defeat at The UN recently. The nations of the world stood up and said NO to the Jewish state - NO to Israeli occupation, NO to Israeli human rights abuse, NO to Jewish racism. In effect, they stood up and confessed to serious Zio-fatigue ... This is a very good news indeed. But interestingly, this united opposition to Israel is not in response to Israeli strength ... ....(size: 2.6Kb)

photo: AP / Patrick Semansky

Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, center, steps out of a security vehicle as he is escorted into a courthouse in Fort Meade, Md., Wednesday, Nov. 28, 2012, for a pretrial hearing.

Pfc. Manning: From Bloody Eagle to Bloody Cage

WorldNews.com

02 Dec 2012

Article by WN.com Correspondent Dallas Darling. Much like the United States, the Vikings were a paradoxical and duplicitous civilization. Not only were they highly skilled shipbuilders and tremendous explorers, not to mention their expertise in the fishing, farming and trading industries, but they helped establish and contribute to the nation-states of France, England, Ireland, Germany, Russia, and Iceland ... This came to mind when Pfc....(size: 5.5Kb)

photo: US NARA

Dr. Martin Luther King giving his "I Have a Dream" speech during the March on Washington in Washington, D.C., on 28 August 1963.

The Other 'Black' Friday

WorldNews.com

30 Nov 2012

Article by WN.com Correspondent Dallas Darling. Staring at the quote on the small granite monument which read. "They said to one another, behold here comes the dreamer...Let us slay him...And we shall see what will become of his dreams," I tried to understand that fateful moment when a shot shattered heaven and earth ... Martin Luther King, Jr. Straining my ears, I tried to hear Rev. Abernathy cry out, "Oh my God, Martin's been shot!" ... Dr....(size: 6.5Kb)

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Deron Williams' confidence suffering as Brooklyn Nets point guard tries to regain form after injury

New York Daily News

03 Dec 2012

Deron Williams made the visitors’ locker room in Miami look like a physical therapy center Saturday night ... Williams is painfully aware that if the Nets are going to take the next step in their transition from jokes from Jersey to contenders from Brooklyn, he has to do more ... We could be a great team,” Williams said ... Since Williams hurt the wrist, the numbers have been even worse ... “It’s not my wrist, it’s my confidence,” Williams said....(size: 2.9Kb)

Deron Williams isn't happy with his play

Newsday

03 Dec 2012

Slumped on the chair in front of his locker, with packs of ice attached to his banged-up right wrist and elbow, Deron Williams was dejected ... A tender wrist certainly doesn't help, but to Williams, that's an excuse ... Williams at times has been hesitant to let it loose, passing up open jumpers because he's not seeing the ball sail through the hoop enough ... Jerry thinks Williams might have to be a decoy, perhaps even more than in the past....(size: 10.5Kb)

Council gets boost for local projects (Rockhampton Regional Council)

noodls

03 Dec 2012

Rockhampton Region Acting Mayor Tony Williams said the Queensland Government had recently approved $146,000 for the projects. "This support will help us with providing a new amenities building at Rigarlsford Park, a new amenities building at Zilzie and will also go towards the work already underway on a new playground at Mt Morgan," Cr Williams said....(size: 2.9Kb)

Vanderbilt gives coach James Franklin new contract

Sporting News

03 Dec 2012

Vanderbilt does not discuss contract details, but athletic director David Williams called it a "long-term" contract that will keep Franklin here "a number of years." ... "We hope very soon we'll be playing in Atlanta for the SEC championship," Williams said ... But Williams said they are determined to keep Franklin as their coach because Vanderbilt officials know they needed someone to help them know what to do to compete in football....(size: 5.4Kb)

Matured Trent Williams, leader of Redskins offensive line, prepares for Giants pass rush

The Washington Post

03 Dec 2012

Trent Williams sat in front of his locker at Redskins Park, reflecting on his journey from promising NFL prospect to seasoned left tackle. The 6-foot-5, 325-pound Williams is in his third season out of Oklahoma ... Drawing the assignment of facing the league’s top pass-rushers on a weekly basis and a career-threatening life lesson have forced Williams to grow up quickly....(size: 6.8Kb)

NeverBefore Comes Ashore

Scoop

03 Dec 2012

Monday, 3 December 2012, 12.41 pm. Press Release. NeverBefore. Comes Ashore ... NeverBefore ... The founder and spokesperson Skye Williams says this criticism played some part in their decision to make the shift to dry land ... Williams explains, “The Fringe is known for its breakthrough works of innovative art ... “This is the end-game” declares Williams, “and we want to facilitate a discussion on how we should play it ... -- ... ....(size: 2.5Kb)

Jovan Belcher's murder of girlfriend, suicide made easy by a gun, because a gun always makes it easier

New York Daily News

03 Dec 2012

the gun ... Jovan Belcher, shooter ... I called the Kansas City Police Department Sunday morning and talked to a homicide detective named Williams, asked him how you go about getting a gun in Kansas City, Mo ... Detective Williams of the KCPD was asked then what kind of gun Belcher used ... Williams paused again and said, “We are looking into that.” ... “My guess,” Williams said, “is that (Belcher) did not have a concealed-carry permit.” ... Jovan Belcher ... ....(size: 4.4Kb)

Dalton's 6-yard TD lifts Bengals over Bolts

The News Tribune

03 Dec 2012

SAN DIEGO — All Andy Dalton and the Cincinnati Bengals had to do was bide their time against the San Diego Chargers ... One of them was returned 31 yards for a touchdown by Demorrio Williams ... Two plays into the next Bengals drive, Williams intercepted Dalton and returned it 31 yards down the left sideline to give the Chargers a 10-7 lead. It was Williams' second interception returned for a touchdown this season ... A.J ... ....(size: 2.9Kb)

Duke women too much for California

Yahoo Daily News

03 Dec 2012

DURHAM, N.C. (AP) -- Joanne P ... 4 Duke beat No ... Elizabeth Williams had 12 points and Alexis Jones had 11 points as Duke won for the 65th time in its last 67 home games ... The Blue Devils' run began when Williams, their second leading scorer, went to the bench with her second foul with 13.47 left in the first half ... I thought they showed that when Elizabeth Williams got in foul trouble and they were just as dangerous.''. ....(size: 2.9Kb)

McDaniels scores 16 to lead Clemson

Sporting News

03 Dec 2012

COLUMBIA, S.C. — K.J ... That's when McDaniels and Devin Booker got going for Clemson . ... Booker ended with 13 points and eight rebounds ... Brenton Williams led South Carolina with 16 points, three days after taking a scary fall in a loss at St ... Williams was taken from the court on a stretcher ... But the Gamecocks closed the half with a 16-5 run as Williams had six points and Mindaugas Kacinas five to cut the margin to 28-27 at the half ... ....(size: 3.7Kb)

Depleted Bills pick up win over Jaguars

TSN Canada

03 Dec 2012

The Bills also got a boost from a Mario Williams-led defence that forced two turnovers, had four sacks, stopped the Jaguars on all three fourth-down attempts and allowed just 236 yards. "I'm not worried about a month ago," defensive tackle Kyle Williams said, when reminded of how many games the Bills had squandered....(size: 5.5Kb)

Wilson hits Rice for OT touchdown, Seahawks edge Bears

TSN Canada

03 Dec 2012

Committee makes fact-finding visit to Fort William (Scottish Parliament)

noodls

03 Dec 2012

The Rural Affairs, Climate Change and Environment Committee is visiting Fort William on 16 and 17 November as part of its scrutiny of the Aquaculture and Fisheries (Scotland) Bill ... While in Fort William, the Committee will meet with staff from seafood company Marine Harvest and visit its operations in the area. ......(size: 2.0Kb)

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For other people named William Burroughs, see William Burroughs (disambiguation).

William S. Burroughs

Born	William Seward Burroughs II (1914-02-05)February 5, 1914 St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.
Died	August 2, 1997(1997-08-02) (aged 83) Lawrence, Kansas, U.S.
Pen name	William Lee
Occupation	Author
Genres	Postmodern, satire
Literary movement	Beat
Notable work(s)	Naked Lunch (1959)
Spouse(s)	Ilse von Klapper (1937–1946) Joan Vollmer (1946–1951)
Children	William S. Burroughs, Jr.
Relative(s)	William Seward Burroughs I, grandfather Ivy Lee, maternal uncle
Influences Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Arthur Rimbaud, Jack Black, Jean Genet, Wilhelm Reich, Jean Paul Sartre, Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, Alfred Korzybski, Oswald Spengler, Brion Gysin, Dashiell Hammett, Denton Welch, Joseph Conrad, Tristan Tzara, Jonathan Swift
Influenced Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, J. G. Ballard, Norman Mailer, Kathy Acker, Paul Di Filippo, Thomas Pynchon, Mark Leyner, Dennis Cooper, Will Self, Gus Van Sant, William Gibson, Clive Barker, Alan Moore, Irvine Welsh, David Cronenberg, Lydia Lunch, Patti Smith, Robert Wyatt, David Bowie, Brian Eno, Grant Morrison, Genesis P-Orridge, John Zorn, Kurt Cobain, Ken Kesey, Ian Curtis, Lou Reed, Tom Waits, Hunter S. Thompson, Poppy Z. Brite, Keith Haring

Signature

William Seward Burroughs II ( /ˈbʌroʊz/; also known by his pen name William Lee; (1914-02-05)February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997(1997-08-02)) was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century."^[1] His influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote 18 novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays. Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearances in films.

He was born to a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri, grandson of the inventor and founder of the Burroughs Corporation, William Seward Burroughs I, and nephew of public relations manager Ivy Lee. Burroughs began writing essays and journals in early adolescence. He left home in 1932 to attend Harvard University, studying English, and anthropology as a postgraduate, and later attending medical school in Vienna. After being turned down by the Office of Strategic Services and U.S. Navy in 1942 to serve in World War II, he dropped out and became afflicted with the drug addiction that affected him for the rest of his life, while working a variety of jobs. In 1943 while living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the mutually influential foundation of what became the countercultural movement of the Beat Generation.

Much of Burroughs's work is semi-autobiographical, primarily drawn from his experiences as a heroin addict, as he lived throughout Mexico City, London, Paris, Berlin, the South American Amazon and Tangier in Morocco. Finding success with his confessional first novel, Junkie (1953), Burroughs is perhaps best known for his third novel Naked Lunch (1959), a work fraught with controversy that underwent a court case under the U.S. sodomy laws. With Brion Gysin, he also popularized the literary cut-up technique in works such as The Nova Trilogy (1961–64). In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1984 was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France.^[2] Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the "greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift,"^[3] a reputation he owes to his "lifelong subversion"^[1] of the moral, political and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism. J. G. Ballard considered Burroughs to be "the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War," while Norman Mailer declared him "the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius."^[3]

Burroughs had one child, William Seward Burroughs III (1947-1981), with his second wife Joan Vollmer. Vollmer died in 1951 in Mexico City. Burroughs was convicted of manslaughter in Vollmer's death, an event that deeply permeated all of his writings. Burroughs died at his home in Lawrence, Kansas after suffering a heart attack in 1997.

Early life and education [link]

Burroughs was born in 1914, the younger of two sons born to Mortimer Perry Burroughs (June 16, 1885 – January 5, 1965) and Laura Hammon Lee (August 5, 1888 – October 20, 1970). The Burroughses were a prominent family of English ancestry in St. Louis, Missouri. His grandfather, William Seward Burroughs I, founded the Burroughs Adding Machine company, which evolved into the Burroughs Corporation. Burroughs' mother, Laura Hammon Lee, was the daughter of a minister whose family claimed to be related to Robert E. Lee. His maternal uncle, Ivy Lee, was an advertising pioneer later employed as a publicist for the Rockefellers. His father ran an antique and gift shop, Cobblestone Gardens; first in St. Louis, then in Palm Beach, Florida.

As a boy, Burroughs lived on Pershing Ave. in St. Louis's Central West End. He attended John Burroughs School in St. Louis where his first published essay, "Personal Magnetism," was printed in the John Burroughs Review in 1929.^[4] He then attended the Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico, which was stressful for him. The school was a boarding school for the wealthy, "where the spindly sons of the rich could be transformed into manly specimens."^[5] Burroughs kept journals documenting an erotic attachment to another boy. According to his own account, he destroyed these later, ashamed of their content.^[6] Due to the repressive context where he grew up, and from which he fled, that is, a "family where displays of affection were considered embarrassing,"^[7] he kept his sexual orientation concealed well into adulthood when he became a well known homosexual writer after the publication of Naked Lunch in 1959. Some^[who?] say that he was expelled from Los Alamos after taking chloral hydrate in Santa Fe with a fellow student. Yet, according to his own account, he left voluntarily: "During the Easter vacation of my second year I persuaded my family to let me stay in St. Louis."^[6]

Harvard University [link]

He finished high school at Taylor School in Clayton, Missouri and, in 1932, left home to pursue an arts degree at Harvard University, where he was affiliated with Adams House. During the summers, he worked as a cub reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, covering the police docket. He disliked the work, and refused to cover some events, like the death of a drowned child. He lost his virginity in an East St. Louis brothel that summer with a female prostitute he regularly patronized.^[8] While at Harvard, Burroughs made trips to New York City and was introduced to the gay subculture there. He visited lesbian dives, piano bars, and the Harlem and Greenwich Village homosexual underground with Richard Stern, a wealthy friend from Kansas City. They would drive from Boston to New York in a reckless fashion. Once, Stern scared Burroughs so much, he asked to be let out of the vehicle.^[9]

Burroughs graduated from Harvard in 1936. According to Ted Morgan's Literary Outlaw,

His parents, upon his graduation, had decided to give him a monthly allowance of $200 out of their earnings from Cobblestone Gardens, a tidy sum in those days. It was enough to keep him going, and indeed it guaranteed his survival for the next twenty-five years, arriving with welcome regularity. The allowance was a ticket to freedom; it allowed him to live where he wanted to and to forgo employment.^[10]

Burroughs's parents sold the rights to his grandfather's invention and had no share in the Burroughs Corporation. Shortly before the 1929 stock market crash they sold their stock for $200,000.^[11]

Europe [link]

After leaving Harvard, Burroughs's formal education ended, except for brief flirtations as a graduate student of anthropology at Harvard and as a medical student in Vienna, Austria. He traveled to Europe, which proved a window into Austrian and Hungarian Weimar-era homosexuality; he picked up boys in steam baths in Vienna, and moved in a circle of exiles, homosexuals, and runaways. There, he met Ilse Klapper, a Jewish woman fleeing the country's Nazi government. The two were never romantically involved, but Burroughs married her, in Croatia, against the wishes of his parents, to allow her to gain a visa to the United States. She made her way to New York City, and eventually divorced Burroughs, although they remained friends for many years.^[12] After returning to the U.S., he held a string of uninteresting jobs. In 1939, his emotional health became a concern for his parents, especially after he deliberately severed the last joint of his left little finger, right at the knuckle, to impress a man with whom he was infatuated.^[13] This event made its way into his early fiction as the short story "The Finger."

Beginning of the Beats [link]

Burroughs enlisted in the U.S. Army early in 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor brought the U.S. into World War II. But when he was classified as a 1-A Infantry, not an officer, he became dejected. His mother recognized her son's depression and got Burroughs a civilian disability discharge — a release from duty based on the premise he should have not been allowed to enlist due to previous mental instability. After being evaluated by a family friend, who was also a neurologist at a psychiatric treatment center, Burroughs waited five months in limbo at Jefferson Barracks outside St. Louis before being discharged. During that time he met a Chicago soldier also awaiting release, and once Burroughs was free, he moved to Chicago and held a variety of jobs, including one as an exterminator. When two of his friends from St. Louis, Lucien Carr, a University of Chicago student, and David Kammerer, Carr's homosexual admirer, left for New York City, Burroughs followed.

Joan Vollmer [link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

In 1944, Burroughs began living with Joan Vollmer Adams in an apartment they shared with Jack Kerouac and Edie Parker, Kerouac's first wife. Vollmer Adams was married to a GI with whom she had a young daughter, Julie Adams. Burroughs and Kerouac got into trouble with the law for failing to report a murder involving Lucien Carr, who had killed David Kammerer in a confrontation over Kammerer's incessant and unwanted advances. This incident inspired Burroughs and Kerouac to collaborate on a novel titled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, completed in 1945. The two fledgling authors were unable to get it published, but the manuscript was eventually published in November 2008 by Grove Press and Penguin Books.

During this time, Burroughs began using morphine and quickly became addicted. He eventually sold heroin in Greenwich Village to support his habit.

Vollmer also became an addict, but her drug of choice was Benzedrine, an amphetamine sold over the counter at that time. Because of her addiction and social circle, her husband immediately divorced her after returning from the war. Vollmer would become Burroughs’ common-law wife. Burroughs was soon arrested for forging a narcotics prescription and was sentenced to return to his parents' care in St. Louis. Vollmer's addiction led to a temporary psychosis, which resulted in her admission to a hospital, and the custody of her child was endangered. Yet after Burroughs completed his "house arrest" in St. Louis, he returned to New York, released Vollmer from the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital, and moved with her and her daughter to Texas. Vollmer soon became pregnant with Burroughs's child. Their son, William S. Burroughs, Jr., was born in 1947. The family moved briefly to New Orleans in 1948.

Burroughs was arrested after police searched his home and found letters between him and Allen Ginsberg referring to a possible delivery of marijuana.^{[citation needed]}

Mexico and South America [link]

Burroughs fled to Mexico to escape possible detention in Louisiana's Angola state prison. Vollmer and their children followed him. Burroughs planned to stay in Mexico for at least five years, the length of his charge's statute of limitations. Burroughs also attended classes at the Mexico City College in 1950 studying Spanish as well as "Mexican picture writing" (codices) and the Mayan language with R. H. Barlow.

