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William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch: My thoughts

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Brak
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16 Mar 2011, 8:44 pm

Yeah, once upon a time ago, I had a pretty narcistic like aquantance of mine say, "Hey man. I know every single band in the world, ohh and you should probably read Naked Lunch"
I at the time knew of William S Burroughs, and others like Jack Kueroc and what not, and I give them my respects, but when I had intially picked up Naked Lunch I had to put it back down. I dont hate the book but its definetly not my cup of tea. Anyways a few days later I went up to him and told him to check out Jiddu Krishnamurti. I dont think he ever did though?

Uhh is that Molly Ringwald in your picture by the way :?:



milascave
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17 Mar 2011, 1:26 am

The first one came out in the early eighties and was just called "Burroughs."
The second one just came out, and is called "William S Burroughs, the man within."
I don't know if you can find the whole movies of his on youtube, but there are definatly clips.
Though nothing matches the experaince of seeing him live, an old man in a grey bankes suite with a dry voice reading out loud from his own works, his apearence so jaringly different from his words.



Janissy
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17 Mar 2011, 1:34 pm

milascave wrote:
The first one came out in the early eighties and was just called "Burroughs."
The second one just came out, and is called "William S Burroughs, the man within."
I don't know if you can find the whole movies of his on youtube, but there are definatly clips.
Though nothing matches the experaince of seeing him live, an old man in a grey bankes suite with a dry voice reading out loud from his own works, his apearence so jaringly different from his words.


There is also the movie Naked Lunch. It says it is based on the book, and in a way it is. But since the book doesn't have a plot they decided to make Naked Lunch be a biographical movie about William Burroughs with scenes from the book mixed in.



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17 Mar 2011, 2:46 pm

Giftorcurse wrote:
What I'm trying to say is that Naked Lunch is an incomprehensible mess. Burroughs seemed more concerned with delivering rambling prose than attempting introduce a shred of coherency. I have nothing against stream-of-consciousness narratives, but there is a method to the madness. Take me as an example. When I write a story containing a narrative, I throw the thoughts that my characters are forming inside their brains and glue them together to form a tapestry. Burroughs does none of this. Instead of humor, he uses dirty high school locker room banter. Instead of character, Burroughs delivers an overdose of, well, Burroughs. I think the moral of this story is: don't let literary madness consume that much of you.


True Story:

Jack Kerouac and Allan Ginsberg track their freind, William Burroughs down in a Tangiers Hotel room where he is strung out on heroin, and surrounded by piles of typewritten manuscript. One of them picks a pile up and starts reading, decides that it's good. They collect the random piles of manuscript and decide and when Burroughs goes back to the States, decides that it would be an artistic statement in to have the manuscript published in the random order that it was picked up, nut unlike the 'Random' music of composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage. --So begins William Burroughs legacy of 'Cutup' literature.


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milascave
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17 Mar 2011, 11:01 pm

That story may or may not be true, but either way it was not cut up. Cut up involved literaly cutting and pasting. Like, with real scizoers and paste.
Boroughs did not invent this method. He got it fro Bryon Gysen, who got it from the Dadaists. He publised several books in produced in this way, and revived the method. Later in=t was used by such musicions as Jello Biafra and artist msicains like Genesis P oridge, who used it a lot.
Early punk has been described as neo-dada, and this was in many ways very true.