/lit/ - Literature

it's the best lolsorandum spam ever written and that's it

>>10497208
read junky and you will understand and see the creativity of the new york sections of naked lunch.
arguably you shoudn't have to read junky as a precursor.....but fuck it....just do it

No other book, besides Exercises In Style, made me laugh that much
His trilogies are pretty gud too

>>10497251
This man gets it. High modernist satire at its best.
People portray naked lunch as some kind of dour junky fable....its hilarious.
Wonderful and sumptuous. A feast

>>10497208
He isn't a skilled enough writer to pull shit like this. I'd read non sequitur nonsensical rambling if the prose was good

>>10497273
Would you rather kids read harry potter?

>>10497208

read Junkie first, a decent part of what comes across as nonsense is period slang that you'd never guess in the context of in Naked Lunch.

>>10497273
>He isn't a skilled enough writer to pull shit like this.


any man who can come up with this:

When I was a boy in Chicago I attended the Sunday School of a neighborhood Presbyterian church. I recall our Wednesday-night meetings with the simplest nostalgia. We would meet in the basement. There would be a short prayer and a shorter benediction. And we would turn out all the lights and in total darkness hit each other with chairs.

is okay by me.

>>10497675
it took me years to work out what "the outraged squawk of the displaced bullhead" was.

>>10497789
Enlighten us senpai

>Gawd

>>10497208
Funny as fuck visual and dark. I enjoyed junky more, better story.

read junky

read Naked Lunch, Junky, Nova Trilogy, got stuck during his Place Of Dead Roads trilogy
Is Queer any good?

>>10497208
Funniest thing I ever read.

>>10499288
I liked it.

>>10498672
Read the file name

>>10500382
So just a play on the phrase 'fish out of water,' with the negative emotions that accompany it?
He just made it sound like there was a brilliant idea I was missing

>>10497208
You gotta read his letters to Ginsberg as well as Queer and Yage Letters to really get a hold of it.
>>10497266
I don't think it was very satirical. Burroughs describes his vignettes ("routines") as expressions that originate necessarily from an obsession. He believed he was inhabited by an evil spirit after the death of Joan. He also doesn't remember writing the majority of it. It isn't very dour -- Burroughs seemed to revel in his addictive mire. It really isn't satire, either. David Lodge has a pretty good argument about the blue movies routine as satire in his "The Modes of Modern Writing." Comparing him to Swift was more a device to evade obscenity charges. Naked Lunch certainly is funny and ironic, but I don't think it was ironic in form.
>>10497273
>I'd read non sequitur nonsensical rambling if the prose was good
Burroughs's prose is some of my favorite. What did you find lacking about it? Remember that scene I think was in the blue movies routine where the young boy leaps the hermit's fence and runs off into the trail of autumn leaves? That has to be one of my favorite impressionistic vignettes. The contradiction of the boy being dead, his bleached bones beside the fence and shotgun, and the boy exuberantly laughing as he escapes the hermit is so masterfully done. Once you're familiar with the origins of Burroughs's pederasty (a botched love affair with a young peer) and concurrent addictions you'll see the connective tissue between the routines. You also need to know what was happening in Tangiers at the time. Naked Lunch reads like Decline of the West in that, w/r/t Spengler being called a poet rather than a historian, the connections it makes between addiction, geopolitics, and ancient history are tenuous but necessary for the poetic project of the work which I think succeeds.

>>10497779
that made me laugh.
like, out loud. weird.
where is this from?

>>10497240
>read junky
>read junky
>junky
kys

>>10497789
You're wrong. "Bullhead" refers to head bull, aka the head railroad policeman.Burroughs was obliquely referring to an incident that Kerouac related to him. Kerouac hitched a ride in a reefer and ended up almost freezing to death. A bull (railroad cop) heard his banging and shouts and found him, then proceeded to kick the shit out of him before he could do react. A bosun from a ship Kerouac worked on as a merchant marine saw the whole thing and tossed the bull (displaced) into the reefer. He ended up losing half his toes and fingers and they drank wine while he shouted (squawked).

You clearly don't know Burroughs so stop talking as if you do, it's sad.

>>10500921
Sauce on this story?

>>10501107
I just made it up, but it sounded plausible, no?

I've read a lot of Kerouac's work and a few biographies on him, but I've never gotten into the other Beat writers. I'd like to read Burroughs, but Naked Lunch and his automatic typing work doesn't really appeal to me right off the bat.

[T]

>>10497273

The prose is amazing, though. There was nothing like it before, and much like it after.

>>10497266


The County Clerk sets in his office, gumming snuff and playing "Dark Reign II" on his desktop PC.

"Recall one time," he begins ominously - you ever hear the County Clerk speak these words, stay not on the order of your going etc etc - "ought four, it were, just after the last upgrading, from '98 first edition to XP, I believe it was, or maybe a little before that, the SCSI CD writer stopped showing up. It were there as a device - you could still read CDs with it - but it weren't showing up in CDRWin or Prassi or Padus Discjuggler. One of the reasons, that were, for movin' on up to XP, along with the DVD drive problems I was relating earlier. So's I went an' put XP on, and it don't ease her at all, no writin' happening noway. Can't even rip tracks offen audio CDs with it. Useless as Erich in a kitchen fulla pots and pans.