In 1951, Burroughs shot and killed Vollmer in a drunken game of "William Tell" at a party above the American-owned Bounty Bar in Mexico City. He spent 13 days in jail before his brother came to Mexico City and bribed Mexican lawyers and officials to release Burroughs on bail while he awaited trial for the killing, which was ruled culpable homicide.^[14] Vollmer’s daughter, Julie Adams, went to live with her grandmother, and William S. Burroughs, Jr. went to St. Louis to live with his grandparents. Burroughs reported every Monday morning to the jail in Mexico City while his prominent Mexican attorney worked to resolve the case. According to James Grauerholz, two witnesses had agreed to testify that the gun had gone off accidentally while he was checking to see if it was loaded, and the ballistics experts were bribed to support this story.^[15] Nevertheless, the trial was continuously delayed and Burroughs began to write what would eventually become the short novel Queer while awaiting his trial. However, when his attorney fled Mexico after his own legal problems involving a car accident and altercation with the son of a government official, Burroughs decided, according to Ted Morgan, to "skip" and return to the United States. He was convicted in absentia of homicide and sentenced to two years, which was suspended.^[16] Although Burroughs was writing before the shooting of Joan Vollmer, this event marked him and, biographers argue, his work for the rest of his life.^[17]

After leaving Mexico, Burroughs drifted through South America for several months, looking for a drug called yagé, which promised the user telepathy. A book, composed of letters between Burroughs and Ginsberg, The Yage Letters, was published in 1963 by City Lights Books.

Beginning of literary career [link]

Burroughs later said that shooting Vollmer was a pivotal event in his life, and one which provoked his writing:

"I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a life long struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out."^[18]

Yet he had begun to write in 1945. Burroughs and Kerouac collaborated on And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a mystery novel loosely based on the Carr/Kammerer situation that was left unpublished. Years later, in the documentary What Happened to Kerouac?, Burroughs described it as "not a very distinguished work." An excerpt of this work, in which Burroughs and Kerouac wrote alternating chapters, was finally published in Word Virus,^[19] a compendium of William Burroughs's writing that was published by his biographer after his death in 1997.

Before Vollmer died, Burroughs had largely completed his first two novels in Mexico, although Queer was not published until 1985. Junkie was written at the urging of Allen Ginsberg, who was instrumental in getting the work published, even as a cheap mass market paperback.^{[citation needed]} Ace Books published the novel in 1953 as part of an Ace Double under the pen name William Lee, retitling it Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict. (it was later republished as Junkie or Junky).^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Naked Lunch

Further information: Naked Lunch

During 1953, Burroughs was at a loose end. Due to legal problems, he was unable to live in the cities towards which he was most inclined. He spent time with his parents in Palm Beach, Florida, and New York City with Allen Ginsberg. When Ginsberg refused his romantic advances,^[20] Burroughs went to Rome to meet Alan Ansen on a vacation financed from his parents' continuing support. When he found Rome and Ansen’s company dreary, inspired by Paul Bowles' fiction, he decided to head for Tangier, Morocco.^[21] In a home owned by a known procurer of homosexual prostitutes for visiting American and English men, he rented a room and began to write a large body of text that he personally referred to as Interzone.^[22] Burroughs lived in Tangier for several months, before returning to the United States where he suffered several personal indignities—Ginsberg was in California and refused to see him, A. A. Wyn, the publisher of Junkie, was not forthcoming with his royalties and his parents were threatening to cut off his allowance.^{[citation needed]}

All signs pointed him back to Tangier, a place where his parents would have to continue the support and one where drugs were freely available. He left in November 1954 and spent the next four years there working on the fiction that would later become Naked Lunch, as well as attempting to write commercial articles about Tangier. He sent these writings to Ginsberg, his literary agent for Junkie, but none were published until 1989 when Interzone, a collection of short stories, was published. Under the strong influence of a marijuana confection known as majoun and a German-made opioid called Eukodol, Burroughs settled in to write. Eventually, Ginsberg and Kerouac, who had traveled to Tangier in 1957, helped Burroughs type, edit, and arrange these episodes into Naked Lunch.^[23]

Whereas Junkie and Queer were conventional in style, Naked Lunch was his first venture into a non-linear style. After the publication of Naked Lunch, a book whose creation was to a certain extent the result of a series of contingencies, Burroughs was exposed to Brion Gysin's cut-up technique at the Beat Hotel in Paris in September 1959. He began slicing up phrases and words to create new sentences.^[24] At the Beat Hotel Burroughs discovered "a port of entry" into Gysin's canvases: "I don't think I had ever seen painting until I saw the painting of Brion Gysin."^[25] The two would cultivate a long-term friendship that revolved around a mutual interest in artworks and cut-up techniques. Scenes were slid together with little care for narrative. Perhaps thinking of his crazed physician, Dr Benway, he described Naked Lunch as a book that could be cut into at any point. Although not considered science fiction, the book does seem to forecast—with eerie prescience — such later phenomena as AIDS, liposuction, autoerotic fatalities, and the crack pandemic.^[26]

David Woodard and Burroughs standing in front of a dreamachine invented by Brion Gysin; Burroughs collaborated with Gysin in popularizing the literary cut-up technique, with which he wrote The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express.

Excerpts from Naked Lunch were first published in the United States in 1958. The novel was initially rejected by City Lights Books, the publisher of Ginsberg's Howl, and Olympia Press publisher Maurice Girodias, who had published English language novels in France that were controversial for their subjective views of sex and anti-social characters. But Allen Ginsberg worked to get excerpts published in Black Mountain Review and Chicago Review in 1958. Irving Rosenthal, student editor of Chicago Review, a quarterly journal partially subsidized by the university, promised to publish more excerpts from Naked Lunch, but he was fired from his position in 1958 after Chicago Daily News columnist Jack Mabley called the first excerpt obscene. Rosenthal went on to publish more in his newly created literary journal Big Table No. 1; however, these copies elicited such contempt, the editors were accused of sending obscene material through the United States Mail by the United States Postmaster General, who ruled that copies could not be mailed to subscribers. This controversy made Naked Lunch interesting to Girodias again, and he published the novel in 1959.^{[citation needed]}

After the novel was published, it slowly became notorious across Europe and the United States, garnering interest from not just members of the counterculture of the 1960s, but literary critics such as Mary McCarthy. Once published in the United States, Naked Lunch was prosecuted as obscene by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, followed by other states. In 1966, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court declared the work "not obscene" on the basis of criteria developed largely to defend the book. The case against Burroughs's novel still stands as the last obscenity trial against a work of literature—that is, a work consisting of words only, and not including illustrations or photographs — prosecuted in the United States.

The manuscripts that produced Naked Lunch also produced the later works The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1963). These novels feature extensive use of the cut-up technique, which influenced all of Burroughs' subsequent fiction to a degree. During his friendship and artistic collaborations with Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville the technique was combined with images, Gysin's paintings, and sound, via Somerville's tape recorders. Burroughs was so dedicated to the cut-up method that he often defended his use of the technique before editors and publishers, most notably Dick Seaver at Grove Press in the 1960s^[27] and Holt, Rinehart & Winston in the 1980s. The cut-up method, because of its random or mechanical basis for text generation, combined with the possibilities of mixing in text written by other writers, deemphasizes the traditional role of the writer as creator or originator of a string of words, while simultaneously exalting the importance of the writer's sensibility as an editor. In this sense the cut-up method may be considered as analogous to the collage method in the visual arts.

Paris and the 'Beat Hotel'[link]

Burroughs moved into a rundown hotel in the Latin Quarter of Paris in 1959 when Naked Lunch was still looking for a publisher. Tangier with its easy access to drugs, small groups of homosexuals, growing political unrest and odd collection of criminals became increasingly unhealthy for Burroughs.^[28] He went to Paris to meet Ginsberg and talk with Olympia Press. In so doing, he left a brewing legal problem, which eventually transferred itself to Paris. Paul Lund, a former British career criminal and cigarette smuggler whom Burroughs met in Tangier, was arrested on suspicion of importing narcotics into France. Lund gave up Burroughs and some evidence implicated Burroughs in the possible importation of narcotics into France . Once again, the man faced criminal charges, this time in Paris for conspiracy to import opiates, when the Moroccan authorities forwarded their investigation to French officials. Yet it was under this impending threat of criminal sanction that Maurice Girodias published Naked Lunch, and it was helpful in getting Burroughs a suspended sentence, as a literary career, according to Ted Morgan, is a respected profession in France.

The 'Beat Hotel' was a typical European-style rooming house hotel, with common toilets on every floor, and a small place for personal cooking in the room. Life there was documented by the photographer Harold Chapman, who lived in the attic room. This shabby, inexpensive hotel was populated by Gregory Corso, Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky for several months after Naked Lunch first appeared. The actual process of publication was partly a function of its 'cut-up' presentation to the printer. Girodias had given Burroughs only ten days to prepare the manuscript for print galleys, and Burroughs sent over the manuscript in pieces, preparing the parts in no particular order. When it was published in this authentically random manner, Burroughs liked it better than the initial plan. International rights to the work were sold soon after, and Burroughs used the $3,000 advance from Grove Press to buy drugs.^[29] Naked Lunch was featured in a 1959 Life magazine cover story, partly as an article that highlighted the growing Beat literary movement.

During this time Burroughs found outlet for material otherwise rendered unpublishable in Jeff Nuttall's My Own Mag^{[citation needed]}

The London years [link]

Burroughs left Paris for London in 1966 to take the cure again with Dr. Dent, a well-known English medical doctor who spearheaded a reputedly painless heroin withdrawal treatment using the drug apomorphine.^[30] Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg would take this same cure in 1971, with Dr. Dent's nurse, Smitty.^[31] Dent's apomorphine cure was also used to treat alcoholism, although it was held by several people who undertook it to be no more than straightforward aversion therapy. Burroughs however was convinced. Following his first cure, he wrote a detailed appreciation of apomorphine and other cures, which he submitted to The British Journal of Addiction (Vol. 53, 1956) under the title "Letter From A Master Addict To Dangerous Drugs"; this letter is appended to many editions of Naked Lunch.

Though he ultimately relapsed, Burroughs ended up working out of London for six years, traveling back to the United States on several occasions, including one time escorting his son to Lexington Narcotics Farm and Prison after the younger Burroughs had been convicted of prescription fraud in Florida. In the "Afterward" to the compilation of his son's two previously published novels Speed and Kentucky Ham, Burroughs writes that he thought he had a "small habit" and left London quickly without any narcotics because he suspected the U.S. customs would search him very thoroughly on arrival. He claims he went through the most excruciating two months of opiate withdrawal while seeing his son through his trial and sentencing, traveling with Billy to Lexington, Kentucky from Miami to ensure his son entered the hospital he once spent time in as a volunteer admission.^[32] Earlier Burroughs revisited St. Louis, Missouri, taking a large advance from Playboy to write an article about his trip back to St. Louis that was eventually published in The Paris Review, after Burroughs refused to alter the style for Playboy's publishers. In 1968 Burroughs joined Jean Genet, John Sack, and Terry Southern in covering the 1968 Democratic National Convention for Esquire magazine. Southern and Burroughs, who had first become acquainted in London, would remain lifelong friends and collaborators. In 1972, Burroughs and Southern unsuccessfully attempted to adapt Naked Lunch for the screen in conjunction with American game show producer Chuck Barris.^[33]

Burroughs supported himself and his addiction by publishing pieces in small literary presses. His avant garde reputation grew internationally as the hippie counterculture discovered his earlier works. He developed a close friendship with Anthony Balch and lived with a young hustler named John Brady who continuously brought home young women despite Burroughs' protestations. In the midst of this personal turmoil, Burroughs managed to complete two works: a novel written in screen play format, The Last Words of Dutch Schultz (1969); and the traditional prose-format novel The Wild Boys (1971).

Burroughs was a fan of Harold S. Schroeppel ^[34] and passionately studied the manuscripts that were made available from the Institute for Advanced Perception. The teachings were known as the Lessons in Advanced Perception. Copies of these manuscripts, dated February 1960, along with four pages of notes exist in the William S. Burroughs archives at Ohio State University.^[35]

In the 1960s Burroughs joined and left the Church of Scientology. In talking about the experience, he claimed that the techniques and philosophy of Scientology helped him and that he felt that further study into Scientology would produce great results. He was skeptical of the organization itself, and felt that it fostered an environment that did not accept critical discussion.^[36] His subsequent critical writings about the church and his review of Inside Scientology by Robert Kaufman led to a battle of letters between Burroughs and Scientology supporters in the pages of Rolling Stone magazine.

Return to U.S.[link]

In 1974, concerned about his friend's well-being, Allen Ginsberg gained for Burroughs a contract to teach creative writing at the City College of New York. Burroughs successfully withdrew from heroin use and moved to New York. He eventually found an apartment, affectionately dubbed "The Bunker," on the Lower East Side of Manhattan at 222 Bowery. The dwelling was a partially converted YMCA gym, complete with lockers and communal showers. The building fell within New York City rent control policies that made it extremely cheap; it was only about four hundred dollars a month until 1981 when the rent control rules changed, doubling the rent overnight.^[37] Burroughs added "teacher" to the list of jobs he did not like, as he lasted only a semester as a professor; he found the students uninteresting and without much creative talent. Although he needed income desperately, he turned down a teaching position at the University at Buffalo for $15,000 a semester. "The teaching gig was a lesson in never again. You were giving out all this energy and nothing was coming back."^[38] His savior was the newly arrived, twenty-one-year-old book seller and Beat Generation devotee James Grauerholz, who worked for Burroughs part-time as a secretary as well as in a book store. It was Grauerholz who floated the idea of reading tours, something similar to rock and roll touring, or stand-up comedian dates in clubs across the country. Grauerholz had managed several rock bands in Kansas and took the lead in booking Burroughs reading tours that would help support him throughout the next two decades. It raised his public profile, which eventually aided in obtaining new publishing contracts. Through Grauerholz, Burroughs became a monthly columnist for the noted popular culture magazine Crawdaddy, for which he interviewed Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page in 1975. Burroughs decided to relocate back to the United States permanently in 1976. He then began to associate with New York cultural players such as Andy Warhol, John Giorno, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and Susan Sontag, frequently entertaining them at the Bunker. Throughout early 1977, Burroughs collaborated with Southern and Dennis Hopper on a screen adaptation of Junky. Financed by a reclusive acquaintance of Burroughs, the project lost traction after financial problems and creative disagreements between Hopper and Burroughs.

Organized by Columbia professor Sylvère Lotringer, Giorno, and Grauerholz, the Nova Convention was a multimedia retrospective of Burroughs's work held from November 30 to December 2, 1978 at various locations throughout New York. The event included readings from Southern, Ginsberg, Smith, and Frank Zappa (who filled in at the last minute for Keith Richards, then entangled in a legal problem) in addition to panel discussions with Timothy Leary & Robert Anton Wilson and concerts featuring The B-52's, Suicide, Philip Glass, and Debbie Harry & Chris Stein.

In 1976, Billy Burroughs was eating dinner with his father and Allen Ginsberg in Boulder, Colorado, at Ginsberg’s Buddhist poetry school (Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics) at Chogyam Trungpa's Naropa University when he began to vomit blood. Burroughs senior had not seen his son for over a year and was alarmed at his appearance when Billy arrived at Ginsberg’s apartment. Although Billy had successfully published two short novels in the 1970s, and was deemed by literary critics like Ann Charters as a bona fide "second generation beat writer",^[39] his brief marriage to a teenage waitress had disintegrated. Under his constant drinking, there were long periods where Billy was out of contact with any of his family or friends. The diagnosis was liver cirrhosis so complete that the only treatment was a rarely performed liver transplant operation. Fortunately, the University of Colorado Medical Center was one of two places in the nation that performed transplants under the pioneering work of Dr. Thomas Starzl. Billy underwent the procedure and beat the thirty-percent survival odds. His father spent many months in 1976 and 1977 in Colorado, helping Billy through many additional surgeries and complications. Ted Morgan’s biography asserts that their relationship was not spontaneous and lacked real warmth or intimacy. Allen Ginsberg was supportive to both Burroughs and his son throughout the long period of recovery.^[40]

In London, he had begun to write what would become the first novel of a trilogy. Between 1981 and 1987 he published Cities of the Red Night (1981), The Place of Dead Roads (1983) and The Western Lands (1987). Grauerholz helped edit Cities when it was first rejected by Burroughs' long-time editor Dick Seaver at Holt Rinehart, after it was deemed too disjointed. The novel was written as a straight narrative and then chopped up into a more random pattern, leaving the reader to sort through the characters and events. This technique was definitely different from the author's earlier cut-up methods, which were organically accidental from the start. Nevertheless, the novel was reassembled and published, still without a straight linear form, but with fewer breaks in the story. The back-and-forth sway of the read replicated the theme of the trilogy; time-travel adventures where Burroughs's narrators rewrite episodes in history and thus reform mankind.^[41] Reviews were mixed for Cities. Novelist and critic Anthony Burgess panned the work in Saturday Review, saying Burroughs was boring readers with repetitive episodes of pederast fantasy and sexual strangulation that lacked any comprehensible world view or theology; other reviewers, like J. G. Ballard, argued that Burroughs was shaping a new literary "mythography".^[41]

In 1981, Billy Burroughs died in Florida. He had cut off contact with his father several years before, even publishing an article in Esquire magazine claiming the author had poisoned his life and revealing that he had been molested by one of his father's friends as a fourteen-year-old while visiting his father in Tangier, something that he had previously kept to himself. The liver transplant had not cured his urge to drink, and Billy suffered from serious health complications years after the operation. He had stopped taking his transplant rejection drugs and was found near the side of a Florida highway by a stranger. He died shortly afterwards. Burroughs was in New York when he heard from Allen Ginsberg of the death.

