Naked Lunch

that sounds like something that could actually work

How different to the movie?

Very. The movie is a meta-story. It's from outside the book looking in.

He didn't experiment with the cut-up technique in Naked Lunch. That stuff came after.

I'm sort of indifferent to the rest of his body of work, but Naked Lunch really is an astonishing work of genius.

this desu. he has a great ear for prose that gets lost in the madness, too.

I feel like the cut-up trilogy gets lost in critical discussion of his ouevre. I wrote part of my dissertation on "The Soft Machine"

any key insights to share?

One of the worst books I've ever read in my entire life.

Probably the worst thing I've ever read that has a sizable number of people who think it's good.

it is good, there's more craft behind it that tit seems, it's just that if it's not your thing it's a horrible experience, I guess. I loved it.

I'll try and summarize some of the key points on his work
-His writing is heavily influenced by the cold war- he saw the cold war as primarily a psychological struggle of mind and culture
-his prose is heavily influenced by science fiction and detective fiction - we can think of him as a writer who pushes these concepts of 'genre' to their most abstract. The cut-ups are the ultimate formation of this. By cutting up the text, it's an assault or attack on the structures of linguistics and narrative progression so to speak. The cut-up trilogy can really be seen as a series of fucked-up, hyper experimental sci-fi novels

-his body of work can be thought of as a slow decomposition/unwinding of the novel form. Junky and Queer are episodic but ultimately hold some structure, and starting from naked lunch on, Burroughs reconsiders the very idea of what a novel might be. Burroughs himself wrote ""And how can I ever write a 'novel'? I can't and I won't. The 'novel' is a
dead form, rigid and arbitrary. I can't use it"
He sought to break the boundaries of the novel and reinvent it in a sense.

thanks!

for me part of the point of Naked Lunch was that it was a novel trying to be a drug. the same way drugs can completely deform rational thought, the fragmented cut-up of Naked Lunch deforms prose. to get anything from Naked Lunch you have to grapple with chaos.

I can see that - sometimes I forget about Burroughs' role as a kind of drug-fueled beat author - but there was a whole period arguably from the late 50s to the mid-70s where writers were trying to emulate this idea of "novel as hallucination" - and I can see Burroughs as like a progenitor of that. one key book that comes to mind is Michael Herr's Dispatches - It sees the Vietnam War as mass hallucination

I guess maybe it would be more my thing if I was a faggot druggie murderer.

huh, thanks for the insight. Usually those books garner no discussion further than DUDE CUT UP METHOD AND JISM, though I feel there's a wealth of references or maybe psychological elements I'm often missing.
Have any explanation for the Nova Criminals? Or maybe a link to the dissertation?

he didn't get fully into the cutup technique until his later books, like Nova Express and The Soft Machine. Naked Lunch is still mostly coherent, being a summation of the "routines" he came up with.

my favorite is Antonio the Portuguese Mooch, mainly because i started writing an homage and the story took on a life of its own and ran off in a different direction. weird how that happens.

wild boys anime.

designs by Poju.

hell yes.

you read it expecting a conventional narrative. you didn't get it and now you're in a huff. that's nice, dear.

now go read "Gravity's Rainbow".

>Have any explanation for the Nova Criminals?
I kind of agree with the point that's on the wikipedia interpretation for Nova Express, but I would like to add that these characters as metaphor for control is a geneological holdover from detective fiction (I'm a little trashed right now, if this doesn't make sense). The idea that police need criminals to reinforce their positions of control and criminals need police figures to ensure that crime as a concept still exists is a holdover from your agatha christie's and your dashiell hammett's - ultimately existing as representations of the effects of state power. All things exist inside the state's territory, and really truly Burroughs' work is in part about identifying the state mechanisms of control and trying to break them

I hope this makes sense

Really some nice twisted prose, and interesting too read, if anything it could make you uncomfortable, really good work, I like junky more though I think.

Your thinking about a different book op, he used cut up method in nova express.

Naked Lunch is a perfectly coherent story.

It's pretty shit compared to The Naked Ape. I don't know how he could pass this shite off for science after the first book.

>pass this shite off for science

ay-yo
*murders wife*
so you be
*laughs about it and flees mexico*
ay-yo
*lets friends rape teenage son*
you be sayin
*has sex with six yr old*
we wuz beatniks?