Giftorcurse wrote:
Let's not mince words: I could not get past the first dang chapter. No. Wait. Let me start earlier.
(The following is written in Burroughs' seemingly alien language)
One day, I was in a Books-A-Million in Savannah, looking for more junk too stimulate my book craven an saw William S. Burroughs' crazy lit soft based on his experiences with junk, brain-movies and mugwumps devouring an elephant whole on a hot summer day in the middle of San Francisco's Castro district during a pride parade full of queens and kings performing choreographed to Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'". I drop gold dookies and unicorns that warblewarblewarble police sirens then you choke on a gorilla's (sic)... vomit... Twilight sucks... static... I love you, Ms. Ringwald... dmoibmdsjnmomnjsdmvfmwroimdv,oppx,opwmkoirmfo,s,em.
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.
I like it myself, although in terms of Burroughs' legacy I prefer "Junkie" and "Cities of the Red Night".
If you think "The Naked Lunch" is an incomprehensible mess, try reading James Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake". I've got a degree in English Literature, and even I couldn't get past the first three pages of that particular tome.
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The panda made me do it.