Burroughs, by 1979, was once again addicted to heroin. The cheap heroin that was easily purchased outside his door on the Lower East Side "made its way" into his veins, coupled with "gifts" from the overzealous if well-intentioned admirers who frequently visited the Bunker. Although Burroughs would have episodes of being free from heroin, from this point until his death he was regularly addicted to the drug. He died in 1997 on a methadone maintenance program. In an introduction to Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs, James Grauerholz (who managed Burroughs's reading tours in the 1980s and 1990s) mentions that part of his job was to deal with the “underworld” in each city to secure the author’s needed drugs.^[42]

Later years in Kansas [link]

William S. Burroughs and James Grauerholz in the alley behind the Jazzhaus in Lawrence, Kansas (1996).

Burroughs moved to Lawrence, Kansas, in 1981 and lived the remainder of his life there, at 1927 Learnard Avenue. He once told a Wichita Eagle reporter that he was content to live in Kansas, saying, “The thing I like about Kansas is that it’s not nearly as violent, and it’s a helluva lot cheaper. And I can get out in the country and fish and shoot and whatnot.”^[43] In 1984 he signed a seven-book deal with Viking Press after he signed with literary agent Andrew Wylie. This deal included the publication rights to the 1953 unpublished novel Queer. With this money he purchased a small bungalow for $29,000.^[44] He was finally inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983 after several attempts by Allen Ginsberg to get him accepted. He attended the induction ceremony in May 1983. Lawrence Ferlinghetti remarked the induction of Burroughs into the Academy proved Herbert Marcuse's point that capitalistic society had a great ability to incorporate its one-time outsiders.^[45]

Burroughs became a counterculture figure and inspired 1970’s proto punk rock band Doctors of Madness and in the 1980s collaborated with performers ranging from Bill Laswell's Material and Laurie Anderson to Throbbing Gristle, Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy and Ministry, and in Gus Van Sant's 1989 film Drugstore Cowboy, playing a character based on a short story he published in Exterminator!, "The "Priest" They Called Him". In 1990, he released the spoken word album Dead City Radio, with musical back-up from producers Hal Willner and Nelson Lyon, and alternative rock band Sonic Youth. A collaboration with musicians Nick Cave and Tom Waits resulted in a collection of short prose, Smack My Crack, later released as a spoken word album in 1987. He also collaborated with Tom Waits and director Robert Wilson to create The Black Rider, a play which opened at the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg in 1990, to critical acclaim, and was later performed all over Europe and the U.S. In 1991, with Burroughs's sanction, director David Cronenberg took on the seemingly impossible task of adapting Naked Lunch into a full-length feature film. The film opened to critical acclaim.

In June 1991 Burroughs underwent triple bypass surgery.^[46]

He became a member of a chaos magic organization, the Illuminates of Thanateros, in 1993.^[47]

During his later years in Kansas, Burroughs also developed a painting technique whereby he created abstract compositions by placing spray paint cans some distance in front of blank canvasses, and then shooting at the paint cans with a shotgun. These splattered canvasses were shown in a Chicago gallery in the late 1980s and a New York City gallery in the early 1990s. During this same period Burroughs spent more of his time making art for its own sake including a series of file-folders featuring "automatic calligraphy" inspired by Brion Gysin, which were later dubbed "life files." He originally used the folders to mix pigments before observing that they could be viewed as art in themselves.^[48]

Burroughs's final filmed performance was in the music video for "Last Night on Earth" by Irish rock band U2, filmed in Kansas City, Missouri, directed by Richie Smyth and also featuring Sophie Dahl.^[49]

Death [link]

Burroughs died in Lawrence, at 6:50 p.m. on August 2, 1997 from complications of a heart attack he had suffered the previous day.^[11] He was interred in the family plot in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri,^[50] with a marker bearing his full name and the epitaph "American Writer." The grave lies to the right of the white granite obelisk of William Seward Burroughs I (1857–1898).

After his death [link]

Since 1997, several posthumous collections of Burroughs's work have been published. A few months after his death, a collection of writings spanning his entire career, Word Virus, was published (according to the book's introduction, Burroughs himself approved its contents prior to his death).^[19] Aside from numerous previously released pieces, Word Virus also included one of the few surviving fragments of And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, an unpublished novel by Burroughs and Kerouac. A collection of journal entries written during the final months of Burroughs's life was published as the book Last Words in 2000. Publication of a memoir by Burroughs entitled Evil River by Viking Press has been delayed several times; after initially being announced for a 2005 release, Web retailers such as Amazon.com indicated a 2007 release, complete with an ISBN number (ISBN 0670813516), but no such release has, to date, occurred.^[51] In December 2007, Ohio State University Press released Everything Lost: The Latin American Journals of William S. Burroughs. Edited by Oliver Harris, the book contains transcriptions of journal entries made by Burroughs during the time of composing Queer and The Yage Letters.^[52] In addition, special editions of The Yage Letters, Naked Lunch and Junkie/Junky have been published in recent years, all containing additional material and essays on the works.

The complete Kerouac/Burroughs manuscript And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks was published for the first time in November 2008.^[53]

In September 2010, Telos Publishing, a UK publisher, is scheduled to release the novel Rules of Duel, a previously unpublished late-60s collaboration between Burroughs and Graham Masterton.^[54]

Literary style and periods [link]

Burroughs's major works can be divided into four different periods. The dates refer to the time of writing, not publication, which in some cases was not until decades later:

Early work (early 1950s): Junkie, Queer and The Yage Letters are relatively straightforward linear narratives, written in and about Burroughs's time in Mexico City and South America.
The cut-up period (mid 1950s to mid 1960s): Naked Lunch is a fragmentary collection of "routines" from The Word Hoard – manuscripts written in Tangier, Paris, London, as well as of some other texts written in South America such as "The Composite City", blending into the cut-up and fold-in fiction also heavily drawn from The Word Hoard: The Soft Machine, Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded, also referred to as "The Nova Trilogy" or "the Nova Epic", self-described by Burroughs as an attempt to create "a mythology for the space age". Interzone also derives from this period.
Experiment and subversion (mid 1960s to mid 1970s): This period saw Burroughs continue experimental writing with increased political content and branching into multimedia such as film and sound recording. The only major novel written in this period was The Wild Boys, but he also wrote dozens of published articles, short stories, scrap books and other works, several in collaboration with Brion Gysin. The major anthologies representing work from this period are The Burroughs File, The Adding Machine and Exterminator!.
The Red Night trilogy (mid 1970s to mid 1980s): The books Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands came from Burroughs in a final, mature stage, creating a complete mythology.

Burroughs also produced numerous essays and a large body of autobiographical material, including a book with a detailed account of his own dreams (My Education: A Book of Dreams).

Reaction to critics and view on criticism [link]

Several literary critics treated Burroughs's work harshly. For example Anatole Broyard and Philip Toynbee wrote devastating reviews of some of his most important books. In a short essay entitled "A Review of the Reviewers", Burroughs answers his critics in this way:

Critics constantly complain that writers are lacking in standards, yet they themselves seem to have no standards other than personal prejudice for literary criticism. (...) such standards do exist. Matthew Arnold set up three criteria for criticism: 1. What is the writer trying to do? 2. How well does he succeed in doing it? (...) 3. Does the work exhibit "high seriousness"? That is, does it touch on basic issues of good and evil, life and death and the human condition. I would also apply a fourth criterion (...) Write about what you know. More writers fail because they try to write about things they don't know than for any other reason.

—William S. Burroughs, "A Review of the Reviewers"^[55]

Burroughs clearly indicates here that he prefers to be evaluated against such criteria over being reviewed based on the reviewer's personal reactions to a certain book. Always a contradictory figure, Burroughs nevertheless criticized Anatole Broyard for reading authorial intentionality into his works where there is none, which sets him at odds both with New Criticism and the old school as represented by Mathew Arnold.

Legacy [link]

William S. Burroughs
Video, Color Laserprint by Christiaan Tonnis, 2006

Burroughs is often called one of the greatest and most influential writers of the 20th century, most notably by Norman Mailer whose quote on Burroughs, "The only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius," appears on many Burroughs publications. Others consider his concepts and attitude more influential than his prose. Prominent admirers of Burroughs's work have included British critic and biographer Peter Ackroyd, the rock critic Lester Bangs and the authors J. G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Jean Genet, William Gibson, Alan Moore, and Ken Kesey. Burroughs had a profound influence on the German writer Carl Weissner, who in addition to being his German translator was a novelist in his own right and frequently wrote cut-up texts in a manner reminiscent of Burroughs.^[56]

Burroughs continues to be named as an influence by contemporary writers of fiction. Both the New Wave and, especially, the cyberpunk schools of science fiction are indebted to him. Admirers from the late 1970s—early 1980s milieu of this subgenre include William Gibson and John Shirley, to name only two. First published in 1982, the British slipstream fiction magazine Interzone (which later evolved into a more traditional science fiction magazine) paid tribute to him with its choice of name. He is also cited as a major influence by musicians Roger Waters, Patti Smith, Genesis P-Orridge, Ian Curtis, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Tom Waits and Kurt Cobain.^[57]

Drugs, homosexuality and death, common among Burroughs's themes, have been taken up by Dennis Cooper, of whom Burroughs said, "Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer."^{[cite this quote]} Cooper, in return, wrote, in his essay 'King Junk', "along with Jean Genet, John Rechy, and Ginsberg, [Burroughs] helped make homosexuality seem cool and highbrow, providing gay liberation with a delicious edge." Splatterpunk writer Poppy Z. Brite has frequently referenced this aspect of Burroughs's work. Burroughs's writing continues to be referenced years after his death; for example, a November 2004 episode of the TV series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation included an evil character named Dr. Benway (named for an amoral physician who appears in a number of Burroughs's works.) This is an echo of the hospital scene in the movie Repo Man, made during Burroughs's lifetime, in which both Dr. Benway and Mr. Lee (a Burroughs pen name) are paged.

Burroughs was cited by Robert Anton Wilson as the first person to notice the "23 Enigma":

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.

—Robert Anton Wilson, Fortean Times^[58]

Appearances in media [link]

In music [link]

Burroughs appears on the cover of The Beatles' eighth studio album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Burroughs participated on numerous album releases by Giorno Poetry Systems, including The Nova Convention (featuring Frank Zappa, John Cage, and Philip Glass) and You're the Guy I Want to Share My Money With (with John Giorno and Laurie Anderson). He is featured in a spoken word piece entitled "Sharkey's Night" on Laurie Anderson's album Mister Heartbreak. In addition, Burroughs provided vocal samples for the soundtrack of Anderson's 1986 concert film, Home of the Brave, and made a cameo appearance in it. He also recites the lyrics of R.E.M.'s "Star Me Kitten" for a special version of the song on the Songs in the Key of X: Music from and Inspired by the X-Files soundtrack.

In 1990, Island Records released Dead City Radio, a collection of readings set to a broad range of musical compositions. It was produced by Hal Willner and Nelson Lyon, with musical accompaniment from John Cale, Donald Fagen, Lenny Pickett, Chris Stein, Sonic Youth, and others. The remastered edition of Sonic Youth's album Goo includes a longer version of "Dr. Benway's House," which had appeared, in shorter form, on Dead City Radio.

In 1992 he recorded "Quick Fix" with Ministry, which appeared on their single for "Just One Fix." The single featured cover art by Burroughs and a remix of the song dubbed the "W.S.B. mix." Burroughs also made an appearance in the video for "Just One Fix." The same year he also recorded the EP The "Priest" They Called Him; Burroughs reads the short story of the same name, while Kurt Cobain creates layers of guitar feedback and distortion. Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic is featured on the cover as the titular "Priest." In 1992 Burroughs worked with The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy on Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales, with the duo providing musical background and accompaniment to Burroughs's spoken readings from several of his books.

Burroughs appears near the end of U2's music video "Last Night on Earth", pushing a shopping cart with a large spotlight positioned inside it. The video ends with a close up of his eyes.

In 2000, Spring Heel Jack released the album Oddities, on which appears the band's remix of Material's Road to the Western Lands, featuring Burroughs, which had originally appeared on the remix album Seven Souls.

Band names [link]

Numerous bands have found their names in Burroughs's work. The most widely known of these is Steely Dan, a group named after a dildo in Naked Lunch.^[59] Also from Naked Lunch came the names The Mugwumps and The Insect Trust. The novel Nova Express inspired the names of Grant Hart's post-Hüsker Dü band Nova Mob, as well as Australian 1960s R&B band Nova Express.^[60] British band Soft Machine took its moniker from the Burroughs novel of the same name, as did protopunk band Dead Fingers Talk, from Hull, England; their only album was titled Storm the Reality Studios, after a quote from Nova Express. Alt-country band Clem Snide is named for a Burroughs character. Thin White Rope took their name from Burroughs's euphemism for ejaculation.^[61]

The American extreme metal band Success Will Write Apocalypse Across the Sky took their name from the 1989 text "Apocalypse",^[62] in which Burroughs describes "art and creative expression taking a literal and physical form."^[63]

In film and television [link]

Burroughs played Opium Jones in the 1966 Conrad Rooks cult film Chappaqua, which also featured cameo roles by Allen Ginsberg, Moondog, and others. In 1968, an abbreviated—77 minutes as opposed to the original's 104 minutes—version of Benjamin Christensen's 1922 film Häxan was released, subtitled Witchcraft Through The Ages. This version, produced by Anthony Balch, featured an eclectic jazz score by Daniel Humair and narration by Burroughs.^[64] He also appeared alongside Brion Gysin in a number of short films in the 1960s directed by Balch.^[65] Jack Sargeant's book Naked Lens: Beat Cinema details Burroughs film work at length, covering his collaborations with Balch and Burroughs' theories of film.

Burroughs narrated part of the 1980 documentary Shamans of the Blind Country by anthropologist and filmmaker Michael Oppitz.^[66] He gave a reading on Saturday Night Live on November 7, 1981, in an episode hosted by Lauren Hutton.

Burroughs subsequently made cameo appearances in a number of other films and videos, such as David Blair's Wax: or the Discovery of Television among the Bees, in which he plays a beekeeper, in an elliptic story about the first Gulf War, and Decoder by Klaus Maeck. He played an aging junkie priest in Gus Van Sant's 1989 film Drugstore Cowboy. He also appears briefly at the beginning of Van Sant's Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (based on the Tom Robbins novel), in which he is seen crossing a city street; as the noise of the city rises around him he pauses in the middle of the intersection and speaks the single word "ominous". Van Sant's short film "Thanksgiving Prayer" features Burroughs reading the poem "Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986," from Tornado Alley, intercut with a collage of black and white images.

Burroughs was portrayed by Kiefer Sutherland in the 2000 film Beat, written and directed by Gary Walkow. Loosely biographical, the plot involves a car trip to Mexico City with Vollmer, Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Lucien Carr, and includes a scene of Vollmer's shooting.

A documentary titled Burroughs, directed by Howard Brookner, was released in 1984. It included footage of Burroughs and many of his friends and colleagues.

Near the end of his life, recordings of Burroughs reading his short stories "A Junky's Christmas" and "Ah Pook is Here" were used on the soundtracks of two highly acclaimed animated films.^[67]

Filmmakers Lars Movin and Steen Moller Rasmussen used footage of Burroughs taken during a 1983 tour of Scandinavia in the documentary Words of Advice: William S. Burroughs on the Road. A 2010 documentary, William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, was made for Independent Lens on PBS.

As a fictional character [link]

Burroughs was fictionalized in Jack Kerouac's autobiographical novel On the Road as "Old Bull Lee." He also makes an appearance in J. G. Ballard's semi-autobiographical 1991 novel The Kindness of Women. In the 2004 novel Move Under Ground, Burroughs, Kerouac, and Neal Cassady team up to defeat Cthulhu.

Burroughs appears in the first part of The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson during the 1968 Democratic Convention riots and is described as a person devoid of anger, passion, indignation, hope, or any other recognizable human emotion. He is presented as a polar opposite of Allen Ginsberg, as Ginsberg believed in everything and Burroughs believed in nothing. Wilson would recount in his Cosmic Trigger II: Down to Earth having interviewed both Burroughs and Ginsberg for Playboy the day the riots began as well as his experiences with Shea during the riots, providing some detail on the creation of the fictional sequence.

