Naked Lunch

[thatguy]

I hadn't read the book. It was a little hard to follow what was going on at times. I think Cronenberg was trying to make it disturbing, but held back. Mostly it was disjointed and weird. Peter Weller delivers a few monologs that capture Burroughs's voice really well. Particularly the story about the talking asshole.

I don't know what else to say about it.

--tg

[Drunk Monk]

The movie tried to make it into a linear narrative which killed the whole thing. Burroughs was experimenting with some very disjointed concepts. One of his art concepts was to write multiple story lines, shred them into text chunks and throw them into the air. Then he would reassemble it as it fell. It was like John Cage but for literature. I don't think Naked Lunch was written that way, but you can definitely see the influence of such methods. It's a challenging read that way, but therein lies it's magic. Such is Burroughs. Frankly, the movie version made too much sense to capture the book.

[thatguy]

Frankly, the movie version made too much sense to capture the book.

Wow, the movie made little to no sense. The book must be mind blowing...It's on my list.

--tg

[Drunk Monk]

...the book leaves you in the lurch. Or perhaps the lunch.

The ending of the film with that one character explaining at the end was totally lame. There's no such explanation in Naked Lunch. That's what makes it so good. As you read it, you feel there should be an explanation, and perhaps there is one, but the book forces you to project a lot.

It's been years since I read that. I remember a bizarre night with KB at a campout show on the Eel, where we decided to read random passages from some Burroughs at the top of our voices to passers-by. Probably harshed a lot of good buzzes that night, but we had great fun.

[King Bob]

We were reading The Ticket that Exploded. I think it was Laguna Seca; ED was there as well. The book worked really well that way; since it's cut up, we were just creating a different narrative line. It was better than my experience reading Burroughs. In my opinion he gets out some good scenes, but big chunks of the stream of consciousness stuff could be edited out with no loss. Don't get me wrong - you can get good material that way, but you have to edit; Dionysus is good, but you need Apollo as well.

[Drunk Monk]

Burroughs can be like John Cage - the theory is brilliant but the execution can leave much to be desired by the audience. Nevertheless, it achieves some extraordinary moments that can be poached for other things, like mediocre movie versions...

[King Bob]

Burroughs did some great spoken word pieces with Bill Laswell and Material - Seven Souls, The Western Lands, Words of Advice for Young People, and maybe more I'm forgetting. The remixed versions of the first two are the definitive ones.

[Drunk Monk]

Yes, I used to have tapes of his spoken word stuff but they were stolen from my car when parked outside AFS. Not that I have much use for tapes nowadays. I have a shopping bag or two of tapes just waiting to be thrown out.

He put such emotion in his readings. I didn't quite get the full impact of a few of his works until I heard his readings of them.