William S. Burroughs Jr., doomed from the start, wrote amazing novels before he died at age 33

Cursed From Birth

The Short, Unhappy Life of William S. Burroughs Jr.

By William S. Burroughs Jr.; edited and compiled by David Ohle

SOFT SKULL PRESS; 210 Pages; $13.95

It would be easy to write off Billy Burroughs Jr. as just one more tragic child of the Beats -- indeed, that's what a lot of people did, including many members of the Beat entourage who should have known better. But the important thing about Billy's life was not how quickly or painfully it ended but how much he actually got done in his short time on earth.

Although he died just short of his 34th birthday (in 1981), he had already written and published two of the best novels to come from the younger Beat Generation -- "Speed" and "Kentucky Ham" -- and was well along on the third novel of his trilogy, "Prakriti Junction," whose fragment is included in "Cursed From Birth," along with journal entries, correspondence, interviews, medical reports and other material that fleshes out the final years of his story.

If people could indeed choose the situation of their birth, no one would have chosen to be Billy Burroughs Jr. He was drug-addicted in the womb of his mother, Joan Vollmer Burroughs, as she used vast amounts of Benzedrine -- speed -- during her pregnancy, while his old man -- later to become the infamous author of "Naked Lunch" -- raised marijuana and shot lizards for target practice in the wasteland of south Texas. That sordid scene, a sort of demonic inversion of the happy Norman Rockwell American household, was described by Jack Kerouac in "On the Road."

A few years later, the elder Burroughs shot Billy's mother, killing her, in a game of William Tell in Mexico City. At the age of 4, Billy was spirited off by his wealthy paternal grandparents, heirs to the Burroughs adding-machine fortune, and raised in Palm Beach, Fla., where he saw his father on brief visits maybe once a year. Predictably, he got in trouble early with drugs, guns and -- most unlike his gay, misogynistic father -- girls. By the time Billy was 16, in the early 1960s, he was living on the streets of the Lower East Side of New York City and beginning the severe damage he would inflict on his liver by shooting methedrine several times a day. Later, he would also become an alcoholic. At 29, he had a liver transplant to save his life after severe esophageal bleeding, but he did not curb his alcoholism. Five years later, he died alone in Florida, his body found along the side of a road, according to one story.

But somehow those stark outlines, however dramatic, and however colorful an addition they provide to the legend of his outlaw father, don't really tell much of the story of this sensitive and bighearted young man, who was a natural writer. Despite all the writing programs in the world, there is something that can't be taught -- the ability to use words in a way that makes others fully see and hear and experience what you experienced -- and Billy had that ability in spades. "Cursed From Birth" is chock-full of passages that are just plain good writing, apart from any Beat resonance. Read More...

At a new breed of "Robin Hood" restaurants, diners pay what they can afford -- and what they think the meal is worth

Deciding between the spicy peanut stew and the pesto chicken, or the squash soup and the avocado, chicken, lime soup, are not the only decisions tempting patrons at the One World Café in Salt Lake City and the SAME (So All Might Eat) Café in Denver. They must also decide what the meal is worth.

These pay-as-you-can cafes have missions that are unapologetically altruistic—call it serving up fare Robin Hood style. "Our philosophy is that everyone, regardless of economic status, deserves the chance to eat healthy, organic food while being treated with dignity," explains Brad Birky, who opened SAME with his wife, Libby, in October. Customers who have no money are encouraged to exchange an hour of service — sweep, wash the dishes, weed the organic garden — for a meal. Likewise, guests who have money are encouraged to leave a little extra to offset the meals of those who have less to give. "We're a hand up, not a hand out," says One World owner Denise Cerreta, who prides herself on the fact that everyone can afford a meal at her café.

An epiphany scribbled out on a cocktail napkin on a plane ride gave birth to SAME café (So All May Eat). Both Brad and Libby had been searching for a meaningful way to give back while making a living. Admitted volunteer junkies, they had been serving and eating with homeless shelter residents for the past eight years. "We loved the service aspect of giving to the community and attacking the issue of hunger," says Brad. "Plus we both love to cook." When they found out about One World, they flew to Salt Lake City to learn how it was run. Cerreta, in turn, spent a month helping the Birkys prepare for opening. One World has had more than 25 inquiries from others around the country interested in starting a similar café. Recently, the café formed a nonprofit One World, Everybody Eats aimed at helping others replicate such a venture. Read More...

