William S Burroughs

[DadaDodo]

I have read Junky and Queer recently and now I am slowly working my way through Naked Lunch. There is something very strange I get from looking at his pictures...Obviously he did awful abuse to his body during his life, but he does not look like just an old drug addict to me...I have seen him typed as INTp, INFp and INTj, and so I was interested in some other people's opinions. What do you think?

[diamond]

intj

[oyburger]

I also tend to think INTj.

[Gilly]

INFj is my guess.

[JuJu]

I agree with Gilligan--INFJ.

[DadaDodo]

So, we have two votes for INTj and two for INFj...It would be helpful if people would describe their reasoning for the type they said. Myself, I'm not sure if I think he was Judging...He seems to have just wandered through his life until he shot his common law wife and felt like he had to write...Also, from his first couple books, he seems more T in Junky, but more F in Queer. Most popular accounts depict him as sort of a cold hard person...In the end, maybe we should just say he was a crosstype? I don't know.

[Joy]

DadaDodo? any relation to gugubaba?

[HERO]

William S. Burroughs

Here are the quotes:

- from My Education: A Book of Dreams by William S. Burroughs (published in 1995); pp. 6-8: Thoughts that arise palpable as a haze from the pages of Jean Genet's Prisoner of Love.
I have never felt close to any cause or people, so I envy from a distance of incomprehension those who speak of "my people." Jews, blacks, Palestinians, Chinese . . . But to affiliate myself with any such aggregate would be an act of brazen dilettantism that I could not begin to carry off. I would be immediately seen as an impostor and categorized as a spy. They would see through the sham at once. I am the worst of all liars, not through any principles of integrity, but through a basic disability. Lies just are not in me and neither is the truth. I could never have been a politician or a swindler, and of all people the most basically antagonistic are the WASPs with whom I was raised.
Ivy Lee, public relations expert for the Rockefeller family, was my uncle. And he hated me at first sight. His son James still refers to me as "that son of a bitch!" in the same tone as the Israelis speak of Dr. Mengele because they never succeeded in finding him. Mendel, or is it Mengle? I can never get names straight. Why? Because I have no name. And the arbiters of destiny decided that I would not be allowed to profit from an assumed name. My last bequest from the Burroughs estate was $10,000. And very welcome at the time.

Genet is concerned with betrayal, to me a meaningless concept, like patriotism. I have nothing and nobody to betray and in consequence I am incorrigibly honest.
My criminal activities (minimal to be sure) were as hopelessly inept as my efforts to hold a job in an advertising agency or any other regular job.
Ted Morgan's biography starts with a basic misconception: Literary Outlaw. To be an outlaw you must first have a base in law to reject and get out of. I never had such a base. I never had a place I could call home that meant any more than a key to a house, apartment, or hotel room. This position or lack of position is incomprehensible to a French aristocrat like Sanche de Gramont. For the aristocrat is formed, limited, and defined by a little piece of earth that he is from. The aristocrat, the landowner, even more than the peasant who tills the land. The farmer can leave the land. The aristocrat may change his name but he will always carry the earth inside him. Speaking of black holes, Sanche said: "I would have to know what the cuisine is like." And I thought, "You are really earthbound." Cuisine! The aliens that have been contacted it seems have no stomachs.
Am I an alien? Alien from what exactly? Perhaps my home is the dream city, more real than my so-called waking life precisely because it has no relation to waking life. In the hotel room I was afraid I would wake up and find it was all a dream, my ability to levitate, but I was afraid of waking up in that bed in that hotel room, not in my room here in Lawrence. A gray haze permeates the city and there is no discernible light source, but I can see a reasonable distance. A twilight haze that has no relation to time of day. In fact there is no time here. The hideous woman who came into my room was always hideous, she did not get that way from age and length of time.

Brion Gysin was the only man I have ever respected. One of the attributes that I respected was his unfailing and dazzling tact, which is one reason why he was blocked and distrusted by the haute monde. He had no right to outdo them in manners. But the "socially prominent" have insulated themselves from the source of tact, which is discernment and perception. Meeting a stranger he, or more likely she, will immediately try to determine the stranger's "social position." There is no more degrading force than snobbery...