Bibliography [link]

Main article: William S. Burroughs bibliography

Notes [link]

^ ^a ^b 2003 Penguin Modern Classics edition of Junky.
^ Biography, The Guardian
^ ^a ^b Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, Harper Perennial Modern Classics (2005). It includes an introduction by J. G. Ballard and an appendix of biography and reference to further reading: "About the author", "About the book" and "Read on".
^ William S Burroughs Popsubculture.com Biography.
^ Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw. p. 44.
^ ^a ^b Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader. James Grauerholz, Ira Silverberg, Ann Douglas, eds., Grove Press, 2000, p. 21
^ Morgan, Ted, Literary Outlaw, p. 26
^ Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw. p. 62.
^ Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw. p. 611
^ Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw. p. 65
^ ^a ^b Severo, Richard (August 3, 1997). "William S. Burroughs Dies at 83; Member of the Beat Generation Wrote 'Naked Lunch'". New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DEED6123DF930A3575BC0A961958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all. Retrieved 2007-10-22.
^ Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw. pp. 65–8
^ Grauerholz, James. Introduction p. xv, in William Burroughs. Interzone. New York: Viking Press, 1987.
^ Grauerholz, James. "The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs: What Really Happened?". American Studies Department, University of Kansas. lawrence.com. http://www.lawrence.com/news/2003/dec/09/the_death/. Retrieved 2008-07-28.
^ Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw. p. 202.
^ Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw. p. 214.
^ Morgan, Ted, Literary Outlaw, pp. 197–198
^ Queer, Penguin, 1985 p.xxiii
^ ^a ^b James Grauerholz. Word Virus, New York: Grove, 1998
^ Bill Morgan, I Celebrate Myself, 2006, New York Viking Press, p.159
^ Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw. pp. 232–34.
^ James Grauerholz writes, in Interzone, the body of text that Burroughs was working on was called Interzone, see Burroughs, William S. Interzone. "Introduction", pp. ix–xiii. New York: Viking Press, 1987.
^ Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw. pp. 238–42.
^ Miles, Barry "The Inventive Mind of Brion Gysin" in José Férez Kuri (ed) Brion Gysin: Tuning in to the Multimedia Age, London: Thames and Hudson, 2003, p.124-125.
^ Burroughs, William S., Ports of Entry – Here is Space-Time Painting, p.32.
^ Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw. p. 355.
^ Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw. p. 425.
^ Grauerholz, James. Introduction p. xviii, in William Burroughs. Interzone. New York: Viking Press, 1987.
^ Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw. p.316-326.
^ Dent, John Yerbury. Anxiety and Its Treatment. J. Murray, London 1941.
^ Stratton, Richard. "Keith Richards Interview 1978". High Times Reader. Thunder's Mouth, Nation Books: New York, 2004.
^ Burroughs, William, S. "Afterward". Speed/Kentucky Ham: Two Novels. Overlook Press: New York, 1984.
^ Lee Hill A Grand Guy: The Art and Life of Terry Southern.
^ Harold S. Schroeppel – Obituary
^ WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS PAPERS,The Ohio State University, University Libraries, Rare Books and Manuscripts, SPEC.CMS.40, Box #48, Item # 482
^ Burroughs on Scientology, Los Angeles Free Press, Mar 6, 1970.
^ Bockris, Victor. With William Burroughs: A Report From the Bunker. St. Martin's Griffin, New York: 1996
^ Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw. p. 477.
^ Charters, Ann. "Introduction". Speed/Kentucky Ham: Two Novels. Overlook Press: New York, 1984.
^ Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw. pp. 495–536.
^ ^a ^b Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw. p. 565.
^ Burroughs, William. "Introduction". Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs. New York: Grove Press, 2000.
^ "Godfather of Beat Generation was content to live last days in Kansas", Wichita Eagle and Kansas.com, April 5, 2010.
^ Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw. p.596.
^ Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw. p. 577
^ "The Life of William S. Burroughs: A timeline," Phil Cauthon, lawrence.com. July 30, 2007. Retrieved: May 24, 2010
^ Grant, Douglas (2003). "Magick and Photography". Ashé Journal. Rebel Satori Press. http://www.ashejournal.com/index.php?id=166. Retrieved 31 March 2012.
^ WILLIAM S.BURROUGHS 'Life-File' at Beak Street
^ William S. Burroughs: Overview from msn.com
^ "William S. Burroughs". Find a Grave. http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=6201607. Retrieved October 19, 2010.
^ Reality Studio.org: Evil River-A Burroughs Memoir?, a 2005 discussion on the origin of this book.
^ Amazon.ca listing, with cover art and review information.
^ Chris Hastings and Beth Jones, "New Jack Kerouac book to be published, The Telegraph, March 2, 2008 . Retrieved March 3, 2008.
^ Telos Publishing catalogue entry, accessed Aug. 9, 2010
^ Burroughs, William S. The Adding Machine: Selected Essays. Arcade Publishing, 1993
^ "In Memory of Carl Weissner". Reality Studio. 25 January 2012. http://realitystudio.org/publications/death-in-paris/in-memory-of-carl-weissner/. Retrieved 25 February 2012.
^ Wills, D. 'Modern Beats: Tom Waits', in Wills, D. (ed.) Beatdom Vol. 3 (Mauling Press: Dundee, 2007) p. ????
^ Robert Anton Wilson (2007-05). "The 23 Phenomenon". Fortean Times. http://forteantimes.com/features/commentary/396/the_23_phenomenon.html. Retrieved 2008-09-25.
^ FAQ from the Official Steely Dan website
^ Nova Express, band profile
^ http://www.allmusic.com/artist/p5634/biography
^ Murphy, Timothy S. (1998). "Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted". Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. p. 6. ISBN 0-520-20951-6. http://books.google.com/books?id=x_x5kgD1ijAC&lpg=PA6&dq=Success%20Will%20Write%20Apocalypse%20Across%20the%20Sky&client=firefox-a&pg=PA6. Retrieved June 23, 2009.
^ G., Richard (April 2009). "Success Will Write Apocalypse Across the Sky interview". Lords of Metal. http://www.lordsofmetal.nl/showinterview.php?id=2619&lang=en. Retrieved June 23, 2009.
^ Mark Bourne (2001). "Häxan / Witchcraft Through the Ages: The Criterion Collection". DVD Journal. http://www.dvdjournal.com/reviews/h/haxan_cc.shtml. Retrieved 2008-10-24.
^ U B U W E B : William S. Burroughs Films
^ Ausgewählte Publikationen von Michael Oppitz from the website of the Ethnographic Museum of the University of Zürich
^ Wills, David, "Naked Lunch on Film" in Beatdom Vol. 5 (City of Recovery Press, 2009) p.30

References [link]

Ted Morgan (1988). Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S.Burroughs. New York: Avon. ISBN 0-8050-0901-9
James Grauerholz, Ira Silverberg, Ann Douglas (eds.) (2000). Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader. Grove Press. 576 pages. ISBN 0-8021-3694-X, 9780802136947 OCLC 57590795
Thomas Wason (February 15, 1951). "William Burroughs". Mexico City Collegian: p. 6. http://catarina.udlap.mx/u_dl_a/acervos/mcc/volumen_04/1951_02_15.pdf.

External links [link]

Biography portal

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: William S. Burroughs

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs at the Internet Movie Database
Works by or about William S. Burroughs in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
Conrad Knickerbocker (Fall 1965). "William S. Burroughs, The Art of Fiction No. 36". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4424/the-art-of-fiction-no-36-william-s-burroughs.
William S. Burroughs Papers at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Columbia University
RealityStudio fan site with texts, community, scholarship, criticism
William S. Burroughs Internet Database at Southeast Missouri State University
International festivities for 50th anniversary of Naked Lunch
Burroughs multimedia directory
A gallery of Burroughs book cover designs
Artist Malcolm McNeill: On Beat Writer William Burroughs, Interview by George Laughead, August 2007
Doom Patrols: 10. WILLIAM BURROUGHS by Steven Shaviro
William Burroughs and Tom Waits
Interview excerpt from RE/Search
Shooting Joan Burroughs by George Laughead
Allen Ginsberg & William S. Burroughs, Last Public Appearance November 2, 1996 Lawrence, KS
William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch: American Literature from Morocco
European Beat Studies Network
William S. Burroughs: A Man Within site for Independent Lens on PBS
William S. Burroughs: A Man Within at the Internet Movie Database

v t e Works by William S. Burroughs

Novels and novellas	And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks Junkie Queer Naked Lunch The Soft Machine The Ticket That Exploded Dead Fingers Talk Nova Express The Last Words of Dutch Schultz The Wild Boys Port of Saints Blade Runner (a movie) Cities of the Red Night Ghost of Chance The Place of Dead Roads The Western Lands My Education: A Book of Dreams The Cat Inside

Short story collections	Interzone Exterminator! Ah Pook Is Here Tornado Alley The Burroughs File The Third Mind Time The Exterminator Minutes to Go

Essay collections	The Electronic Revolution The Third Mind Ali's Smile: Naked Scientology The Adding Machine: Collected Essays

Non-fiction	The Yage Letters The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs Letters to Allen Ginsberg The Burroughs File Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs

Recordings	Call Me Burroughs Dead City Radio Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales Real English Tea Made Here The "Priest" They Called Him

Films	The Junky's Christmas Ah Pook Is Here Naked Lunch (film)

Persondata
Name	Burroughs, William S.
Alternative names	Burroughs, William Seward II; Lee, William (pseudonym)
Short description	American novelist, essayist
Date of birth	February 5, 1914
Place of birth	St. Louis, Missouri
Date of death	August 2, 1997
Place of death	Lawrence, Kansas

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Kathy Acker
File:Kathy Acker.jpg Acker in 1984
Born	Karen Lehmann (1947-04-18)April 18, 1947 New York City, New York, United States
Died	November 30, 1997(1997-11-30) (aged 50) Tijuana, Mexico
Occupation	Novelist, playwright, essayist, poet
Notable work(s)	Blood and Guts in High School (novel) Great Expectations New York (short story)
Notable award(s)	Pushcart Prize (1979)
Spouse(s)	Robert Acker (1966–????) Peter Gordon (1976–????)
Influences William Burroughs and David Antin

Kathy Acker (née Karen Lehmann; April 18, 1947 – November 30, 1997) was an American experimental novelist, punk poet, playwright, essayist, postmodernist and sex-positive feminist writer. She was strongly influenced by the Black Mountain School, William S. Burroughs, David Antin, French critical theory, philosophy, and pornography.

1 Biography
2 Literary overview
3 Posthumous reputation
4 Quotes
5 Published works
6 See also
7 Further reading
8 References
9 External links

Biography [link]

The daughter of Donald and Claire (Weill) Lehman, a wealthy Jewish family, Kathy Acker was born in New York City on April 18. There is some question as to her year of birth, however: the Library of Congress lists her birth year as 1948, a few sources have listed 1947, but most obituaries state that she was born in 1944. The pregnancy was unplanned, and Donald Lehman abandoned the family before Kathy was born; Acker’s relationship with her domineering mother even into adulthood was fraught with hostility and anxiety because Acker felt unloved and unwanted. Her mother soon remarried, a union that Acker later characterized as an essentially passionless marriage to an ineffectual man, and Acker was raised in her mother and stepfather’s respectable upper-middle-class Jewish home on New York’s Upper East Side.

As a girl, Acker was expected to act with ladylike propriety in this oppressive, well-to-do environment, yet she was fascinated by pirates, a fascination that continued until the end of her life. She wanted to grow up to be a pirate, but she knew that only men could be pirates. Thus Acker experienced early the limitations of gender. However, she found that reading about pirates was a way of running away from home, and she turned to books as her reality. She associated reading and writing with bodily pleasure and remained a voracious reader throughout her life.

Acker took her last name from her first husband, Robert Acker; though named Karen, she was known as Kathy by her friends and family. She studied classics as an undergraduate at Brandeis University and aspired to write novels but moved to San Diego to further pursue her studies. Acker's first work appeared in print as part of the burgeoning New York literary underground of the mid-1970s. She claimed that her early writings were profoundly influenced by her experiences working for a few months as a stripper. She remained on the margins of the literary establishment, only being published by small presses until the mid-1980s, thus earning herself the epithet of literary terrorist.^{[citation needed]} 1984 saw her first British publication, a novel called Blood and Guts in High School. From here on Acker produced a considerable body of novels, almost all still in print with Grove Press. She wrote pieces for a number of magazines and anthologies, and also had notable pieces printed in issues of RE/Search, Angel Exhaust and Rapid Eye. Towards the end of her life she had a measure of success in the conventional press—the Guardian newspaper published several of her articles, including an interview with the Spice Girls, which she submitted just a few months before her death.

Acker's formative influences were American poets and writers (the Black Mountain poets, especially Jackson Mac Low, Charles Olson, William S. Burroughs), and the Fluxus movement, as well as literary theory, especially the French feminists and Gilles Deleuze. In her work, she combined plagiarism, cut-up techniques, pornography, autobiography, persona and personal essay to confound expectations of what fiction should be. She acknowledged the performative function of language in drawing attention to the instability of female identity in male narrative and literary history (Don Quixote), created parallelism^{[disambiguation needed ]} in characters and autobiographical personas and experimented with pronouns, upsetting conventional syntax.

In In Memoriam to Identity, Acker draws attention to popular analyses of Rimbaud's life and The Sound and the Fury, constructing or revealing social and literary identity. Though she was known in the literary world for creating a whole new style of feminist prose and for her transgressive fiction, she was also a punk and feminist icon for her devoted portrayals of subcultures, strong-willed women, and violence.

In April 1996 Acker was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a double mastectomy. In January 1997 she wrote about her loss of faith in conventional medicine in a Guardian article, "The Gift of Disease." In the article she explains that after unsuccessful surgery, which left her feeling physically mutilated and emotionally debilitated, she rejected the passivity of the patient in the medical mainstream and began to seek out the advice of nutritionists, acupuncturists, psychic healers, and Chinese herbalists. She found appealing the claim that instead of being an object of knowledge, as in Western medicine, the patient becomes a seer, a seeker of wisdom, that illness becomes the teacher and the patient the student. After pursuing several forms of alternative medicine in England and the United States, Acker died a year and a half later from complications of breast cancer in an alternative cancer clinic in Tijuana, Mexico. She died in Room 101, to which her friend Alan Moore quipped, "There's nothing that woman can't turn into a literary reference."^[1]

Literary overview [link]

Born and raised in New York City, novelist, poet and performance artist Kathy Acker came to be closely associated with the punk movement of the 1970s and '80s that affected much of the culture in and around Manhattan. As an adult, however, she moved around quite a bit. She received her bachelor's degree from the University of California, San Diego in 1968; there she worked with David Antin and Jerome Rothenberg.

She did two years worth of graduate work at City University of New York in Classics, specializing in Greek, but left before earning a degree. While still in New York she worked as a file clerk, secretary, stripper, and porn performer. During the 1970s she often moved back and forth between San Diego, San Francisco and New York.

She married twice, and though most of her relationships were with men, she was openly bisexual for at least part of her adult life. In 1979 she won the Pushcart Prize for her short story "New York City in 1979." During the early 1980s she lived in London, where she wrote several of her most critically acclaimed works. After returning to the United States in the late 1980s she worked as an adjunct professor at the San Francisco Art Institute for about six years and as a visiting professor at several universities, including the University of Idaho, the University of California, San Diego, University of California, Santa Barbara, the California Institute of Arts, and Roanoke College.

Acker’s controversial body of work borrows heavily from the experimental styles of William S. Burroughs and Marguerite Duras. She often used extreme forms of pastiche and even Burroughs’s cut-up technique, in which one cuts passages and sentences into several pieces and rearranges them somewhat randomly. Acker herself situated her writing within a post-nouveau roman European tradition. In her texts, she combines biographical elements, power, sex and violence. Indeed, critics often compare her writing to that of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jean Genet. Critics have noticed links to Gertrude Stein and photographers Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine. Acker’s novels also exhibit a fascination with and an indebtedness to tattoos.^[2] She even dedicated Empire of the Senseless to her tattooist.

Although associated with generally well-respected artists, even Acker’s most recognized novels, Blood and Guts in High School, Great Expectations and Don Quixote receive mixed critical attention. Most critics acknowledge Acker’s skilled manipulation of plagiarized texts from writers as varied as Charles Dickens, Marcel Proust, and Marquis de Sade.

Feminist critics have also had strong responses both for and against Acker’s writing. While some praise her for exposing a misogynistic capitalist society that uses sexual domination as a key form of oppression, others argue that her extreme and frequent use of violent sexual imagery quickly becomes numbing and leads to the degrading objectification of women. Despite repeated criticisms, Acker maintained that in order to challenge the phallogocentric power structures of language, literature must not only experiment with syntax and style, but also give voice to the silenced subjects that common taboos marginalize. The inclusion of controversial topics such as abortion, rape, incest, terrorism, pornography, graphic violence, and feminism demonstrate that conviction.

Acker published her first book, Politics, in 1972. Although the collection of poems and essays did not garner much critical or public attention, it did establish her reputation within the New York punk scene. In 1973 she published her first novel The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula: Some Lives of Murderesses under the pseudonym Black Tarantula^{[citation needed]}. In 1974 she published her second novel, I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac: Imagining.

In 1979 Acker finally received popular attention when she won a Pushcart Prize for her short story "New York City in 1979." She did not receive critical attention, however, until she published Great Expectations in 1982. The opening of Great Expectations is a clear re-writing of Charles Dickens’s classic of the same name. It features Acker’s usual subject matter, including a semi-autobiographical account of her mother’s suicide and the appropriation of several other texts, including Pierre Guyotat's violent and sexually explicit "Eden Eden Eden". That same year, Acker published a chapbook titled Hello, I’m Erica Jong.

Acker wrote the script for the 1983 film Variety, directed by Bette Gordon with actors including Nan Goldin, Will Patton, and Luis Guzmán.^[3]

Despite the increased recognition she got for Great Expectations, Blood and Guts in High School is often considered Acker’s breakthrough work. Published in 1984, it is one of her most extreme explorations of sexuality and violence. Borrowing from, among other texts, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Blood and Guts details the experiences of Janey Smith, a sex addicted and pelvic-inflammatory-disease-ridden urbanite who is in love with a father who sells her into slavery. Many critics criticized it for being demeaning toward women, and Germany banned it completely. Acker published the German court judgment against Blood and Guts in High School in Hannibal Lecter, My Father.

In 1984 Acker published My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini and a year later published Algeria: A Series of Invocations because Nothing Else Works. In 1986 she published Don Quixote, another one of her more acclaimed novels. In Acker’s version of Miguel de Cervantes' classic, Don Quixote becomes a young woman obsessed with poststructuralist theory, taking it to a nihilistic extreme. Moreover, the Don's insanity that causes her to wander the streets of St. Petersburg & New York City was caused from having an abortion. She recognizes the world’s many lies and fakes, believes in nothing and regards identity as an internalized fictional construct. Marching around New York City and London with her dog St. Simeon, who serves as her Sancho Panza, Don Quixote attacks the sexist societies while simultaneously deflating feminist mythologies.

