The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs

The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs PDF Author: Matthew Levi Stevens
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781906958640
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
"In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen. The dogma of science is that the will cannot possibly affect external forces, and I think that's just ridiculous. It's as bad as the church. My viewpoint is the exact contrary of the scientific viewpoint. I believe that if you run into somebody in the street it's for a reason. Among primitive people they say that if someone was bitten by a snake he was murdered. I believe that." -- William S Burroughs Fully revised and expanded from the limited edition chapbook that first appeared in 2012, this is the first ever in-depth consideration of the significance of Magic and the Occult in the Life & Work of the writer and counter-cultural icon.

The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs

The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs PDF Author: Matthew Levi Stevens
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781906958640
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Get Book

Book Description
"In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen. The dogma of science is that the will cannot possibly affect external forces, and I think that's just ridiculous. It's as bad as the church. My viewpoint is the exact contrary of the scientific viewpoint. I believe that if you run into somebody in the street it's for a reason. Among primitive people they say that if someone was bitten by a snake he was murdered. I believe that." -- William S Burroughs Fully revised and expanded from the limited edition chapbook that first appeared in 2012, this is the first ever in-depth consideration of the significance of Magic and the Occult in the Life & Work of the writer and counter-cultural icon.

The Western Lands

The Western Lands PDF Author: William S. Burroughs
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0140094563
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
From the legendary author of Naked Lunch, the conclusion of his trilogy that includes Cities of the Red Night and Palace of Dead Roads The Western Land is legendary Beat writer William S. Burrough’s profound, revealing, and often astonishing meditation on morality, loneliness, life, and death -- a Book of the Dead for the nuclear age. "Burrough's visionary power, his comic genius, and his unerring ability to crack the codes that make up the life of this century are undimished." -- J.G. Ballard, Washington Post Book World

Observed While Falling

Observed While Falling PDF Author: Malcolm McNeill
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781606995617
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Observed While Falling is an account of the personal and creative interaction that defined the collaboration between the writer William S. Burroughs and the artist Malcolm McNeill on the graphic novel Ah Pook is Here. The memoir chronicles the events that surrounded it, the reasons it was abandoned and the unusual circumstances that brought it back to life. McNeill describes his growing friendship with Burroughs and how their personal relationship affected their creative partnership. The book is written with insight and humor, and is liberally sprinkled with the kind of outré anecdotes one would expect working with a writer as original and eccentric as Burroughs. It confirms Burroughs' and McNeill's prescience, the place of Ah Pook in relation to the contemporary graphic novel, and its anticipation of the events surrounding 2012. McNeill expounds on the lessons of that experience to bring Ah Pook into present time.

Everything Lost

Everything Lost PDF Author: William S. Burroughs
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780814253830
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
In late summer 1953, as he returned to Mexico City after an expedition through Latin America, William Burroughs began a notebook of reflections. This notebook, the sole survivor from that period, reveals Burroughs as a man staring down personal catastrophe and visions of looming cultural disaster.

Junky

Junky PDF Author: William S. Burroughs
Publisher: Penguin Books, Limited (UK)
ISBN: 9780141045405
Category : American fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
'Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to increased enjoyment in life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life.' Burrough's cult classic is a raw, semi-autobiographical account of drug addiction, which outraged America and influenced generations of writers to come. He relates with unflinching realism the highs and lows of dependency- euphoria, hallucinations, ghostly nocturnal wanderings and strange sexual encounters. Junkyis a dark, powerful and mesmerizing account of one man's challenge to turn self-destruction into art.