- from Naked Lunch (50th Anniversary Edition) by William S. Burroughs [The Restored Text (edited by James Grauerholz and Barry Miles)]; pp. 8-9:

the vigilante

The Vigilante copped out as a schizo possession case:
"I was standing outside myself trying to stop those hangings with ghost fingers . . . I am a ghost wanting what every ghost wants--a body--after the Long Time moving through odorless alleys of space where no life is, only the colorless no smell of death . . . Nobody can breathe and smell it through pink convolutions of gristle laced with crystal snot, time shit and black blood filters of flesh."
He stood there in elongated court room shadow, his face torn like a broken film by lusts and hungers of larval organs stirring in the tentative ectoplasmic flesh of junk kick (ten days on ice at time of the First Hearing), flesh that fades at the first silent touch of junk.

- p. 11: The Rube's attacks become an habitual condition. Cops, doormen, dogs, secretaries snarl at his approach. The blond God has fallen to untouchable vileness. Con men don't change, they break, shatter--explosions of matter in cold interstellar space, drift away in cosmic dust, leave the empty body behind. Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat: The Mark Inside . . .
...Chicago: invisible hierarchy of decorticated ***s, smell of atrophied gangsters, earthbound ghost hits you at North and Halsted, Cicero, Lincoln Park, panhandler of dreams, past invading the present, rancid magic of slot machines and roadhouses.
Into the Interior: a vast subdivision, antennae of television to the meaningless sky. In lifeproof houses they hover over the young, sop up a little of what they shut out. Only the young bring anything in, and they are not young very long. (Through the bars of East St. Louis lies the dead frontier, riverboat days.) Illinois and Missouri, miasma of mound-building peoples, groveling worship of the Food Source, cruel and ugly festivals, dead-end horror of the Centipede God reaches from Moundville to the lunar deserts of coastal Peru.
America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.

- p. 12: And the U.S. drag closes around us like no other drag in the world, worse than the Andes, high mountain towns, cold wind down from postcard mountains, thin air like death in the throat, river towns of Ecuador, malaria grey as junk under black Stetson, muzzle loading shotguns, vultures pecking through the mud streets--and what hits you when you get off the Malmo Ferry (no juice tax on the ferry) in Sweden knocks all that cheap, tax free juice right out of you and brings you all the way down: averted eyes and the cemetery in the middle of town (every town in Sweden seems to be built around a cemetery), and nothing to do in the afternoon, not a bar not a movie and I blasted my last stick of Tangier tea and I said, "K.E. let's get right back on that ferry."
But there is no drag like U.S. drag. You can't see it, you don't know where it comes from. Take one of those cocktail lounges at the end of a subdivision street--every block of houses has its own bar and drugstore and market and liquor store. You walk in and it hits you. But where does it come from? Not the bartender, not the customers, nor the cream-colored plastic rounding the bar stools, nor the dim neon. Not even the TV.
And our habits build up with the drag, like cocaine will build you up staying ahead of the C bring-down.

- p. 14: Something falls off you when you cross the border into Mexico, and suddenly the landscape hits you straight with nothing between you and it, desert and mountains and vultures; little wheeling specks and others so close you can hear wings cut the air (a dry husking sound), and when they spot something they pour out of the blue sky, that shattering bloody blue sky of Mexico, down in a black funnel . . . Drove all night, came at dawn to a warm misty place, barking dogs and the sound of running water.

- p. 17: In Mexico the gimmick is to find a local junky with a government script whereby they are allowed a certain quantity every month. Our Man was Old Ike who had spent most of his life in the States.
We are getting some C on Rx at this time. Shoot it in the mainline, son. You can smell it going in, clean and cold in your nose and throat then a rush of pure pleasure right through the brain lighting up those C connections. Your head shatters in white explosions. Ten minutes later you want another shot . . . you will walk across town for another shot. But if you can't score for C you eat, sleep and forget about it.
This is a yen of the brain alone, a need without feeling and without body, earthbound ghost need, rancid ectoplasm swept out by an old junky coughing and spitting in the sick morning.