Acker published Empire of the Senseless in 1988 and considered it a turning point in her writing. While she still borrows from other texts, including Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the plagiarism is less obvious. However, one of Acker’s more controversial plagiarisms is from William Gibson’s 1984 text ‘'Neuromancer’' in which Acker equates code with the female body and its militaristic implications. The novel comes from the voices of two terrorists, Abhor, who is half human and half robot, and her lover Thivai. The story takes place in the decaying remnants of a post-revolutionary Paris. Like her other works, Empire of the Senseless includes graphic violence and sexuality. However, it turns toward concerns of language more than her previous works. In 1988 she also published Literal Madness: Three Novels which included three previously published works: Florida deconstructs and reduces John Huston’s 1948 film noir classic Key Largo into its base sexual politics, Kathy Goes to Haiti details a young woman’s relationship and sexual exploits while on vacation, and My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini provides a fictional autobiography of the Italian filmmaker in which he solves his own murder.

Between 1990 and 1993 Acker published four more books: In Memoriam to Identity (1990); Hannibal Lecter, My Father (1991); Portrait of an Eye: Three Novels (1992), also composed of already published works; and My Mother: Demonology (1992). Many critics complained that these later works became redundant and predictable, as Acker continued to explore the same taboos in a similar fashion. Her last novel, Pussy, King of the Pirates, published in 1996, showed signs of Acker’s broadening interests as it incorporates more humor, lighter fantasy and a consideration of Eastern texts and philosophy that was largely absent in her earlier works.

Posthumous reputation [link]

Acker's work has been acknowledged by a number of younger writers working in an experimental style, including Stewart Home, Mark Amerika, Barry Graham, Anna Joy Springer, Tribe 8 singer and writer Lynn Breedlove, Alexander Laurence, Tamil novelist Charu Nivedita, Noah Cicero, Travis Jeppesen, and Salvador Plascencia. Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill and Kim Gordon, co-founder of Sonic Youth have also acknowledged her influence.

Three volumes of her non-fiction have been published and re-published since her death. In 2002 New York University (NYU) staged Discipline and Anarchy, a retrospective exhibition of her works,^[4] while in 2008 London's Institute of Contemporary Arts held an evening of her films.^[5] Recently (2007) Amandla Publishing has re-published Acker's articles for the New Statesman from 1989 to 1991.

Quotes [link]

"We don't have a clue what it is to be male or female, or if there are intermediate genders. Male and female might be fields which overlap into androgyny or different kinds of sexual desires. But because we live in a Western, patriarchal world, we have very little chance of exploring these gender possibilities."^[6]
"Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified."^[7]
"The students who come to my class are very closely related to all the evil girls who are very interested in their bodies and sex and pleasure. I learn a lot from them about how to have pleasure and how cool the female body is. One of my students had a piercing through her labia. And she told me about how when you ride on a motorcycle, the little bead on the ring acts like a vibrator. Her story turned me on so I did it. I got two. It was very cool. I'm very staid compared to my students, actually. I come from a generation where you've got the PC dykes and confused heterosexuals. No one ever told me that you could walk around with a strap-on, having orgasms."^[8]
"Let's compare a pencil to a vagina."^[9]

Published works [link]

Politics (1972)
Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula By the Black Tarantula (1973)
I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac: Imagining (1974)
Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec (1978)
Florida (1978)
Kathy Goes To Haiti (1978)
N.Y.C. in 1979 (1981)
Great Expectations (1983)
Algeria : A Series of Invocations Because Nothing Else Works (1984)
Blood and Guts in High School (1984)
Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream (1986)
Literal Madness: Three Novels (Reprinted 1987)
My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini
Wordplays 5 : An Anthology of New American Drama (1987)
Empire of the Senseless (1988)
In Memoriam to Identity (1990)
Hannibal Lecter, My Father (1991)
My Mother: Demonology (1994)
Pussycat Fever (1995)
Dust. Essays (1995)
Pussy, King of the Pirates (1996)
Bodies of Work : Essays (1997)
Portrait of an Eye: Three Novels (Reprinted 1998)
Redoing Childhood (2000) spoken word CD, KRS 349.
"Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective" (pub. 2002 from manuscript of 1973)

References [link]

^ http://www.bookslut.com/features/2006_10_010057.php
^ Ylioppilaslehti-magazine: Brief in english
^ Stevenson, Jack (November 2010), "Haunted Cinema: Movie Theatres of the Dead", Bright Lights Film Journal (70), http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/70/70stevenson.php
^ NYU > The Office of Public Affairs > Discipline and Anarchy: The Works of Kathy Acker
^ "Looking back at Kathy Acker". The Guardian (London). December 28, 2007. http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/12/looking_back_at_kathy_acker.html.
^ Eve Experts - Kathy Acker, Writer
^ Student Zone: On-line Response #8: Octavia BUTLER & Kathy ACKER
^ Kathy Acker Interview
^ http://bombsite.com/issues/6/articles/307

External links [link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Kathy Acker

A conversation with Kathy Acker by Ellen G. Friedman From “The Review of Contemporary Fiction,” Fall 1989, Volume 9.3
Works by or about Kathy Acker in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
Who's Afraid of Kathy Acker? A documentary by Barbara Caspar
Oblivion: Kathy Acker's CalArts website
Matias Viegener's memoir of Acker's death. Viegener was a close friend who was with her when she died and is currently Acker's literary executor.
Acker answers a survey for BOMB Magazine
Inventory of the Kathy Acker Papers, 1972–1997 and n.d., at Duke University
"Kathy Acker". UbuWeb Sound. http://ubu.com/sound/acker.html. Retrieved January 1, 2012.
"Kathy Acker". PennSound. http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Acker.php. Retrieved January 1, 2012.

Persondata
Name	Acker, Kathy
Alternative names	Lehmann, Karen (birth name)
Short description	American novelist, playwright, essayist, and poet
Date of birth	(1947-04-18)April 18, 1947
Place of birth	Manhattan, New York, United States
Date of death	November 30, 1997(1997-11-30)
Place of death	Tijuana, Mexico

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This article is about the poet and playwright. For other persons of the same name, see William Shakespeare (disambiguation). For other uses of "Shakespeare", see Shakespeare (disambiguation).

William Shakespeare
The Chandos portrait, artist and authenticity unconfirmed. National Portrait Gallery, London.
Born	Baptised 26 April 1564 (birth date unknown) Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England
Died	23 April 1616 (aged 52) Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England
Occupation	Playwright, poet, actor
Period	English Renaissance
Spouse(s)	Anne Hathaway (m. 1582–1616)
Children	Susanna Hall Hamnet Shakespeare Judith Quiney
Relative(s)	John Shakespeare (father) Mary Shakespeare (mother)

Signature

William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564; died 23 April 1616)^{[nb 1]} was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist.^[1] He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon".^[2]^{[nb 2]} His surviving works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays,^{[nb 3]} 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.^[3]

Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others.^[4]

Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613.^[5]^{[nb 4]} His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the 16th century. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights.

Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's.

Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the 19th century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry".^[6] In the 20th century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world.

Life [link]

Main article: Shakespeare's life

Early life [link]

William Shakespeare was the son of John Shakespeare, an alderman and a successful glover originally from Snitterfield, and Mary Arden, the daughter of an affluent landowning farmer.^[7] He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon and baptised there on 26 April 1564. His actual birthdate remains unknown, but is traditionally observed on 23 April, St George's Day.^[8] This date, which can be traced back to an 18th-century scholar's mistake, has proved appealing to biographers, since Shakespeare died 23 April 1616.^[9] He was the third child of eight and the eldest surviving son.^[10]

Although no attendance records for the period survive, most biographers agree that Shakespeare was probably educated at the King's New School in Stratford,^[11] a free school chartered in 1553,^[12] about a quarter-mile from his home. Grammar schools varied in quality during the Elizabethan era, but the grammar curriculum was standardised by royal decree throughout England,^[13] and the school would have provided an intensive education in Latin grammar based upon Latin classical authors.^[14]

John Shakespeare's house, believed to be Shakespeare's birthplace, in Stratford-upon-Avon.

At the age of 18, Shakespeare married the 26-year-old Anne Hathaway. The consistory court of the Diocese of Worcester issued a marriage licence 27 November 1582. The next day two of Hathaway's neighbours posted bonds guaranteeing that no lawful claims impeded the marriage.^[15] The ceremony may have been arranged in some haste, since the Worcester chancellor allowed the marriage banns to be read once instead of the usual three times,^[16] and six months after the marriage Anne gave birth to a daughter, Susanna, baptised 26 May 1583.^[17] Twins, son Hamnet and daughter Judith, followed almost two years later and were baptised 2 February 1585.^[18] Hamnet died of unknown causes at the age of 11 and was buried 11 August 1596.^[19]

After the birth of the twins, Shakespeare left few historical traces until he is mentioned as part of the London theatre scene in 1592, and scholars refer to the years between 1585 and 1592 as Shakespeare's "lost years".^[20] Biographers attempting to account for this period have reported many apocryphal stories. Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare’s first biographer, recounted a Stratford legend that Shakespeare fled the town for London to escape prosecution for deer poaching in the estate of local squire Thomas Lucy. Shakespeare is also supposed to have taken his revenge on Lucy by writing a scurrilous ballad about him.^[21] Another 18th-century story has Shakespeare starting his theatrical career minding the horses of theatre patrons in London.^[22] John Aubrey reported that Shakespeare had been a country schoolmaster.^[23] Some 20th-century scholars have suggested that Shakespeare may have been employed as a schoolmaster by Alexander Hoghton of Lancashire, a Catholic landowner who named a certain "William Shakeshafte" in his will.^[24] Little evidence substantiates such stories other than hearsay collected after his death, and Shakeshafte was a common name in the Lancashire area.^[25]

London and theatrical career [link]

<poem> "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts..." </poem>

—As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7, 139–42^[26]

It is not known exactly when Shakespeare began writing, but contemporary allusions and records of performances show that several of his plays were on the London stage by 1592.^[27] He was well enough known in London by then to be attacked in print by the playwright Robert Greene in his Groats-Worth of Wit:

...there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger's heart wrapped in a Player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.^[28]

Scholars differ on the exact meaning of these words,^[29] but most agree that Greene is accusing Shakespeare of reaching above his rank in trying to match university-educated writers such as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe and Greene himself (the "university wits").^[30] The italicised phrase parodying the line "Oh, tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide" from Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 3, along with the pun "Shake-scene", identifies Shakespeare as Greene's target. Here Johannes Factotum—"Jack of all trades"— means a second-rate tinkerer with the work of others, rather than the more common "universal genius".^[29]^[31]

Greene's attack is the earliest surviving mention of Shakespeare’s career in the theatre. Biographers suggest that his career may have begun any time from the mid-1580s to just before Greene's remarks.^[32] From 1594, Shakespeare's plays were performed by only the Lord Chamberlain's Men, a company owned by a group of players, including Shakespeare, that soon became the leading playing company in London.^[33] After the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, the company was awarded a royal patent by the new king, James I, and changed its name to the King's Men.^[34]

In 1599, a partnership of company members built their own theatre on the south bank of the River Thames, which they called the Globe. In 1608, the partnership also took over the Blackfriars indoor theatre. Records of Shakespeare's property purchases and investments indicate that the company made him a wealthy man.^[35] In 1597, he bought the second-largest house in Stratford, New Place, and in 1605, he invested in a share of the parish tithes in Stratford.^[36]

Some of Shakespeare's plays were published in quarto editions from 1594. By 1598, his name had become a selling point and began to appear on the title pages.^[37] Shakespeare continued to act in his own and other plays after his success as a playwright. The 1616 edition of Ben Jonson's Works names him on the cast lists for Every Man in His Humour (1598) and Sejanus His Fall (1603).^[38] The absence of his name from the 1605 cast list for Jonson’s Volpone is taken by some scholars as a sign that his acting career was nearing its end.^[39] The First Folio of 1623, however, lists Shakespeare as one of "the Principal Actors in all these Plays", some of which were first staged after Volpone, although we cannot know for certain which roles he played.^[40] In 1610, John Davies of Hereford wrote that "good Will" played "kingly" roles.^[41] In 1709, Rowe passed down a tradition that Shakespeare played the ghost of Hamlet's father.^[42] Later traditions maintain that he also played Adam in As You Like It and the Chorus in Henry V,^[43] though scholars doubt the sources of the information.^[44]

Shakespeare divided his time between London and Stratford during his career. In 1596, the year before he bought New Place as his family home in Stratford, Shakespeare was living in the parish of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, north of the River Thames.^[45] He moved across the river to Southwark by 1599, the year his company constructed the Globe Theatre there.^[46] By 1604, he had moved north of the river again, to an area north of St Paul's Cathedral with many fine houses. There he rented rooms from a French Huguenot named Christopher Mountjoy, a maker of ladies' wigs and other headgear.^[47]

Later years and death [link]

Rowe was the first biographer to pass down the tradition that Shakespeare retired to Stratford some years before his death;^[48] but retirement from all work was uncommon at that time,^[49] and Shakespeare continued to visit London.^[48] In 1612 he was called as a witness in a court case concerning the marriage settlement of Mountjoy's daughter, Mary.^[50] In March 1613 he bought a gatehouse in the former Blackfriars priory;^[51] and from November 1614 he was in London for several weeks with his son-in-law, John Hall.^[52]

Shakespeare's funerary monument in Stratford-upon-Avon.

After 1606–1607, Shakespeare wrote fewer plays, and none are attributed to him after 1613.^[53] His last three plays were collaborations, probably with John Fletcher,^[54] who succeeded him as the house playwright for the King’s Men.^[55]

Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616^[56] and was survived by his wife and two daughters. Susanna had married a physician, John Hall, in 1607,^[57] and Judith had married Thomas Quiney, a vintner, two months before Shakespeare’s death.^[58]

In his will, Shakespeare left the bulk of his large estate to his elder daughter Susanna.^[59] The terms instructed that she pass it down intact to "the first son of her body".^[60] The Quineys had three children, all of whom died without marrying.^[61] The Halls had one child, Elizabeth, who married twice but died without children in 1670, ending Shakespeare’s direct line.^[62] Shakespeare's will scarcely mentions his wife, Anne, who was probably entitled to one third of his estate automatically.^[63] He did make a point, however, of leaving her "my second best bed", a bequest that has led to much speculation.^[64] Some scholars see the bequest as an insult to Anne, whereas others believe that the second-best bed would have been the matrimonial bed and therefore rich in significance.^[65]

Shakespeare was buried in the chancel of the Holy Trinity Church two days after his death.^[66] The epitaph carved into the stone slab covering his grave includes a curse against moving his bones, which was carefully avoided during restoration of the church in 2008:^[67]

Shakespeare's grave.

<poem>Good frend for Iesvs sake forbeare, To digg the dvst encloased heare. Bleste be ye man yt spares thes stones, And cvrst be he yt moves my bones.^[68] </poem> (Modern spelling: Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear, | To dig the dust enclosed here. | Blessed be the man that spares these stones, | And cursed be he that moves my bones.)

Sometime before 1623, a funerary monument was erected in his memory on the north wall, with a half-effigy of him in the act of writing. Its plaque compares him to Nestor, Socrates, and Virgil.^[69] In 1623, in conjunction with the publication of the First Folio, the Droeshout engraving was published.^[70]

Shakespeare has been commemorated in many statues and memorials around the world, including funeral monuments in Southwark Cathedral and Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Plays [link]

Main articles: Shakespeare's plays and Shakespeare's collaborations

Most playwrights of the period typically collaborated with others at some point, and critics agree that Shakespeare did the same, mostly early and late in his career.^[71] Some attributions, such as Titus Andronicus and the early history plays, remain controversial, while The Two Noble Kinsmen and the lost Cardenio have well-attested contemporary documentation. Textual evidence also supports the view that several of the plays were revised by other writers after their original composition.

The first recorded works of Shakespeare are Richard III and the three parts of Henry VI, written in the early 1590s during a vogue for historical drama. Shakespeare's plays are difficult to date, however,^[72] and studies of the texts suggest that Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew and The Two Gentlemen of Verona may also belong to Shakespeare’s earliest period.^[73] His first histories, which draw heavily on the 1587 edition of Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland,^[74] dramatise the destructive results of weak or corrupt rule and have been interpreted as a justification for the origins of the Tudor dynasty.^[75] The early plays were influenced by the works of other Elizabethan dramatists, especially Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe, by the traditions of medieval drama, and by the plays of Seneca.^[76] The Comedy of Errors was also based on classical models, but no source for The Taming of the Shrew has been found, though it is related to a separate play of the same name and may have derived from a folk story.^[77] Like The Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which two friends appear to approve of rape,^[78] the Shrew's story of the taming of a woman's independent spirit by a man sometimes troubles modern critics and directors.^[79]

Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing. By William Blake, c. 1786. Tate Britain.

