The Beats by David Sterritt

Author:David Sterritt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

5. “The Death of Mrs. D,” a mixed-media collage by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs. Named for a character in Nova Express, the third novel in Burroughs’s ambitious Nova trilogy, this work reflects Burroughs’s intense fascination with cut-and-paste aesthetics, which played a powerful role in shaping his prose as well as the visual art that he and Gysin created together.

Burroughs lived mainly in London during the 1960s, working with Gysin and the mathematician Ian Sommerville on various projects, and collaborating with the filmmaker Antony Balch on the 1963 movie Towers Open Fire and other underground shorts. In 1971 Burroughs published Ali’s Smile: Naked Scientology, a book comprising a short story and a number of essays and articles related to the Church of Scientology, which he had joined a few years earlier in the hope that its combative stance toward culturally induced thought and behavior might be a useful weapon against the control mechanisms that he believed are ubiquitous in modern society. But by 1970 he concluded that Scientology itself amounted to an authoritarian system, even though some of its ideas and practices could be useful in the search for mental freedom. Literature, he decided, is the best battleground on which to fight and conquer the tyranny of language.

Returning to New York in 1974, Burroughs became a part-time English professor and read from his books on stages across the country. By the time Cities of the Red Night appeared in 1981 he was back on heroin, and partly to overcome this setback he relocated to the Midwest, where he moved more deeply into visual art with his literally explosive “shotgun paintings,” created by shooting at paint cans positioned in front of canvases. He finished his last novel, The Western Lands, in 1987. He also participated in new collaborations—with the stage director Robert Wilson, Tom Waits, and Keith Haring, among others—and oversaw the publication of his journals and other overlooked texts. He died in Lawrence, Kansas, on August 2, 1997, at the age of eighty-three, living far longer than skeptics had ever thought possible for the most incorrigible bad boy of the Beats.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.