Book Review - Look Homeward, America

From Anarchist News

Look Homeward, America, by Bill Kauffman, Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 185 pages, $25

At the turn of the 20th century, one of the most popular writers in America dwelled in a small village in upstate New York. After two decades of wandering about Europe and America, Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) had settled in East Aurora, 18 miles southeast of Buffalo. Along the way he had built and sold a soap company, making a tidy profit he used to finance his literary ventures.
[Is a front-porch anarchist like a stoop anarchists?]

Hubbard wanted to be a well-known writer. The editors at the leading publishing houses of the day did not encourage that ambition. So Hubbard followed the advice of an ancient local rustic, Uncle Billy Bushnell: “Stay at home and do your work well enough, and the world will come to you.�?

Hubbard launched a printing plant, manned by youngsters from the village, to turn out his magazine The Philistine, devoted to expressing his political, philosophical, and religious views. He went on to print, bind, and sell his essays. Many of them, written to introduce readers to notables such as Washington, Voltaire, Marcus Aurelius, and Jane Austen, appeared in a 14-volume set titled Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great. His most celebrated essay—still read today, though not often enough—was “A Message to Garcia,�? the inspiring tale of a resourceful and courageous U.S. Army courier who made his way to the camp of a Cuban rebel leader just before the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. Hubbard became known far and wide as “The Sage of Aurora.�?

In many respects—not including the creation of a 300-employee publishing house—Bill Kauffman of tiny Elba, New York, has become today’s Elbert Hubbard. But unlike Hubbard, whose essays glorified the lives and works of famous people, Kauffman’s literary journey seeks out “the America of holy fools and backyard radicals, the America whose eccentric voice is seldom heard anymore…the [voice of] third parties, of Greenbackers and Libertarians and village atheists and the ‘conservative Christian anarchist’ party whose founder and only member was Henry Adams.�?

Kauffman’s earlier books mined interesting veins of localism and hostility to modernity. America First! celebrated America’s forgotten isolationist activists, from Hamlin Garland to Alice Roosevelt, plus other assorted individualists, including Edward Abbey, Gore Vidal, Sinclair Lewis, and this writer, included because he considered me, not altogether inaccurately, the last lonely true-believing Jeffersonian. His Dispatches From the Muckdog Gazette celebrated the lives of the common people of Kauffman’s Genesee County, home of the minor league Batavia Muckdogs baseball team.

His newest book, Look Homeward, America, will interest anyone who suspects there might be more to America than is found in the average installment of the network news. It’s a series of often sparkling profiles of Americans, both near-famous and obscure—similar to Hubbard’s Little Journeys, but selected and viewed through Kauffman’s unique prism of localism, authenticity, tradition, and human scale.

Like Hubbard, Kauffman has had a long and interesting journey back to his self-imposed exile in Elba. He began a career of itinerant wordsmithing with two and a half unsatisfying years as a staff member for Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) in the 1980s. (Kauffman relates his disappointment with his old boss in a profile in this book, lamenting the senator’s failure to live up to his own best instincts and possibilities.) Kauffman then worked from 1985 to 1988 at Reason, serving part of that time as the magazine’s first Washington editor. At Reason he interviewed such eccentric Americans as the Black Panther turned Reaganite Eldridge Cleaver, a pre–Supreme Court Clarence Thomas, and Charlton Heston; he contributed reports on topics ranging from cowpunk to Kerouac, from anti-war capitalists to Delaware’s former Republican governor Pete du Pont, who sought his party’s presidential nomination in 1988.

In the 1990s Kauffman, who is now 47, returned to his native Genesee County after writing Every Man a King (1989), a novel clearly inspired by his own wanderings. He bought an old house in Elba (32 miles northeast of Hubbard’s East Aurora) and began his own one-man literary enterprise. Besides writing books, he contributes articles to a range of publications, from the left-leaning British newspaper The Independent to the libertarian monthly Liberty. For several years he did editorial work for the conservative magazine The American Enterprise.