Shakespeare's early classical and Italianate comedies, containing tight double plots and precise comic sequences, give way in the mid-1590s to the romantic atmosphere of his greatest comedies.^[80] A Midsummer Night's Dream is a witty mixture of romance, fairy magic, and comic lowlife scenes.^[81] Shakespeare's next comedy, the equally romantic Merchant of Venice, contains a portrayal of the vengeful Jewish moneylender Shylock, which reflects Elizabethan views but may appear derogatory to modern audiences.^[82] The wit and wordplay of Much Ado About Nothing,^[83] the charming rural setting of As You Like It, and the lively merrymaking of Twelfth Night complete Shakespeare's sequence of great comedies.^[84] After the lyrical Richard II, written almost entirely in verse, Shakespeare introduced prose comedy into the histories of the late 1590s, Henry IV, parts 1 and 2, and Henry V. His characters become more complex and tender as he switches deftly between comic and serious scenes, prose and poetry, and achieves the narrative variety of his mature work.^[85] This period begins and ends with two tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, the famous romantic tragedy of sexually charged adolescence, love, and death;^[86] and Julius Caesar—based on Sir Thomas North's 1579 translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives—which introduced a new kind of drama.^[87] According to Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro, in Julius Caesar "the various strands of politics, character, inwardness, contemporary events, even Shakespeare's own reflections on the act of writing, began to infuse each other".^[88]

Hamlet, Horatio, Marcellus, and the Ghost of Hamlet's Father. Henry Fuseli, 1780–5. Kunsthaus Zürich.

In the early 17th century, Shakespeare wrote the so-called "problem plays" Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and All's Well That Ends Well and a number of his best known tragedies.^[89] Many critics believe that Shakespeare's greatest tragedies represent the peak of his art. The titular hero of one of Shakespeare's most famous tragedies, Hamlet, has probably been discussed more than any other Shakespearean character, especially for his famous soliloquy which begins "To be or not to be; that is the question".^[90] Unlike the introverted Hamlet, whose fatal flaw is hesitation, the heroes of the tragedies that followed, Othello and King Lear, are undone by hasty errors of judgement.^[91] The plots of Shakespeare's tragedies often hinge on such fatal errors or flaws, which overturn order and destroy the hero and those he loves.^[92] In Othello, the villain Iago stokes Othello's sexual jealousy to the point where he murders the innocent wife who loves him.^[93] In King Lear, the old king commits the tragic error of giving up his powers, initiating the events which lead to the torture and blinding of the Earl of Gloucester and the murder of Lear's youngest daughter Cordelia. According to the critic Frank Kermode, "the play offers neither its good characters nor its audience any relief from its cruelty".^[94] In Macbeth, the shortest and most compressed of Shakespeare's tragedies,^[95] uncontrollable ambition incites Macbeth and his wife, Lady Macbeth, to murder the rightful king and usurp the throne, until their own guilt destroys them in turn.^[96] In this play, Shakespeare adds a supernatural element to the tragic structure. His last major tragedies, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, contain some of Shakespeare's finest poetry and were considered his most successful tragedies by the poet and critic T. S. Eliot.^[97]

In his final period, Shakespeare turned to romance or tragicomedy and completed three more major plays: Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, as well as the collaboration, Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Less bleak than the tragedies, these four plays are graver in tone than the comedies of the 1590s, but they end with reconciliation and the forgiveness of potentially tragic errors.^[98] Some commentators have seen this change in mood as evidence of a more serene view of life on Shakespeare's part, but it may merely reflect the theatrical fashion of the day.^[99] Shakespeare collaborated on two further surviving plays, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, probably with John Fletcher.^[100]

Performances [link]

Main article: Shakespeare in performance

It is not clear for which companies Shakespeare wrote his early plays. The title page of the 1594 edition of Titus Andronicus reveals that the play had been acted by three different troupes.^[101] After the plagues of 1592–3, Shakespeare's plays were performed by his own company at The Theatre and the Curtain in Shoreditch, north of the Thames.^[102] Londoners flocked there to see the first part of Henry IV, Leonard Digges recording, "Let but Falstaff come, Hal, Poins, the rest...and you scarce shall have a room".^[103] When the company found themselves in dispute with their landlord, they pulled The Theatre down and used the timbers to construct the Globe Theatre, the first playhouse built by actors for actors, on the south bank of the Thames at Southwark.^[104] The Globe opened in autumn 1599, with Julius Caesar one of the first plays staged. Most of Shakespeare's greatest post-1599 plays were written for the Globe, including Hamlet, Othello and King Lear.^[105]

The reconstructed Globe Theatre, London.

After the Lord Chamberlain's Men were renamed the King's Men in 1603, they entered a special relationship with the new King James. Although the performance records are patchy, the King's Men performed seven of Shakespeare's plays at court between 1 November 1604 and 31 October 1605, including two performances of The Merchant of Venice.^[106] After 1608, they performed at the indoor Blackfriars Theatre during the winter and the Globe during the summer.^[107] The indoor setting, combined with the Jacobean fashion for lavishly staged masques, allowed Shakespeare to introduce more elaborate stage devices. In Cymbeline, for example, Jupiter descends "in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle: he throws a thunderbolt. The ghosts fall on their knees."^[108]

The actors in Shakespeare's company included the famous Richard Burbage, William Kempe, Henry Condell and John Heminges. Burbage played the leading role in the first performances of many of Shakespeare's plays, including Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear.^[109] The popular comic actor Will Kempe played the servant Peter in Romeo and Juliet and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, among other characters.^[110] He was replaced around the turn of the 16th century by Robert Armin, who played roles such as Touchstone in As You Like It and the fool in King Lear.^[111] In 1613, Sir Henry Wotton recorded that Henry VIII "was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and ceremony".^[112] On 29 June, however, a cannon set fire to the thatch of the Globe and burned the theatre to the ground, an event which pinpoints the date of a Shakespeare play with rare precision.^[112]

Textual sources [link]

Title page of the First Folio, 1623. Copper engraving of Shakespeare by Martin Droeshout.

In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two of Shakespeare's friends from the King's Men, published the First Folio, a collected edition of Shakespeare's plays. It contained 36 texts, including 18 printed for the first time.^[113] Many of the plays had already appeared in quarto versions—flimsy books made from sheets of paper folded twice to make four leaves.^[114] No evidence suggests that Shakespeare approved these editions, which the First Folio describes as "stol'n and surreptitious copies".^[115] Alfred Pollard termed some of them "bad quartos" because of their adapted, paraphrased or garbled texts, which may in places have been reconstructed from memory.^[116] Where several versions of a play survive, each differs from the other. The differences may stem from copying or printing errors, from notes by actors or audience members, or from Shakespeare's own papers.^[117] In some cases, for example Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida and Othello, Shakespeare could have revised the texts between the quarto and folio editions. In the case of King Lear, however, while most modern additions do conflate them, the 1623 folio version is so different from the 1608 quarto, that the Oxford Shakespeare prints them both, arguing that they cannot be conflated without confusion.^[118]

Poems [link]

In 1593 and 1594, when the theatres were closed because of plague, Shakespeare published two narrative poems on erotic themes, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. He dedicated them to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. In Venus and Adonis, an innocent Adonis rejects the sexual advances of Venus; while in The Rape of Lucrece, the virtuous wife Lucrece is raped by the lustful Tarquin.^[119] Influenced by Ovid's Metamorphoses,^[120] the poems show the guilt and moral confusion that result from uncontrolled lust.^[121] Both proved popular and were often reprinted during Shakespeare's lifetime. A third narrative poem, A Lover's Complaint, in which a young woman laments her seduction by a persuasive suitor, was printed in the first edition of the Sonnets in 1609. Most scholars now accept that Shakespeare wrote A Lover's Complaint. Critics consider that its fine qualities are marred by leaden effects.^[122] The Phoenix and the Turtle, printed in Robert Chester's 1601 Love's Martyr, mourns the deaths of the legendary phoenix and his lover, the faithful turtle dove. In 1599, two early drafts of sonnets 138 and 144 appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim, published under Shakespeare's name but without his permission.^[123]

Sonnets [link]

Main article: Shakespeare's sonnets

Title page from 1609 edition of Shake-Speares Sonnets.

Published in 1609, the Sonnets were the last of Shakespeare's non-dramatic works to be printed. Scholars are not certain when each of the 154 sonnets was composed, but evidence suggests that Shakespeare wrote sonnets throughout his career for a private readership.^[124] Even before the two unauthorised sonnets appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599, Francis Meres had referred in 1598 to Shakespeare's "sugred Sonnets among his private friends".^[125] Few analysts believe that the published collection follows Shakespeare's intended sequence.^[126] He seems to have planned two contrasting series: one about uncontrollable lust for a married woman of dark complexion (the "dark lady"), and one about conflicted love for a fair young man (the "fair youth"). It remains unclear if these figures represent real individuals, or if the authorial "I" who addresses them represents Shakespeare himself, though Wordsworth believed that with the sonnets "Shakespeare unlocked his heart".^[127]

<poem> "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate..." </poem>

—Lines from Shakespeare's Sonnet 18.^[128]

The 1609 edition was dedicated to a "Mr. W.H.", credited as "the only begetter" of the poems. It is not known whether this was written by Shakespeare himself or by the publisher, Thomas Thorpe, whose initials appear at the foot of the dedication page; nor is it known who Mr. W.H. was, despite numerous theories, or whether Shakespeare even authorised the publication.^[129] Critics praise the Sonnets as a profound meditation on the nature of love, sexual passion, procreation, death, and time.^[130]

Style [link]

Main article: Shakespeare's style

Shakespeare's first plays were written in the conventional style of the day. He wrote them in a stylised language that does not always spring naturally from the needs of the characters or the drama.^[131] The poetry depends on extended, sometimes elaborate metaphors and conceits, and the language is often rhetorical—written for actors to declaim rather than speak. The grand speeches in Titus Andronicus, in the view of some critics, often hold up the action, for example; and the verse in The Two Gentlemen of Verona has been described as stilted.^[132]

Soon, however, Shakespeare began to adapt the traditional styles to his own purposes. The opening soliloquy of Richard III has its roots in the self-declaration of Vice in medieval drama. At the same time, Richard’s vivid self-awareness looks forward to the soliloquies of Shakespeare's mature plays.^[133] No single play marks a change from the traditional to the freer style. Shakespeare combined the two throughout his career, with Romeo and Juliet perhaps the best example of the mixing of the styles.^[134] By the time of Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, and A Midsummer Night's Dream in the mid-1590s, Shakespeare had begun to write a more natural poetry. He increasingly tuned his metaphors and images to the needs of the drama itself.

File:Pity.jpg

Pity by William Blake, 1795, Tate Britain, is an illustration of two similes in Macbeth: "And pity, like a naked new-born babe, / Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, hors'd / Upon the sightless couriers of the air".

Shakespeare's standard poetic form was blank verse, composed in iambic pentameter. In practice, this meant that his verse was usually unrhymed and consisted of ten syllables to a line, spoken with a stress on every second syllable. The blank verse of his early plays is quite different from that of his later ones. It is often beautiful, but its sentences tend to start, pause, and finish at the end of lines, with the risk of monotony.^[135] Once Shakespeare mastered traditional blank verse, he began to interrupt and vary its flow. This technique releases the new power and flexibility of the poetry in plays such as Julius Caesar and Hamlet. Shakespeare uses it, for example, to convey the turmoil in Hamlet's mind:^[136]

Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting

That would not let me sleep. Methought I lay

Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly—

And prais'd be rashness for it—let us know

Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well...

Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2, 4–8^[136]

After Hamlet, Shakespeare varied his poetic style further, particularly in the more emotional passages of the late tragedies. The literary critic A. C. Bradley described this style as "more concentrated, rapid, varied, and, in construction, less regular, not seldom twisted or elliptical".^[137] In the last phase of his career, Shakespeare adopted many techniques to achieve these effects. These included run-on lines, irregular pauses and stops, and extreme variations in sentence structure and length.^[138] In Macbeth, for example, the language darts from one unrelated metaphor or simile to another: "was the hope drunk/ Wherein you dressed yourself?" (1.7.35–38); "...pity, like a naked new-born babe/ Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, hors'd/ Upon the sightless couriers of the air..." (1.7.21–25). The listener is challenged to complete the sense.^[138] The late romances, with their shifts in time and surprising turns of plot, inspired a last poetic style in which long and short sentences are set against one another, clauses are piled up, subject and object are reversed, and words are omitted, creating an effect of spontaneity.^[139]

Shakespeare combined poetic genius with a practical sense of the theatre.^[140] Like all playwrights of the time, he dramatised stories from sources such as Plutarch and Holinshed.^[141] He reshaped each plot to create several centres of interest and to show as many sides of a narrative to the audience as possible. This strength of design ensures that a Shakespeare play can survive translation, cutting and wide interpretation without loss to its core drama.^[142] As Shakespeare’s mastery grew, he gave his characters clearer and more varied motivations and distinctive patterns of speech. He preserved aspects of his earlier style in the later plays, however. In Shakespeare's late romances, he deliberately returned to a more artificial style, which emphasised the illusion of theatre.^[143]

Influence [link]

Main article: Shakespeare's influence

Macbeth Consulting the Vision of the Armed Head. By Henry Fuseli, 1793–94. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington.

Shakespeare's work has made a lasting impression on later theatre and literature. In particular, he expanded the dramatic potential of characterisation, plot, language, and genre.^[144] Until Romeo and Juliet, for example, romance had not been viewed as a worthy topic for tragedy.^[145] Soliloquies had been used mainly to convey information about characters or events; but Shakespeare used them to explore characters' minds.^[146] His work heavily influenced later poetry. The Romantic poets attempted to revive Shakespearean verse drama, though with little success. Critic George Steiner described all English verse dramas from Coleridge to Tennyson as "feeble variations on Shakespearean themes."^[147]

Shakespeare influenced novelists such as Thomas Hardy, William Faulkner, and Charles Dickens. The American novelist Herman Melville's soliloquies owe much to Shakespeare; his Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick is a classic tragic hero, inspired by King Lear.^[148] Scholars have identified 20,000 pieces of music linked to Shakespeare's works. These include two operas by Giuseppe Verdi, Otello and Falstaff, whose critical standing compares with that of the source plays.^[149] Shakespeare has also inspired many painters, including the Romantics and the Pre-Raphaelites. The Swiss Romantic artist Henry Fuseli, a friend of William Blake, even translated Macbeth into German.^[150] The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud drew on Shakespearean psychology, in particular that of Hamlet, for his theories of human nature.^[151]

In Shakespeare's day, English grammar, spelling and pronunciation were less standardised than they are now,^[152] and his use of language helped shape modern English.^[153] Samuel Johnson quoted him more often than any other author in his A Dictionary of the English Language, the first serious work of its type.^[154] Expressions such as "with bated breath" (Merchant of Venice) and "a foregone conclusion" (Othello) have found their way into everyday English speech.^[155]

Critical reputation [link]

Main articles: Shakespeare's reputation and Timeline of Shakespeare criticism

"He was not of an age, but for all time."

—Ben Jonson^[156]

Shakespeare was not revered in his lifetime, but he received his share of praise.^[157] In 1598, the cleric and author Francis Meres singled him out from a group of English writers as "the most excellent" in both comedy and tragedy.^[158] And the authors of the Parnassus plays at St John's College, Cambridge, numbered him with Chaucer, Gower and Spenser.^[159] In the First Folio, Ben Jonson called Shakespeare the "Soul of the age, the applause, delight, the wonder of our stage", though he had remarked elsewhere that "Shakespeare wanted art".

A recently garlanded statue of William Shakespeare in Lincoln Park, Chicago, typical of many created in the 19th and early 20th century.

Between the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the end of the 17th century, classical ideas were in vogue. As a result, critics of the time mostly rated Shakespeare below John Fletcher and Ben Jonson.^[160] Thomas Rymer, for example, condemned Shakespeare for mixing the comic with the tragic. Nevertheless, poet and critic John Dryden rated Shakespeare highly, saying of Jonson, "I admire him, but I love Shakespeare".^[161] For several decades, Rymer's view held sway; but during the 18th century, critics began to respond to Shakespeare on his own terms and acclaim what they termed his natural genius. A series of scholarly editions of his work, notably those of Samuel Johnson in 1765 and Edmond Malone in 1790, added to his growing reputation.^[162] By 1800, he was firmly enshrined as the national poet.^[163] In the 18th and 19th centuries, his reputation also spread abroad. Among those who championed him were the writers Voltaire, Goethe, Stendhal and Victor Hugo.^[164]

During the Romantic era, Shakespeare was praised by the poet and literary philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge; and the critic August Wilhelm Schlegel translated his plays in the spirit of German Romanticism.^[165] In the 19th century, critical admiration for Shakespeare's genius often bordered on adulation.^[166] "That King Shakespeare," the essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1840, "does not he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying signs; indestructible".^[167] The Victorians produced his plays as lavish spectacles on a grand scale.^[168] The playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw mocked the cult of Shakespeare worship as "bardolatry". He claimed that the new naturalism of Ibsen's plays had made Shakespeare obsolete.^[169]

The modernist revolution in the arts during the early 20th century, far from discarding Shakespeare, eagerly enlisted his work in the service of the avant-garde. The Expressionists in Germany and the Futurists in Moscow mounted productions of his plays. Marxist playwright and director Bertolt Brecht devised an epic theatre under the influence of Shakespeare. The poet and critic T. S. Eliot argued against Shaw that Shakespeare's "primitiveness" in fact made him truly modern.^[170] Eliot, along with G. Wilson Knight and the school of New Criticism, led a movement towards a closer reading of Shakespeare's imagery. In the 1950s, a wave of new critical approaches replaced modernism and paved the way for "post-modern" studies of Shakespeare.^[171] By the 1980s, Shakespeare studies were open to movements such as structuralism, feminism, New Historicism, African American studies, and queer studies.^[172]^[173]

Speculation about Shakespeare [link]

Authorship [link]

Main article: Shakespeare authorship question

Around 230 years after Shakespeare's death, doubts began to be expressed about the authorship of the works attributed to him.^[174] Proposed alternative candidates include Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.^[175] Several "group theories" have also been proposed.^[176] Only a small minority of academics believe there is reason to question the traditional attribution,^[177] but interest in the subject, particularly the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship, continues into the 21st century.^[178]

Religion [link]

Main article: William Shakespeare's religion

Some scholars claim that members of Shakespeare's family were Catholics, at a time when Catholic practice was against the law.^[179] Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, certainly came from a pious Catholic family. The strongest evidence might be a Catholic statement of faith signed by John Shakespeare, found in 1757 in the rafters of his former house in Henley Street. The document is now lost, however, and scholars differ as to its authenticity.^[180] In 1591 the authorities reported that John Shakespeare had missed church "for fear of process for debt", a common Catholic excuse.^[181] In 1606 the name of William's daughter Susanna appears on a list of those who failed to attend Easter communion in Stratford.^[181] Scholars find evidence both for and against Shakespeare's Catholicism in his plays, but the truth may be impossible to prove either way.^[182]

Sexuality [link]

Main article: Sexuality of William Shakespeare

Few details of Shakespeare's sexuality are known. At 18, he married the 26-year-old Anne Hathaway, who was pregnant. Susanna, the first of their three children, was born six months later on 26 May 1583. Over the centuries some readers have posited that Shakespeare's sonnets are autobiographical,^[183] and point to them as evidence of his love for a young man. Others read the same passages as the expression of intense friendship rather than sexual love.^[184] The 26 so-called "Dark Lady" sonnets, addressed to a married woman, are taken as evidence of heterosexual liaisons.^[185]

Portraiture [link]

Main article: Portraits of William Shakespeare

There is no written description of Shakespeare's physical appearance and no evidence that he ever commissioned a portrait, so the Droeshout engraving, which Ben Jonson approved of as a good likeness,^[186] and his Stratford monument provide the best evidence of his appearance. From the 18th century, the desire for authentic Shakespeare portraits fuelled claims that various surviving pictures depicted Shakespeare. That demand also led to the production of several fake portraits, as well as misattributions, repaintings and relabelling of portraits of other people.^[187]

List of works [link]

Further information: William Shakespeare bibliography and Chronology of Shakespeare's plays

Classification of the plays [link]

The Plays of William Shakespeare. By Sir John Gilbert, 1849.

