et cetera, et cetera 英文人行道: Hub & Store. William S. Burroughs. I am a snake and a tiptoe feather at opposite ends of the scales as they balance themselves against each other.

2024年12月26日星期四

Hub & Store. William S. Burroughs. I am a snake and a tiptoe feather at opposite ends of the scales as they balance themselves against each other.

William S. Burroughs & Beats Quotes

THERE ARE HILLS LIKE SHARKFINS
and clods of mud.
The mind drifts through
in the shape of a museum,
in the guise of a museum
dreaming dead friends:
Jim, Tom, Emmet, Bill.
—Like billboards their huge faces droop
and stretch on the walls,
on the walls of the cliffs out there,
where trees with white trunks
makes plumes on rock ridges.

My mind is fingers holding a pen.

Trees with white trunks
make plumes on rock ridges.
Rivers of sand are memories.
Memories make movies
on the dust of the desert.
Hawks with pale bellies
perch on the cactus,
their bodies are portholes
to other dimensions.

This might go on forever.

I am a snake and a tiptoe feather
at opposite ends of the scales
as they balance themselves
against each other.
This might go on forever.

“Mexico Seen from the Moving Car” by Michael McClure
William S. Burroughs & Beats 語錄
有著像魚翅的山丘和泥塊。思緒飄過以博物館的形式，以博物館的名義夢見死去的朋友：吉姆、湯姆、艾米特、比爾。——像廣告看板一樣，他們巨大的臉龐低垂下來並在牆上伸展，在那兒的懸崖峭壁上，那裡有白色樹幹的樹在岩脊上產生羽毛。
我的思緒是握著筆的手指。
有白色樹幹的樹在岩石山脊上製作羽毛。沙河是回憶。回憶拍電影落在沙漠的塵土上。腹部蒼白的鷹棲息在仙人掌上，他們的身體是舷窗到其他維度。
這可能會永遠持續下去。
我是一條蛇和一根腳尖的羽毛在天平的兩端當他們平衡自己時互相對抗。這可能會永遠持續下去。
麥克盧爾的《從行駛的汽車中看到的墨西哥》

“Sangre de Cristo! Blood of Christ! Rivers of blood! Mountains of blood! Does Christ never get tired of bleeding?”

― William S. Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads

William Seward Burroughs II (/ˈbʌroʊz/; February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American writer and visual artist. He is widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular culture and literature.^[2]^[3]^[4] Burroughs wrote 18 novels and novellas, six collections of short stories, and four collections of essays. Five books of his interviews and correspondences have also been published. He was initially briefly known by the pen name William Lee. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, made many appearances in films, and created and exhibited thousands of visual artworks, including his celebrated "shotgun art".^[5]

Burroughs was born into a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri. He was a grandson of inventor William Seward Burroughs I, who founded the Burroughs Corporation, and a nephew of public relations manager Ivy Lee.

Burroughs attended Harvard University, where he studied English, then anthropology as a postgraduate, and went on to medical school in Vienna. In 1942, he enlisted in the U.S. Army to serve during World War II. After being turned down by both the Office of Strategic Services and the Navy, he veered into substance abuse, beginning with morphine and developing a heroin addiction that would affect him for the rest of his life.

In 1943, while living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. This liaison would become the foundation of the Beat Generation, later a defining influence on the 1960s counterculture.

Burroughs found success with his confessional first novel, Junkie (1953), but is perhaps best known for his third novel, Naked Lunch (1959). It became the subject of one of the last major literary censorship cases in the United States after its US publisher, Grove Press, was sued for violating a Massachusetts obscenity statute.

Burroughs is believed to have killed his second wife, Joan Vollmer, in 1951 in Mexico City. He initially claimed that he had accidentally shot her while drunkenly attempting a "William Tell" stunt.^[6] He later told investigators that he had been showing his pistol to friends when it fell and hit the table, firing the bullet that killed Vollmer.^[7] After he fled Mexico back to the United States, he was convicted of manslaughter in absentia and received a two-year suspended sentence.

Much of Burroughs' work is highly experimental and features unreliable narrators, but it is also semi-autobiographical, often drawing from his experiences as a heroin addict. He lived at various times in Mexico City, London, Paris, and the Tangier International Zone in Morocco, and traveled in the Amazon rainforest — and featured these places in many of his novels and stories. With Brion Gysin, Burroughs popularized the cut-up, an aleatory literary technique, featuring heavily in such works of his as The Nova Trilogy (1961–1964). His writing also engages frequent mystical, occult, or otherwise magical themes, constant preoccupations in both his fiction and real life.^[4]^[8]

In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1984, he was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France.^[9] Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the "greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift";^[10] he owed this reputation to his "lifelong subversion"^[11] 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."^[10]