- p. 22: "The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.
"Ever pop coke in the mainline? It hits you right in the brain, activating connections of pure pleasure. The pleasure of morphine is in the viscera. You listen down into yourself after a shot. But C is electricity through the brain, and the C yen is of the brain alone, a need without body and without feeling. The C-charged brain is a berserk pinball machine, flashing blue and pink lights in electric orgasm. C pleasure could be felt by a thinking machine, the first stirrings of hideous insect life. The craving for C lasts only a few hours, as long as the C channels are stimulated. Of course the effect of C could be produced by an electric current activating the C channels . . .
"So after a bit the channels wear out like veins, and the addict has to find new ones. A vein will come back in time, and by adroit vein rotation a junky can piece out the odds if he don't become an oil burner. But brain cells don't come back once they're gone, and when the addict runs out of brain cells he is in a terrible fucking position.

- p. 26: (Nutmeg. I quote from the author's article on narcotic drugs in the British Journal of Addiction (see Appendix): "Convicts and sailors sometimes have recourse to nutmeg. About a tablespoon is swallowed with water. Result vaguely similar to marijuana with side effects of headache and nausea.... There are a number of narcotics of the nutmeg family in use among the Indians of South America. They are usually administered by sniffing a dried powder of the plant. The medicine men take these noxious substances and go into convulsive states. Their twitchings and mutterings are thought to have prophetic significance.")

- pp. 29-30: The patients stand in groups talking and spitting on the floor. Junk hangs in the air like a grey haze.
"A heart-warming sight," says Benway, "those junkies standing around waiting for the Man. Six months ago they were all schizophrenic. Some of them hadn't been out of bed for years. Now look at them. In all the course of my practices, I have never seen a schizophrenic junky, and junkies are mostly of the schizo physical type. Want to cure anybody of anything, find out who doesn't have it. So who don't got it? Junkies don't got it. Oh, incidentally, there's an area in Bolivia with no psychosis. Right sane folk in them hills. Like to get in there, me, before it is loused up by literacy, advertising, TV and drive-ins. Make a study strictly from metabolism: diet, use of drugs and alcohol, sex, etc. Who cares what they think? Same nonsense everybody thinks, I daresay.
"And why dont junkies got schizophrenia? Don't know yet. A schizophrenic can ignore hunger and starve to death if he isn't fed. No one can ignore heroin withdrawal. The fact of addiction imposes contact.
"But that's only one angle. Mescaline, LSD6, deteriorated adrenaline, harmine can produce an approximate schizophrenia. The best stuff is extracted from the blood of schizos; so schizophrenia is likely a drug psychosis. They got a metabolic connection, a Man Within you might say."
(Interested readers are referred to Appendix.)
"In the terminal stage of schizophrenia the back brain is permanently depressed, and the front brain is almost without content since the front brain is only active in response to back-brain stimulation.
"Morphine calls forth the antidote of back-brain stimulation similar to schizo substance. (Note similarity between withdrawal syndrome and intoxication with yage or LSD6.) Eventual result of junk use--especially true of heroin addiction where large doses are available to the addict--is permanent back-brain depression and a state much like terminal schizophrenia: complete lack of affect, autism, virtual absence of cerebral event. The addict can spend eight hours looking at a wall. He is conscious of his surroundings, but they have no emotional connotation and in consequence no interest. Remembering a period of heavy addiction is like playing back a tape recording of events experienced by the front brain alone. Flat statements of external events. 'I went to the store and bought some brown sugar. I came home and ate half the box. I took a three grain shot,' etc. Complete absence of nostalgia in these memories. However, as soon as junk intake falls below par, the withdrawal substance floods the body.
"If all pleasure is relief from tension, junk affords relief from the whole life process, in disconnecting the hypothalamus, which is the center of psychic energy and libido.

