The Naked Lunch (and other beat literature)

[TMA_1]

I am really interested in "The Naked Lunch" right now. It is hard to put into words. It is so profoundly insane. At one moment it is sick, disturbing, and raw. At another moment it is textually beautiful and mind blowing. Above all though is how interesting the book is to read.

William S. Burroughs wrote the book. It is about his life during the years of his extreme drug use. The book itself is strange in that at times it is lucid, and then it will all fall apart. Portions of the book were written when he would fade out of reality, continuing to write while going through his own dilerious hell.

During the book he was extremely addicted to opiates. Drugs play an extremely important part of the book, as they are apart of what made him go nuts. In fact Mr. Burroughs doesnt even remember writing most of the book.

You are literally gazing into insanity as you are reading the book. At times it will fade back into reality, basically focusing on his life as he went from place to place sleeping with men and doing drugs, observing the kinds of people in that sub-culture all around him. Then all the sudden it seems he will go to a completely non-existant country called "annexia" where he meets with a mind control artist (drug dealer) called Doctor Benway. Here and in other places you are reading figments of Mr. Burroughs' insanity. They are all somewhat based on some sort of strange reality that has been twisted, and it all feels like a bad dream.

Not only this, but reading about the drug culture during the 50s especially is extremely interesting. It is so sick and twisted that you would be shocked at all you hear. If you read this book, you realize how repressed people were during the post war era, and how much of a rift there was between the drug sub-culture and the rest of america in general. Some of the stuff you read about is truly haunting, and you wont finish it without being oddly moved.

The book itself is amazingly written. It is extremely eccentric, but you can see clearly Mr. Burroughs' education at Harvard. it is written in the "beat prose" style, if you can even label it a style. I have heard that Mr. Burroughs' style is similar in some ways to how Jack Kerouac writes his beat poetry.

Has anybody ever heard of William S. Burroughs, or "The Naked Lunch"? If not that, have any of you guys ever studied up on Beat culture, or other Beat writers? I would love to talk about this subject to others. :)

[Kiyouta]

I swear a thread on this book was made before...

I remember saying something completely pointless in it.

Hmmm, I think the title is a little deceiving...

a) Probably no lunch scenes what-so-ever...

b) No naked people.

You just thought, it was gonna be pics of naked people didn't you? Well I did anyway.

On Dune2k??! Never. Just pictures of mad hatters with teapots will float my boat.

Ahhh :)

[Khan]

That was the film Kiyouta.

[TMA_1]

The film is amazing, David Cronenberg is a film-making genius.

But the film and the book are worlds apart, and it is almost completely impossible to compare them.