Call Me Burroughs

Call Me Burroughs PDF Author: Barry Miles
Publisher: Twelve
ISBN: 1455511943
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 676

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Book Description
Fifty years ago, Norman Mailer asserted, "William Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius." Few since have taken such literary risks, developed such individual political or spiritual ideas, or spanned such a wide range of media. Burroughs wrote novels, memoirs, technical manuals, and poetry. He painted, made collages, took thousands of photographs, produced hundreds of hours of experimental recordings, acted in movies, and recorded more CDs than most rock bands. Burroughs was the original cult figure of the Beat Movement, and with the publication of his novel Naked Lunch, which was originally banned for obscenity, he became a guru to the 60s youth counterculture. In Call Me Burroughs, biographer and Beat historian Barry Miles presents the first full-length biography of Burroughs to be published in a quarter century-and the first one to chronicle the last decade of Burroughs's life and examine his long-term cultural legacy. Written with the full support of the Burroughs estate and drawing from countless interviews with figures like Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, and Burroughs himself, Call Me Burroughs is a rigorously researched biography that finally gets to the heart of its notoriously mercurial subject.

The Adding Machine

The Adding Machine PDF Author: William S. Burroughs
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802121950
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
"Sheer pleasure. . . . Wonderfully entertaining."--Chicago Sun-Times Acclaimed by Norman Mailer more than twenty years ago as "possibly the only American writer of genius," William S. Burroughs has produced a body of work unique in our time. In these scintillating essays, he writes wittily and wisely about himself, his interests, his influences, his friends and foes. He offers candid and not always flattering assessments of such diverse writers as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Samuel Beckett, and Marcel Proust. He ruminates on science and the often dubious paths into which it seems intent on leading us, whether into outer or inner space. He reviews his reviewers, explains his famous "cut-up" method, and discusses the role coincidence has played in his life and work. As satirist and parodist, William Burroughs has no peer, as these varied works, written over three decades, amply reveal.

Retaking The Universe

Retaking The Universe PDF Author: Davis Schneiderman
Publisher: Pluto Press
ISBN: 9780745320816
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
William S. Burroughs is one of America's most influential and widely studied writers. A leading member of the Beat movement, his books and essays continue to attract a wide readership. His films, paintings, recordings and other projects that grew out of his literary production, together with his iconic persona as a counter-culture (anti-)hero, mean his work has become a broad cultural phenomenon. This collection of essays by leading scholars offers an interdisciplinary consideration of Burroughs's art. It links his lived experience to his many major prose works written from 1953 on, as well his sound, cinema and media projects. Moving beyond the merely literary, the contributors argue for the continuing social and political relevance of Burroughs's work for the emerging global order. Themes include: Burroughs and contemporary theory; debates on 'reality'; violence; magic and mysticism ; cybernetic cultures; language and technology; control and transformation; transgression and addiction; the limits of prose; image politics and the avant-garde.

William S. Burroughs Cutting Up the Century

William S. Burroughs Cutting Up the Century PDF Author: Joan Hawkins
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253041368
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 457

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Book Description
William S. Burroughs Cutting Up the Century is the definitive book on Burroughs’ overarching cut-up project and its relevance to the American twentieth century. Burroughs’s Nova Trilogy (The Soft Machine, Nova Express, and The Ticket That Exploded) remains the best-known of his textual cut-up creations, but he committed more than a decade of his life to searching out multimedia for use in works of collage. By cutting up, folding in, and splicing together newspapers, magazines, letters, book reviews, classical literature, audio recordings, photographs, and films, Burroughs created an eclectic and wide-ranging countercultural archive. This collection includes previously unpublished work by Burroughs such as cut-ups of work written by his son, cut-ups of critical responses to his own work, collages on the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, excerpts from his dream journals, and some of the few diary entries that Burroughs wrote about his wife, Joan. William S. Burroughs Cutting Up the Century also features original essays, interviews, and discussions by established Burroughs scholars, respected artists, and people who encountered Burroughs. The essays consider Burroughs from a range of starting points—literary studies, media studies, popular culture, gender studies, post-colonialism, history, and geography. Ultimately, the collection situates Burroughs as a central artist and thinker of his time and considers his insights on political and social problems that have become even more dire in ours.

Real Magic

Real Magic PDF Author: Isaac Bonewits
Publisher: Weiser Books
ISBN: 9780877286882
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Examines every category of occult phenomena from ESP to Eastern ritual and explores the basic laws of magic, relating them to the natural laws of the universe.