- from My Education: A Book of Dreams by William S. Burroughs (published in 1995); p. 1: Airport. Like a high school play, attempting to convey a spectral atmosphere. One desk onstage, a gray woman behind the desk with the cold waxen face of an intergalactic bureaucrat. She is dressed in a gray-blue uniform. Airport sounds from a distance, blurred, incomprehensible, then suddenly loud and clear. "Flight sixty-nine has been--" Static . . . fades into the distance . . . "Flight . . ."
Standing to one side of the desk are three men, grinning with joy at their prospective destinations. When I present myself at the desk, the woman says: "You haven't had your education yet."

This dream occurred approximately thirty-five years ago, shortly after the publication of Naked Lunch with the Olympia Press in Paris in 1959.

- p. 5: Going out the window to attend a performance I'd seen advertised on a billboard, and someone tells me that show isn't there yet. It's another show on now. I forget the name. I am afraid I will wake up in this bed and find that this is just a dream. Then I wake up in my bed in Lawrence and I realize that the dream in the gray, empty city is more real than my real life here in Lawrence.


- pp. 17-18: So, still carrying this silver trough, I alight with the two angelic boys on a balcony where Colonel Massek of the advertising firm Van Dolen, Givordan and Massek, where I worked in 1942, is now located. He, the Colonel, says I can go out for lunch. I tell him I've already eaten. The balcony is a thousand feet above the city . . . stunning view.
"Well," I say, "let's go."
One of the boys says he has "lost it" and it is a long way down. As a test I raise myself three feet off the floor, but none of the kids in the office seem to notice anything, so I take off into what I now call "my element," out through the clouds, and in fact sit down on a cloud, which I can do because I got no weight at all. Just floating, lonely as a cloud, and the view is so breathtaking and no fear of falling anymore. I got no body to fall. Just me and my shadow. Strolling down the avenue over New York.
There is no hurry . . . no hurry at all.

Being conceived is like you are in a car driven by the father . . . faster, faster, faster . . . only this time it is Mother who was driving when we crashed and in the time it took the hydraulic brakes to take hold, I had written out two hundred pages of images . . . poetic images yet. But I know it was only two pages and that is the way people talk here. They exaggerate by a hundred, like putting bigger numbers on the money.
Then I'm in a room with Ian who looks all pink and red . . . a beautiful terra-cotta color . . . and these phantoms keep coming in, look like people but are just as fraudulent and if you shove them they disappear.

- pp. 22-23: I can see down a thousand feet to dingy gray streets. Shall I open the window and jump down? The gray emptiness blocks me. No color, no life anywhere, nothing but this empty room. Looking out I can see no open spaces, just gray buildings and a narrow canyon down to the streets. I see a beam, a two-by-four of yellow pine in a ray of light. It is a sign.
I open the window and dive down, falling with the dead weight of my body . . . faster . . . faster . . . WHOOSH. I explode out the sides, standing now in a gray street. I can fly up to thirty feet with considerable effort. I come to a wharf where old clipper ships are stacked against each other like stage props. Can they be made serviceable with magnetic sails that will drive the ship a hundred miles an hour?
"What is your hurry to get nowhere?"
Someone is with me now--a brother in the junkyard of dead tattered sails and wrecked ships.
A fog of pain and despair drifts on an iron-blue painted sea. Dead Time. The ships are crushed flat by the pressure of time, stacked against each other, leaning against a wooden stand.

[ashlesha]

just sent this to an iei i know cuz this guy is his favorite

ENJOY YOUR DIRTY MONEY. YOU ARE FINISHEDDD

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08...ast-visit.html

i saw socionix has him down as istj but ive never read a single thing of his, so no idea.

[blackburry]

His lil eyes in the second pic make him look like he just really needs a hug.


I say F> T.

[ashlesha]

just finished last words and i do like LSI for him. ESI would be my second guess.
he reminded me a bit of my LSI dad but it could just be the whole crotchety old man thing, lol.

[Aylen]

I have read some of his books and understood them, at the time. I have not thought about a type for him but I could have been friends with him.

[Amber]

LII or LSI-Ti