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Happy 50th Birthday, Naked Lunch!

post #1 of 11
4/21/10 at 9:06am
Thread Starter 
"You were not there for the beginning. You will not be there for the end. Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative."

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Why is "Where were you when ...," a question for assassinations and catastrophes, so often asked with respect to this book? Maybe because reading "Naked Lunch" is an act of violence to one's psyche. Jack Kerouac, who suggested the book's title (based on a misreading of the phrase "naked lust") and typed up the manuscript, claimed it gave him nightmares. Good for him, or at least for his unconscious mind. There is something gratingly adolescent about those who insist on the essential humor of a work replete with violent interspecies pornography ("The Mugwump pushes a slender blond youth to a couch and strips him expertly"); fetishistic descriptions of putrefaction and disease ("[h]e's got a prolapsed asshole and when he wants to get screwed he'll pass you his ass on three feet of in-tes-tine"); and general nastiness ("Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk?").
I think the author of the piece comes across as a bit of a prudish dick, and seems to unfairly dismiss the novel out of hand. Nonetheless, I wanted to bring attention to the 50th anniversary of the novel, and thought this might generate some good discussion.
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post #2 of 11
4/21/10 at 5:42pm
"'The Priest they called him...'"

God, I miss WSB.
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post #3 of 11
4/22/10 at 12:33am
He didn't get it, it's kinda obvious.
The book is awesome. Some routines, like he liked to call them, are near perfect.
Yonqui is great too.
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post #4 of 11
4/24/10 at 10:09pm
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Burroughs the man was as awful as he was beloved. He enjoyed a very comfortable upbringing in St. Louis -- his grandfather invented the adding machine -- and received an allowance for much of his life, but petulantly insisted "we were not rich." He had a son he didn't take care of, whose mother, Joan Vollmer, he'd shot dead in a drunken game of "William Tell." Adding insult to murder, he spent much of his writing life glorifying the incident, imagining that a so-called Ugly Spirit had invaded him and forced his hand. He even attempted a kitschy sweat lodge "exorcism" late in life, described in nauseatingly approving detail in the Miles biography.
The writer is a bore who doesn't get it. Burroughs knew how to find a good story. Killing his wife, engaging in 'depravity' from an upper-class background, and such, he was well aware of creating a narrative for himself, like Bukowski.
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post #5 of 11
5/10/10 at 9:08am
Christ.

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It is unthinkable that Burroughs' writing had a significant influence on anyone above high-school age.
Yup... Cronenberg, Lynch, David Bowie, Giger, Blade Runner, MTV, the whole culture of sampling...

All forgettable fads, each & everyone of em. What an ass.

On topic, though: while it contains some good yarns, I find Naked Lunch to be a lesser Burroughs novel. His writing certainly becomes better the older he gets. Western Lands is one of the best goddamn books ever written.
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post #6 of 11
5/10/10 at 1:25pm
Transgressive = Juvenile

It's a common misconception.
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post #7 of 11
5/10/10 at 3:40pm
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Originally Posted by dreary louse View Post
Transgressive = Juvenile

It's a common misconception.
Maybe because both are based on 'trying something different from the norm.' Whether it's transgression only becomes apparent after a while, often over the course of a generation or even longer.
But in this case: the quote I mentioned just proves the guy has no idea what he's talking about. Either that or he's just stirring up reaction by singling out the most irrelevant traces of Burroughs' legacy (which, ironically, is a pretty juvenile thing to do).

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Originally Posted by dreary louse View Post
Killing his wife, engaging in 'depravity' from an upper-class background, and such, he was well aware of creating a narrative for himself, like Bukowski.
He definitely belongs to the distinctive subcategory of artists who actively seek to live out the fringe life in a kind of twisted martyrdom to absolve the rest of us. The last cultural movement where this was cultivated turned out to be rock'n'roll.. it seems to have become curiously absent these days, or at least 'non-present' to the mainstream in any measure.
ETA: This may be a result of the fact that our Western society (a.o. due to rock culture) has evolved to a situation where 'living the fringe life' has been democratized to such an extent that anyone can safely engage in it, without severe penalties from the environment.
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post #8 of 11
5/11/10 at 12:21am
Quote:
Originally Posted by dreary louse View Post
The writer is a bore who doesn't get it. Burroughs knew how to find a good story. Killing his wife, engaging in 'depravity' from an upper-class background, and such, he was well aware of creating a narrative for himself, like Bukowski.
I'm sure his wife appreciated it
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post #9 of 11
5/11/10 at 12:35am
I'll always appreciate this book for the weird moment it brought about in college. I was reading it while waiting for a class to start and this odd guy walked in and as he passed my desk he stopped and started to fan himself. He looked about and said "What is that?" He then turned to me and goes "Ah, Burroughs. I can feel the heat coming off the page from here!" Then he sat down and never spoke a word to me again.
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post #10 of 11
5/11/10 at 1:42am
I wrote my 11th grade American Lit paper on Naked Lunch. It was a multi week project and my teacher had never read it so she took my copy. Halfway though the project she returned it and told me that had she known what the book was about she would never have let me write a paper on it, as it was it was too late for me to read and research something else. I was to never mention that this was my topic outside of her classroom and I was also exempt from the presentation portion of the paper.

Rock on.

I fixed all the things that were wrong with the paper and turned it back in during a college English class taught by an obviously homosexual professor. He felt we were kindred spirits afterwards I guess because he always wanted to chat me up. He told me a story about how "I was in San Francisco years ago and I was walking down the street. Coming towards me was a gentleman who was gesticulating wildly and talking to himself. As he passed I heard him say, 'Who the hell does Allan Ginsburg think he is anyway!?'"
I got a lower grade on the paper in college than I did in high school. I was miffed.
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post #11 of 11
5/11/10 at 4:48am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cylon Baby View Post
I'm sure his wife appreciated it
He didn't try to kill his wife.

And about the following replies - it must be a truly transgressive work if the book can isolate you socially. William S. Burroughs - the Marquis de Sade of the 20th century? But I only say that very loosely, of course.
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