Shakespeare's works include the 36 plays printed in the First Folio of 1623, listed below according to their folio classification as comedies, histories and tragedies.^[188] Two plays not included in the First Folio, The Two Noble Kinsmen and Pericles, Prince of Tyre, are now accepted as part of the canon, with scholars agreed that Shakespeare made a major contribution to their composition.^[189] No Shakespearean poems were included in the First Folio.

In the late 19th century, Edward Dowden classified four of the late comedies as romances, and though many scholars prefer to call them tragicomedies, his term is often used.^[190] These plays and the associated Two Noble Kinsmen are marked with an asterisk (*) below. In 1896, Frederick S. Boas coined the term "problem plays" to describe four plays: All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida and Hamlet.^[191] "Dramas as singular in theme and temper cannot be strictly called comedies or tragedies", he wrote. "We may therefore borrow a convenient phrase from the theatre of today and class them together as Shakespeare's problem plays."^[192] The term, much debated and sometimes applied to other plays, remains in use, though Hamlet is definitively classed as a tragedy.^[193] The other problem plays are marked below with a double dagger (‡).

Plays thought to be only partly written by Shakespeare are marked with a dagger (†) below. Other works occasionally attributed to him are listed as apocrypha.

Works [link]

Comedies

Main article: Shakespearean comedy

Histories

Main article: Shakespearean history

Tragedies

Main article: Shakespearean tragedy

Poems

Lost plays

Love's Labour's Won
The History of Cardenio †

Apocrypha

Main article: Shakespeare Apocrypha

v t e Early editions of William Shakespeare's works

Folios and Quartos	Foul papers List of Shakespeare plays in quarto Quarto Folio Bad quarto First Quarto First Folio Second Folio False Folio

Early editors	John Heminges Henry Condell Edward Knight

Publishers	Robert Allot William Aspley John Benson Edward Blount Cuthbert Burby Nathaniel Butter Philip Chetwinde Richard Hawkins Henry Herringman William Leake Richard Meighen Thomas Millington Thomas Pavier John Smethwick Thomas Thorpe Thomas Walkley John Waterson Andrew Wise

Printers	Edward Allde Thomas Cotes Thomas Creede George Eld Richard Field William Jaggard Augustine Matthews Nicholas Okes Peter Short Valentine Simmes William Stansby

Notes [link]

^ Dates follow the Julian calendar, used in England throughout Shakespeare's lifespan, but with the start of year adjusted to 1 January (see Old Style and New Style dates). Under the Gregorian calendar, adopted in Catholic countries in 1582, Shakespeare died on 3 May (Schoenbaum 1987, xv).
^ The "national cult" of Shakespeare, and the "bard" identification, dates from September 1769, when the actor David Garrick organised a week-long carnival at Stratford to mark the town council awarding him the freedom of the town. In addition to presenting the town with a statue of Shakespeare, Garrick composed a doggerel verse, lampooned in the London newspapers, naming the banks of the Avon as the birthplace of the "matchless Bard" (McIntyre 1999, 412–432).
^ The exact figures are unknown. See Shakespeare's collaborations and Shakespeare Apocrypha for further details.
^ Individual play dates and precise writing span are unknown. See Chronology of Shakespeare's plays for further details.
^ The Passionate Pilgrim, published under Shakespeare's name in 1599 without his permission, includes early versions of two of his sonnets, three extracts from Love's Labour's Lost, several poems known to be by other poets, and eleven poems of unknown authorship for which the attribution to Shakespeare has not been disproved (Wells et al. 2005, 805)

References [link]

^ Greenblatt 2005, 11; Bevington 2002, 1–3; Wells 1997, 399.
^ Dobson 1992, 185–186
^ Craig 2003, 3.
^ Shapiro 2005, xvii–xviii; Schoenbaum 1991, 41, 66, 397–98, 402, 409; Taylor 1990, 145, 210–23, 261–5
^ Chambers 1930, Vol. 1: 270–71; Taylor 1987, 109–134.
^ Bertolini 1993, 119.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 14–22.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 24–6.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 24, 296; Honan 1998, 15–16.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 23–24.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 62–63; Ackroyd 2006, 53; Wells et al. 2005, xv–xvi
^ Baldwin 1944, 464.
^ Baldwin 1944, 179-80, 183; Cressy 1975, 28, 29.
^ Baldwin 1944, 117.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 77–78.
^ Wood 2003, 84; Schoenbaum 1987, 78–79.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 93.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 94.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 224.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 95.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 97–108; Rowe 1709.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 144–45.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 110–11.
^ Honigmann 1999, 1; Wells et al. 2005, xvii
^ Honigmann 1999, 95–117; Wood 2003, 97–109.
^ Wells et al. 2005, 666
^ Chambers 1930, Vol. 1: 287, 292
^ Greenblatt 2005, 213.
^ ^a ^b Greenblatt 2005, 213; Schoenbaum 1987, 153.
^ Ackroyd 2006, 176.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 151–52
^ Wells 2006, 28; Schoenbaum 1987, 144–46; Chambers 1930, Vol. 1: 59.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 184.
^ Chambers 1923, 208–209.
^ Chambers 1930, Vol. 2: 67–71.
^ Bentley 1961, 36.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 188; Kastan 1999, 37; Knutson 2001, 17
^ Adams 1923, 275
^ Wells 2006, 28.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 200.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 200–201.
^ Rowe 1709.
^ Ackroyd 2006, 357; Wells et al. 2005, xxii
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 202–3.
^ Honan 1998, 121.
^ Shapiro 2005, 122.
^ Honan 1998, 325; Greenblatt 2005, 405.
^ ^a ^b Ackroyd 2006, 476.
^ Honan 1998, 382–83.
^ Honan 1998, 326; Ackroyd 2006, 462–464.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 272–274.
^ Honan 1998, 387.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 279.
^ Honan 1998, 375–78.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 276.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 25, 296.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 287.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 292, 294.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 304.
^ Honan 1998, 395–96.
^ Chambers 1930, Vol. 2: 8, 11, 104; Schoenbaum 1987, 296.
^ Chambers 1930, Vol. 2: 7, 9, 13; Schoenbaum 1987, 289, 318–19.
^ Charles Knight, 1842, in his notes on Twelfth Night, quoted in Schoenbaum 1991, 275.
^ Ackroyd 2006, 483; Frye 2005, 16; Greenblatt 2005, 145–6.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 301–3.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 306–07; Wells et al. 2005, xviii
^ BBC News 2008.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 306.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 308–10.
^ Cooper 2006, 48.
^ Thomson, Peter, "Conventions of Playwriting". in Wells & Orlin 2003, 49.
^ Frye 2005, 9; Honan 1998, 166.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 159–61; Frye 2005, 9.
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^ Ribner 2005, 154–155.
^ Frye 2005, 105; Ribner 2005, 67; Cheney 2004, 100.
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^ Frye 2005, 91; Honan 1998, 116–117; Werner 2001, 96–100.
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^ Ackroyd 2006, 235.
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^ Wood 2003, 205–206; Honan 1998, 258.
^ Ackroyd 2006, 359.
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^ Wood 2003, 161; Honan 1998, 206.
^ Ackroyd 2006, 353, 358; Shapiro 2005, 151–153.
^ Shapiro 2005, 151.
^ Bradley 1991, 85; Muir 2005, 12–16.
^ Bradley 1991, 94.
^ Bradley 1991, 86.
^ Bradley 1991, 40, 48.
^ Bradley 1991, 42, 169, 195; Greenblatt 2005, 304.
^ Bradley 1991, 226; Ackroyd 2006, 423; Kermode 2004, 141–2.
^ McDonald 2006, 43–46.
^ Bradley 1991, 306.
^ Ackroyd 2006, 444; McDonald 2006, 69–70; Eliot 1934, 59.
^ Dowden 1881, 57.
^ Dowden 1881, 60; Frye 2005, 123; McDonald 2006, 15.
^ Wells et al. 2005, 1247, 1279
^ Wells et al. 2005, xx
^ Wells et al. 2005, xxi
^ Shapiro 2005, 16.
^ Foakes 1990, 6; Shapiro 2005, 125–31.
^ Foakes 1990, 6; Nagler 1958, 7; Shapiro 2005, 131–2.
^ Wells et al. 2005, xxii
^ Foakes 1990, 33.
^ Ackroyd 2006, 454; Holland 2000, xli.
^ Ringler 1997, 127.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 210; Chambers 1930, Vol. 1: 341.
^ Shapiro 2005, 247–9.
^ ^a ^b Wells et al. 2005, 1247
^ Wells et al. 2005, xxxvii
^ Wells et al. 2005, xxxiv
^ Pollard 1909, xi.
^ Wells et al. 2005, xxxiv; Pollard 1909, xi; Maguire 1996, 28.
^ Bowers 1955, 8–10; Wells et al. 2005, xxxiv–xxxv
^ Wells et al. 2005, 909, 1153
^ Rowe 2006, 21.
^ Frye 2005, 288.
^ Rowe 2006, 3, 21.
^ Rowe 2006, 1; Jackson 2004, 267–294; Honan 1998, 289.
^ Rowe 2006, 1; Honan 1998, 289; Schoenbaum 1987, 327.
^ Wood 2003, 178; Schoenbaum 1987, 180.
^ Honan 1998, 180.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 268.
^ Honan 1998, 180; Schoenbaum 1987, 180.
^ Shakespeare 1914.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 268–269.
^ Wood 2003, 177.
^ Clemen 2005a, 150.
^ Frye 2005, 105, 177; Clemen 2005b, 29.
^ Brooke 2004, 69; Bradbrook 2004, 195.
^ Clemen 2005b, 63.
^ Frye 2005, 185.
^ ^a ^b Wright 2004, 868.
^ Bradley 1991, 91.
^ ^a ^b McDonald 2006, 42–6.
^ McDonald 2006, 36, 39, 75.
^ Gibbons 1993, 4.
^ Gibbons 1993, 1–4.
^ Gibbons 1993, 1–7, 15.
^ McDonald 2006, 13; Meagher 2003, 358.
^ Chambers 1944, 35.
^ Levenson 2000, 49–50.
^ Clemen 1987, 179.
^ Steiner 1996, 145.
^ Bryant 1998, 82.
^ Gross, John, "Shakespeare's Influence" in Wells & Orlin 2003, 641–2..
^ Paraisz 2006, 130.
^ Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon. New York, Riverhead Books, p.346
^ Cercignani 1981.
^ Crystal 2001, 55–65, 74.
^ Wain 1975, 194.
^ Johnson 2002, 12; Crystal 2001, 63.
^ Jonson 1996, 10.
^ Dominik 1988, 9; Grady 2001b, 267.
^ Grady 2001b, 265; Greer 1986, 9.
^ Grady 2001b, 266.
^ Grady 2001b, 269.
^ Dryden 1889, 71.
^ Grady 2001b, 270–27; Levin 1986, 217.
^ Dobson 1992 Cited by Grady 2001b, 270.
^ Grady 2001b, 272–274. Grady cites Voltaire's Philosophical Letters (1733); Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795); Stendhal's two-part pamphlet Racine et Shakespeare (1823–5); and Victor Hugo's prefaces to Cromwell (1827) and William Shakespeare (1864).
^ Levin 1986, 223.
^ Sawyer 2003, 113.
^ Carlyle 1907, 161.
^ Schoch 2002, 58–59.
^ Grady 2001b, 276.
^ Grady 2001a, 22–6.
^ Grady 2001a, 24.
^ Grady 2001a, 29.
^ Drakakis 1985, 16–17, 23–25
^ Shapiro 2010, 77-8.
^ Gibson 2005, 48, 72, 124.
^ McMichael & Glenn 1962, p. 56.
^ Did He or Didn’t He? That Is the Question, The New York Times, 22 April 2007
^ Kathman 2003, 620, 625–626; Love 2002, 194–209; Schoenbaum 1991, 430–40.
^ Pritchard 1979, 3.
^ Wood 2003, 75–8; Ackroyd 2006, 22–3.
^ ^a ^b Wood 2003, 78; Ackroyd 2006, 416; Schoenbaum 1987, 41–2, 286.
^ Wilson 2004, 34; Shapiro 2005, 167.
^ Lee 1900, 55
^ Casey; Pequigney 1985; Evans 1996, 132.
^ Fort 1927, 406–414.
^ Cooper 2006, 48, 57.
^ Schoenbaum 1981, 190.
^ Boyce 1996, 91, 193, 513..
^ Kathman 2003, 629; Boyce 1996, 91.
^ Edwards 1958, 1–10; Snyder & Curren-Aquino 2007.
^ Schanzer 1963, 1–10.
^ Boas 1896, 345.
^ Schanzer 1963, 1; Bloom 1999, 325–380; Berry 2005, 37.

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William Shakespeare

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Tragedies	Antony and Cleopatra Coriolanus Hamlet Julius Caesar King Lear Macbeth Othello Romeo and Juliet Timon of Athens Titus Andronicus Troilus and Cressida

Comedies	All's Well That Ends Well As You Like It The Comedy of Errors Cymbeline Love's Labour's Lost Measure for Measure The Merchant of Venice The Merry Wives of Windsor A Midsummer Night's Dream Much Ado About Nothing Pericles, Prince of Tyre The Taming of the Shrew The Tempest Twelfth Night The Two Gentlemen of Verona The Two Noble Kinsmen The Winter's Tale

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Plays	Sir Thomas More Cardenio (lost) Love's Labour's Won (lost) The Birth of Merlin Locrine The London Prodigal The Puritan The Second Maiden's Tragedy Double Falsehood Thomas of Woodstock Sir John Oldcastle Thomas Lord Cromwell A Yorkshire Tragedy Fair Em Mucedorus The Merry Devil of Edmonton Arden of Faversham Edmund Ironside Vortigern and Rowena Ireland Shakespeare forgeries

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Persondata
Name	Shakespeare, William
Alternative names
Short description	English poet and playwright
Date of birth	April 1564
Place of birth	Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England
Date of death	23 April 1616
Place of death	Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England

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Brion Gysin
File:Brion Gysin.jpg
Born	John Clifford Brian Gysin 19 January 1916 Taplow, England
Died	July 13, 1986(1986-07-13) (aged 70) Paris, France
Occupation	painter, writer, poet
Nationality	British/Canadian
Literary movement	Beat, Postmodern

Brion Gysin (January 19, 1916 – July 13, 1986) was a painter, writer, sound poet, and performance artist born in Taplow, Buckinghamshire.^[1]

He is best known for his discovery of the cut-up technique, used by his friend, the novelist William S. Burroughs. With the engineer Ian Sommerville he invented the Dreamachine, a flicker device designed as an art object to be viewed with the eyes closed. It was in painting and drawing, however, that Gysin devoted his greatest efforts, creating calligraphic works inspired by the cursive Japanese "grass" script and Arabic script. Burroughs later stated that "Brion Gysin was the only man I ever respected."^[2]

1 Biography
2 Burroughs on the Gysin cut-up
3 Influence
4 Quotes
5 Selected bibliography
- 5.1 Works
6 Sources
- 6.1 Print
  - 6.1.1 Primary sources
  - 6.1.2 Secondary sources
7 See also
8 References
9 External links

Biography [link]

Early years [link]

John Clifford Brian Gysin was born at Taplow House, England, a Canadian military hospital. His mother, Stella Margaret Martin, was a Canadian from Deseronto, Ontario. His father, Leonard Gysin, a captain with the Canadian Expeditionary Force, was killed in action eight months after his son's birth. Stella returned to Canada and settled in Edmonton, Alberta where her son became "the only Catholic day-boy at an Anglican boarding school".^[3] Graduating at fifteen, Gysin was sent to Downside School in Stratton-on-the-Fosse, near Bath, Somerset in England, a prestigious college known as "the Eton of Catholic public schools" run by the Benedictines.