It’s difficult to find a place for Kauffman in today’s political taxonomy. He started out as a populist liberal. As that youthful infatuation waned, he became a libertarian, attracted by that creed’s unrelenting hostility to the curse of statism. In his own telling, he became increasingly uncomfortable with the Randian side of libertarianism and what he saw as the movement’s infatuation with economic calculus to the near-exclusion of humanistic values such as community, charity, faith, and honor. He then slid into the “peace-and-love left wing of paleoconservatism,�? of which he may well be the only identifiable member.

The more Kauffman read and experienced, the more he developed an affinity for various schools of thought, not all of them mutually consistent: Jeffersonian agrarian distributist, Catholic Worker pacifist, traditional Old Right conservative, transcendentalist, decentralist, anarchist. His anarchism, he stresses, is not that of “a sallow garret-rat translating Proudhon by pirated kilowatt, nor a militiaman catechized by the Classic Comics version of The Turner Diaries.�? Rather, he writes, “I am the love child of Henry Thoreau and Dorothy Day, conceived among the asters and goldenrod of an Upstate New York autumn.�? Thoreau doesn’t play a major role in Look Homeward, America, but Day, a largely forgotten social activist who died in 1980, is one of its stars.

Read More...

Drugged Up Mouse Party

Want to know how different drugs affect yer body and brain? Well this awesome little game will tell you all about it and they only hurt wittle fake digital mice.

Check out Anarchy Jordan's YouTube videos!

From one of the kings/finks of our dear old alma mater: The Evergreen State College. Enjoy.

please call comcast and cancel your cable internet service

From OlyBlog, Thanks Chris!

i have just been forwarded a very disturbing message. comcast blocked messages from riseup.net mailing lists for a few days, and is treating customers who complain very rudely. if you are a comcast cable internet subscriber, please call them and cancel your service, and tell them you are switching to dsl because they blocked messages from riseup.net and issued no apology. here's the e-mail message that was forwarded to me:

Date: Mon, 11 Dec 2006 21:50:50 -0800
From: Carrie Lybecker <...>
To: OMJP <...>
Subject: [OMJP] Comcast blocking list email again

Comcast has again blocked the email messages of its customers to and from this list. If you have a Comcast email address, you are affected.

At least 28 list subscribers with Comcast email addresses including me were affected over three days, as was TJ Johnson via scattercreek.com for some reason, and possibly others. Comcast subscribers were blocked from receiving or sending list email Dec 7-10. The problem now appears to be resolved--for the moment.

I called Comcast. The person I talked to didn't know what she was talking about--tried the time-honored ploy of misdirecting attention to my email program, Thunderbird ("We don't support any email program but Internet Explorer"), when the email program is NOT the problem. When pressed, she became quite rude.

After she was compelled to consult a real tech person, she came back and with even greater hostility said (framed as an accusation) that Riseup has been "blacklisted" by Comcast for a reason she refused to identify and that I should contact Riseup, let them know about our list problem, and that they would know, she emphasized several times, what the issue is and what "they needed to do" to resolve it.

I emailed Riseup. A response may take several days.

I think this is something we should be concerned about.

Riseup is an awesome collective of tech experts dedicated to providing progressive activists, especially the most oppressed and marginalized, the means to communicate and organize electronically, for free. They've been at this since before Seattle WTO in 1999 and are now a worldwide network. See http://help.riseup.net/about-us/.

Fine Print in Defense Bill Opens Door to Martial Law

It’s amazing what you can find if you turn over a few rocks in the anti-terrorism legislation Congress approved during the election season.

Take, for example, the John W. Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2006, named for the longtime Armed Services Committee chairman from Virginia.

Signed by President Bush on Oct. 17, the law (PL 109-364) has a provocative provision called “Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies.”

The thrust of it seems to be about giving the federal government a far stronger hand in coordinating responses to Katrina-like disasters.

But on closer inspection, its language also alters the two-centuries-old Insurrection Act, which Congress passed in 1807 to limit the president’s power to deploy troops within the United States.

That law has long allowed the president to mobilize troops only “to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.”

But the amended law takes the cuffs off.

Specifically, the new language adds “natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident” to the list of conditions permitting the President to take over local authority — particularly “if domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the State or possession are incapable of maintaining public order.” Read More