Burroughs on Addiction, Miller on other type of drug: possessions

As a result of my good habit of browsing the Paris Review interviews archive, I came across The Art Of Fiction, Issue 35, Fall 1965. William S. Burroughs interviewed by Conrad Knickerbocker.

Burroughs admits, with blunt honesty, that he didn’t start writing out of a strong desire towards it. “I had nothing else to do. Writing gave me something to do every day.”

He talks a great deal about addiction, about people’s deformed interest towards this phenomenon and somehow dethrones the myth that drugs and art go together. “They are absolutely contraindicated for productive work”, Burroughs argues, because he says they “decrease awareness of inner processes, thoughts, and feelings”.

He rejects the idea that drug addiction is an illness. In his perception, the process that leads a person to succumb to drugs is similar to the one that leads a cop to exercise his authority.

Burroughs talks at large about drugs. Fame came to him after writing Junky, a novel based on his experience with addiction. Even more interesting are his theories on “wordless state” being more desirable, or his visionary image on the future merge of arts and science. Religion and cults – Scientology. Nova Express. Sex and utopia.

I feel I have to praise [again] the interviewers from The Paris Review. One never gets bored of reading them till the end.

The William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac collaboration, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, was first published in 2008 at Grove Press.
On August 14, 1944, Lucien Carr, a friend of William S. Burroughs from St. Louis, stabbed a man named David Kammerer with a Boy Scout knife and dropped the body into the Hudson River. Kammerer had long fawned over the younger Carr, making romantic advances that, for a time, it seemed Carr didn’t mind. But after six years as the older man’s protégé, either Carr had had enough or he was forced to defend himself. The next day, his clothes stained with blood, he went to his friends Bill Burroughs and Jack Kerouac for help. Doing so, he caught them up in the crime. The two were arrested for failing to inform the police, and a few months later, they were drawn to the crime in a different way. [...] And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks is an incomparable artifact from the early days of the Beats, a fascinating piece of American literary history, and a remarkable window into the personal lives of two hugely influential writers at the very beginning of their careers. It is also an engaging novel, a hypnotic descent into lust and obsession, drugs and alcohol, art and outsized dreams.

For the Spanish  speakers: Guadalajara International Book Fair is going on until December 07. Here is the English version of the website.

From New Statesman, Tribes of Clutter looks at the “contemporary Londoners’ possessions and the values they attach to them”. A review of Daniel Miller‘s book The Comfort of Things. The photo that heads the article is representative. Reminds me of Martin Paar‘s photographic studies on the English society. Check, for example Think of England.

In The Comfort of Things Miller investigates the citizens of contemporary London by way of their consumerism – or at least their material possessions, in an era of unprecedented mass consumption.