Surrealism [link]

In 1934, he moved to Paris to study La Civilisation Française, an open course given at the Sorbonne where he made literary and artistic contacts through Marie Berthe Aurenche, Max Ernst's second wife.^[4] He joined the Surrealist Group and began frequenting Valentine Hugo, Leonor Fini, Salvador Dalí, Picasso and Dora Maar. A year later, he had his first exhibition at the Galerie Quatre Chemins in Paris with Ernst, Picasso, Hans Arp, Hans Bellmer, Victor Brauner, Giorgio de Chirico, Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte, Man Ray and Yves Tanguy. On the day of the preview, however, he was expelled from the Surrealist Group by André Breton who ordered the poet Paul Éluard to take down his pictures. Gysin was 19 years old. His biographer, John Geiger, suggests the arbitrary expulsion "had the effect of a curse. Years later, he blamed other failures on the Breton incident. It gave rise to conspiracy theories about the powerful interests who seek control of the art world. He gave various explanations for the expulsion, the more elaborate involving 'insubordination' or lèse majesté towards Breton".^[4]

After World War II [link]

After serving in the U.S. army during World War II, Gysin published a biography of Josiah "Uncle Tom" Henson titled, To Master, a Long Goodnight: The History of Slavery in Canada (1946). A gifted draughtsman, he took an 18-month course learning the Japanese language (including calligraphy) that would greatly influence his artwork. In 1949, he was among the first Fulbright Fellows. His goal: to research the history of slavery at the University of Bordeaux and in the Archivo de Indias in Seville, Spain, a project that he later abandoned. He moved to Tangier, Morocco after visiting the city with novelist and composer Paul Bowles in 1950.

Morocco and the Beat Hotel [link]

In 1954 in Tangier, Gysin opened a restaurant called The 1001 Nights, with his friend Mohamed Hamri, who was the cook. Gysin hired the Master Musicians of Jajouka from the village of Jajouka to perform alongside entertainment that included acrobats, a dancing boy and fire eaters.^[5]^[6] The musicians performed there for an international clientele that included William S. Burroughs. Gysin lost the business in 1958,^[7] and the restaurant closed permanently. That same year, Gysin returned to Paris, taking lodgings in a flophouse located at 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur that would become famous as the Beat Hotel. Working on a drawing, he discovered a Dada technique by accident:

William Burroughs and I first went into techniques of writing, together, back in room No. 15 of the Beat Hotel during the cold Paris spring of 1958... Burroughs was more intent on Scotch-taping his photos together into one great continuum on the wall, where scenes faded and slipped into one another, than occupied with editing the monster manuscript... Naked Lunch appeared and Burroughs disappeared. He kicked his habit with apomorphine and flew off to London to see Dr Dent, who had first turned him on to the cure. While cutting a mount for a drawing in room No. 15, I sliced through a pile of newspapers with my Stanley blade and thought of what I had said to Burroughs some six months earlier about the necessity for turning painters' techniques directly into writing. I picked up the raw words and began to piece together texts that later appeared as "First Cut-Ups" in Minutes to Go (Two Cities, Paris 1960).^[8]

When Burroughs returned from London in September 1959, Gysin not only shared his discovery with his friend but the new techniques he had developed for it. Burroughs then put the techniques to use while completing Naked Lunch and the experiment dramatically changed the landscape of American literature. Gysin helped Burroughs with the editing of several of his novels including Interzone, and wrote a script for a film version of Naked Lunch which was never produced. The pair collaborated on a large manuscript for Grove Press titled The Third Mind but it was determined that it would be impractical to publish it as originally envisioned. The book later published under that title incorporates little of this material. Interviewed for The Guardian in 1997, Burroughs explained that Gysin was "the only man that I've ever respected in my life. I've admired people, I've liked them, but he's the only man I've ever respected." ^[9] In 1969, Gysin completed his finest novel, The Process, a work judged by critic Robert Palmer as "a classic of 20th century modernism".^[10]

A consummate innovator, Gysin altered the cut-up technique to produce what he called permutation poems in which a single phrase was repeated several times with the words rearranged in a different order with each reiteration. An example of this is "I don't dig work, man/Man, work I don't dig." Many of these permutations were derived using a random sequence generator in an early computer program written by Ian Sommerville. Commissioned by the BBC in 1960 to produce material for broadcast, Gysin's results included "Pistol Poem", which was created by recording a gun firing at different distances and then splicing the sounds. That year, the piece was subsequently used as a theme for the Paris performance of Le Domaine Poetique, a showcase for experimental works by people like Gysin, François Dufrêne, Bernard Heidsieck, and Henri Chopin.

With Sommerville, he built the Dreamachine in 1961. Described as "the first art object to be seen with the eyes closed",^[11] the flicker device uses alpha waves in the 8-16 Hz range to produce a change of consciousness in receptive viewers.

Later years [link]

He also worked extensively with noted jazz soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy.

He recorded an album in 1986 with French musician Ramuntcho Matta, featuring himself singing/rapping his own texts, with performances by Don Cherry, Elli Medeiros, Steve Lacy, Lizzy Mercier Descloux and more. The album was reissued on CD in 1993 by Crammed Discs, under the title Self-Portrait Jumping.

As a joke, Gysin contributed a recipe for marijuana fudge to a cookbook by Alice B. Toklas; it was unintentionally included for publication, becoming famous under the name Alice B. Toklas brownies.^[12]

A heavily edited version of his novel, The Last Museum, was published posthumously in 1986 by Faber & Faber (London) and by Grove Press (New York).

Made an American Commander of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1985, Gysin died a year later of lung cancer on July 13, 1986. An obituary by Robert Palmer published in The New York Times fittingly described him as a man who "threw off the sort of ideas that ordinary artists would parlay into a lifetime career, great clumps of ideas, as casually as a locomotive throws off sparks".^[13]

Burroughs on the Gysin cut-up [link]

In a 1966 interview by Conrad Knickerbocker for The Paris Review, William S. Burroughs explained that Brion Gysin was, to his knowledge, "the first to create cut-ups".

INTERVIEWER: How did you become interested in the cut-up technique? BURROUGHS: A friend, Brion Gysin, an American poet and painter, who has lived in Europe for thirty years, was, as far as I know, the first to create cut-ups. His cut-up poem, Minutes to Go, was broadcast by the BBC and later published in a pamphlet. I was in Paris in the summer of 1960; this was after the publication there of Naked Lunch. I became interested in the possibilities of this technique, and I began experimenting myself. Of course, when you think of it, The Waste Land was the first great cut-up collage, and Tristan Tzara had done a bit along the same lines. Dos Passos used the same idea in 'The Camera Eye' sequences in USA. I felt I had been working toward the same goal; thus it was a major revelation to me when I actually saw it being done.^[14]

Influence [link]

According to José Férez Kuri, author of Brion Gysin: Tuning in to the Multimedia Age (2003) and co-curator of a major retrospective of the artist's work at The Edmonton Art Gallery in 1998, Gysin's wide range of "radical ideas would become a source of inspiration for artists of the Beat Generation, as well as for their successors (among them David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Keith Haring, and Laurie Anderson)".^[15] Other artists include Genesis P-Orridge, and Brian Jones.

Quotes [link]

This section is a candidate to be copied to Wikiquote using the Transwiki process.

"Writing is fifty years behind painting." ^[16]

"I enjoy inventing things out of fun. After all, life is a game, not a career." ^[17]

"I view life as a fortuitous collaboration ascribable to the fact that one finds oneself at the right place at the same time.^[18]

"The Way Is Nor This Nor That." ^[19]

"Writers don't own their words. Since when do words belong to anybody? 'Your very own words,' indeed! And who are you?"

- 'Cut-Ups Self-Explained' in Brion Gysin Let the Mice In ^[20]

"I may write only what I know in space: I am that I am."

- Notes on Painting ^[21]

"He covered tons of paper with his words and made them his very own words... he branded them like cattle he rustled out there on the free ranges of Literature... Used by another writer who was attempting cut-ups, one single word of Burroughs vocabulary could ruin a whole barrel of good everyday words, run the literary rot right through them. One sniff of that prose and you'd say, 'Why, that's a Burroughs.' "

- on the prose of William S. Burroughs in Here to Go: Planet R-101 (Interviews with Terry Wilson) ^[22]

"Of course the sands of Present Time are running out from under our feet. And why not? The Great Conundrum: 'What are we here for?' is all that ever held us here in the first place. Fear. The answer to the Riddle of the Ages has actually been out in the street since the First Step in Space. Who runs may read but few people run fast enough. What are we here for? Does the great metaphysical nut revolve around that? Well, I'll crack it for you, right now. What are we here for? We are here to go!"

- The Process ^[23]

"Language is an abominable misunderstanding which makes up a part of matter. The painters and the physicists have treated matter pretty well. The poets have hardly touched it. In March 1958, when I was living at the Beat Hotel, I proposed to Burroughs to at least make available to literature the means that painters have been using for fifty years. Cut words into pieces and scramble them. You'll hear someone draw a bow-string. Who runs may read, To read better, practice your running. Speed is entirely up to us, since machines have delivered us from the horse. Henceforth the question is to deliver us from that other so-called superior animal, man. It's not worth it to chase out the merchants: their temple is dedicated to the unsuitable lie of the value of the Unique. The crime of separation gave birth to the idea of the Unique which would not be separate. In painting, matter has seen everything: from sand to stuffed goats. Disfigured more and more, the image has been geometrically multiplied to a dizzying degree. A snow of advertising could fall from the sky, and only collector babies and the chimpanzees who make abstract paintings would bother to pick one up."

- Cut-Ups: A Project for Disastrous Success

"I Am the Artist when I am Open. When I am closed I am Brion Gysin."^[24]

Selected bibliography [link]

Gysin is the subject of John Geiger's biography, Nothing Is True Everything Is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin, and features in Chapel of Extreme Experience: A Short History of Stroboscopic Light and the Dream Machine, also by Geiger. Man From Nowhere: Storming the Citadels of Enlightenment with William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, a biographical study of Burroughs and Gysin with a collection of homages to Gysin, was authored by Joe Ambrose, Frank Rynne, and Terry Wilson with contributions by Marianne Faithfull, John Cale, William S. Burroughs, John Giorno, Stanley Booth, Bill Laswell, Mohamed Hamri, Keith Haring and Paul Bowles. A monograph on Gysin was published in 2003 by Thames and Hudson.

Works [link]

Prose

To Master, A Long Goodnight: The History of Slavery in Canada (1946)
Minutes to Go (1960)
The Exterminator (1960)
The Process (1969)
Brion Gysin Let The Mice In (1973)
The Third Mind (1978)
Here To Go: Planet R-101 (first published 1982)
Stories (1984)
The Last Museum (1985)

Radio

Pistol Poem (1960)
Permutations (1960)
I Am (1960)
No Poets (1962)
Junk is No Good Baby (1962)

Cinema

Scenario to Naked Lunch (1973)

Music

Junk (1985)
Self-Portrait Jumping (with Ramuntcho Matta, Don Cherry, Steve Lacy) (1993)

Painting

Les deux faux interlocuteurs, Gradiva Rediviva Zoe Bertgang, and Signe dans le paysage (Surrealist ink drawings, 1935)
Sahara Sand (1958)
The Songs of Marrakech (1959)
Unit II pink, Unit III yellow, Unit IV orange, Unit V blue (1961)
Francis in the Beat Hotel (1962)
For a Stained-Glass Window in Rheims (1963)
Roller Poem (1971)
Calligraffiti of Fire (1986)

Gysin, Brion. To Master, A Long Goodnight: The History of Slavery in Canada. Creative Age Press, New York 1946.
—. Minutes to Go (with Sinclair Beiles, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso). Two Cities Editions, Paris 1960.
—. The Exterminator (with William S. Burroughs). Auerhahn Press, San Francisco 1960.
—. The Process. Doubleday, New York 1969. Overlook Press, New York 1987.
—. Brion Gysin Let The Mice In (with William S. Burroughs, Ian Sommerville). Ed. Jan Herman. Something Else Press, West Glover, VT, 1973.
—. The Third Mind (with William S. Burroughs). Viking, New York 1978.
—. Here To Go: Planet R-101. Interviews with Terry Wilson. Quartet Books, London 1982. Creation Books, London 2003.
—. Stories. Inkblot Publications, Oakland 1984.
—. The Last Museum. Grove Press, New York 1986.
—. Who Runs May Read. Inkblot/Xochi, Oakland/Brisbane: Inkblot/Xochi, 2000.
—. Back in No Time: The Brion Gysin Reader. Ed. Jason Weiss. Wesleyan University Press, 2001.

Secondary sources [link]

Kuri, José Férez, ed. Brion Gysin: Tuning in to the Multimedia Age. London: Thames & Hudson, 2003. ISBN 0-500-28438-5
Geiger, John. Nothing Is True Everything Is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin. Disinformation Company, 2005. ISBN 1-932857-12-5
Geiger, John. Chapel of Extreme Experience: A Short History of Stroboscopic Light and the Dream Machine. Soft Skull Press, 2003.
Ambrose, Joe, Frank Rynne, and Terry Wilson. Man From Nowhere: Storming the Citadels of Enlightenment with William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Williamsburg: Autonomedia, 1992
Vale, V. William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Throbbing Gristle. San Francisco: V/Search, 1982. ISBN 0-9650469-1-5

References [link]

^ Geiger, John (2005). Nothing Is True - Everything Is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin. The Disinformation Company. pp. 130. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/19328571251|19328571251]].
^ Burroughs, William. "Introduction." in Man from Nowhere: Storming the Citadels of Enlightenment with William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Ambrose, Joe, Frank Rynne, Terry Wilson. Dublin: Sublimin, 1992, n.p.
^ Cf. John Geiger's biographical essay on Gysin titled, 'Brion Gysin: His Life and Times' in Brion Gysin: Tuning into the Multimedia Age, ed. José Férez Kuri (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003), p. 201.
^ ^a ^b Cf. John Geiger, 'Brion Gysin: His Life and Times' in Brion Gysin: Tuning into the Multimedia Age, p. 204.
^ Greene, Michelle, The Dream at the End of the World, (New York, 1991), p. 123, p. 201
^ Geiger, John, Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted: the Life of Brion Gysin, (New York, 2005), p. 103
^ In his essay "Cut-Ups: A Project for Disastrous Success," Gysin explains that "on January 5, 1958, I lost the business over a signature given to a friendly American couple who 'wanted to help me out.' I was out with the shirt on my back." in A Williams Burroughs Reader, ed. John Calder (London: Picador, 1982), p. 276.
^ Brion Gysin: Cut-Ups: A Project for Disastrous Success, published in Evergreen Review and much later in [Brion Gysin] Let the Mice In, Something Else Press, West Clover 1973; also in the A Williams Burroughs Reader, John Calder (editor), Picador, London 1982, p. 272.
^ The Guardian, January 18, 1997.
^ From Palmer's forward to the novel published by The Overlook Press in 1987.
^ Quoted on coverflap of Tuning in to the Multimedia Age.
^ Biographer John Geiger writes that Gysin's restaurant, The 1001 Nights provided him "with an entrée into Tangiers society. His Moroccan culinary delights even merited an entry in Alice B. Toklas's famous cookbook, with a recipe for hashish fudge. Toklas, however, had no idea what the mysterious ingredient - cannabis - was, protesting later 'of course I didn't know the Latin name'." Cf. John Geiger, 'Brion Gysin: His Life and Times' in Brion Gysin: Tuning into the Multimedia Age, p. 213.
^ Cf. John Geiger, 'Brion Gysin: His Life and Times' in Brion Gysin: Tuning into the Multimedia Age, p. 227.
^ Knickerbocker, Conrad, Burroughs, Williams S., 'The Paris Review Interview with William S. Burroughs' in A Williams Burroughs Reader, ed. John Calder (London: Picador, 1982), p. 263.
^ Kuri, Tuning in to the Multimedia Age, coverflap.
^ Gysin quoted in Brion Gysin: Tuning in to the Multimedia Age, ed. José Férez Kuri (Thames & Hudson, London, 2003), p. 153.
^ Tuning in to the Multimedia Age, p. 4.
^ Tuning in to the Multimedia Age, p. 9.
^ Tuning in to the Multimedia Age, p. 10.
^ Tuning in to the Multimedia Age, p. 153.
^ Tuning in to the Multimedia Age, p. 96.
^ Tuning in to the Multimedia Age, p. 159.
^ Tuning in to the Multimedia Age, p. 49.
^ Tuning in to the Multimedia Age, back cover.

External links [link]

Works by or about Brion Gysin in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
UBU Sound Article on Brion Gysin
Extrageographic Magazine article What Does Brion Gysin's Art Mean?
Cutup The Burroughs & Gysin Non-Linear Adding Machine
The Master Musicians of Jajouka led by Bachir Attar Official website
Master Musicians of Joujouka Official website
Village Voice Review of Back in No Time: A Brion Gysin Reader (2001)
Perilous Passages Terry Wilson's account of his "lifetime apprenticeship" with Brion Gysin
William Burroughs's letter on Gysin and Jajouka
Interzone documentation on the Dream Machine and free Dream Machine plans
Official website of FLicKeR a film on Brion Gysin and the Dream Machine based on Geiger's book
The Third Mind at Le Palais de Tokyo by Joseph Nechvatal
A page on the Self-Portrait Jumping album, including audio excerpts
Authentic Dreamachines
Brion Gysin Tribute

Persondata
Name	Gysin, Brion
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	January 19, 1916
Place of birth	Taplow, England
Date of death	July 13, 1986
Place of death	Paris, France

This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brion_Gysin

This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.

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Burroughs, William S. Filmography

Born: 1914-02-05

Died: 1997-08-02

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