Tag: william s. burroughs

Yes­ter­day, I read Naked Lunch by William S. Bur­roughs. It has been on my list of books to read since Dr. Led­man’s US His­to­ry class junior year of high school when Phil cor­rect­ly answered one of his father’s ridicu­lous extra cred­it ques­tions. They nev­er had any­thing to do with US his­to­ry per se and were always con­cerned with either the beat gen­er­a­tion or Pink Floyd. Well, now I lis­ten to Pink Floyd and have pret­ty much exhaust­ed the beat authors so US His­to­ry was­n’t a waste. Oh yeah, Pres­i­dent Taft was one fat mofo, I remem­ber that as well.

Any­way, Naked Lunch was not as good as I had hoped. It was, for the most part, pure hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry descrip­tion rife with explic­it homo­erot­ic imagery. There were moments of strik­ing satire, but the con­stant indwelling phi­los­o­phy on addic­tion took its toll. A few posts ago, I bitched about over­ly clever descrip­tion that ful­fills no pur­pose. I’ve just read a whole book full of it.

It also seems that I am begin­ning a new unit in my sum­mer read­ing enti­tled DRUGS. The next book I am start­ing today is Aldous Hux­ley’s Brave New World. I know Hux­ley was an addict, and all I know about Brave New World is that it is a dystopia either along the same lines as 1984 or it has some­thing to do with cloning or per­haps the tra­vails of an addict­ed soci­ety. hel­li­fi­know.