"I found the Advansys SCSI card install CD Sean Benton give me - not a finer man in the Zone than Sean Benton, believe me - but it crashes under XP. Guess the code ain't clean enough for Mr Bill's latest. I wanders around the web lookin' for updated drivers for a IWill Side-2930C SCSI card, and there ain't nothin' for XP, just little executeables with .INF and .OEM files inside for '98 and NT4 and linux and the like, nothin' specific, as I said, for XP. I grab a couple and tell XP to use 'em, and XP don't like 'em. One of the NT ones sticks, machine says it got to reboot. It reboots and freezes. Restart in safe mode with console and it's hangin' on windows\system32\Drivers\Mup.sys, whatever the hell that is.

I resets the machine, going for the "reset to last successful config" option, a blessing if there ever be one. Machine reboots, detects hardware, installs the authorised Microsoft driver, reboots and I just knows it's a-gonna hang again so I powers it down, extract the SCSI card and pull out the CW-7502-B writer (I recalls Nick - not a finer man in the zone than Nick - insist we put a SCSI writer in 'cause it were the fastest at the time, time being about four years ago), start the machine up again and she's runnin' slicker'n' a handful of goose grease.

"and what if you needs to write a CD," one of his assistants asks.

"I reckon I might could probably pick up an IDE CD writer at the weekend swap-meet for a song and a dance."

"I's seen ye dance, ye ugly bastard," Mabel sez, "and it'll take more than a song and a dance fra' the likes o' you, matey."

>>10500598
it's a quote from William Burroughs, you etiolated tosser.

>>10501175
>I just made it up, but it sounded plausible, no?


no, it doesn't.

you haven't read burroughs, but you like to tell other people who actually HAVE waded through The Soft Machine and Nova Express that they haven't. i guess it wouldn't be 4chan without a couple of turds in the punchbowl now and then.

>>10502912
>>>10497266
>The County Clerk sets in his office, gumming snuff and playing "Dark Reign II" on his desktop PC.
>"Recall one time," he begins ominously - you ever hear the County Clerk speak these words, stay not on the order of your going etc etc - "ought four, it were, just after the last upgrading, from '98 first edition to XP, I believe it was, or maybe a little before that, the SCSI CD writer stopped showing up. It were there as a device - you could still read CDs with it - but it weren't showing up in CDRWin or Prassi or Padus Discjuggler. One of the reasons, that were, for movin' on up to XP, along with the DVD drive problems I was relating earlier. So's I went an' put XP on, and it don't ease her at all, no writin' happening noway. Can't even rip tracks offen audio CDs with it. Useless as Erich in a kitchen fulla pots and pans.
>"I found the Advansys SCSI card install CD Sean Benton give me - not a finer man in the Zone than Sean Benton, believe me - but it crashes under XP. Guess the code ain't clean enough for Mr Bill's latest. I wanders around the web lookin' for updated drivers for a IWill Side-2930C SCSI card, and there ain't nothin' for XP, just little executeables with .INF and .OEM files inside for '98 and NT4 and linux and the like, nothin' specific, as I said, for XP. I grab a couple and tell XP to use 'em, and XP don't like 'em. One of the NT ones sticks, machine says it got to reboot. It reboots and freezes. Restart in safe mode with console and it's hangin' on windows\system32\Drivers\Mup.sys, whatever the hell that is.
>I resets the machine, going for the "reset to last successful config" option, a blessing if there ever be one. Machine reboots, detects hardware, installs the authorised Microsoft driver, reboots and I just knows it's a-gonna hang again so I powers it down, extract the SCSI card and pull out the CW-7502-B writer (I recalls Nick - not a finer man in the zone than Nick - insist we put a SCSI writer in 'cause it were the fastest at the time, time being about four years ago), start the machine up again and she's runnin' slicker'n' a handful of goose grease.
>"and what if you needs to write a CD," one of his assistants asks.
>"I reckon I might could probably pick up an IDE CD writer at the weekend swap-meet for a song and a dance."
>"I's seen ye dance, ye ugly bastard," Mabel sez, "and it'll take more than a song and a dance fra' the likes o' you, matey."

if you read junky first then it makes alot more sense

>>10497208
ikr reallymakes you think

like does erotic asphyxiation by a junky space lizard really feel that good

>>10501175
No it doesn't sound plausible. Kerouac would have been too Buddhist to laugh at another's suffering
>>10502948
Not sure why people are saying this. All Junky does is show you how an intelligent man can become a raving addict. A great, short read but not necessary for NL. Reading Burroughs' Wikipedia page would be more helpful imo.
>>10502959
t. Brainlet
It's definitely not everyone's bread and butter, some people can't get past the shock value and attribute it as NL's only worth, but for those of us that understand his conception of the language virus and his subsequent attack on consciousness, it's quite the juicy read, real tasty

>>10502997
I think I might just rub up against it a third time and get fixed.

>>10497208
Read it recently for the first time, I was a bit repulsed after reading the first chapter featuring dr Benway, but then it was brilliant. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

>>10497208
Proto /b/ bullshit. It's pseud stuff. Strictly for pseuds.

>>10502997
>No it doesn't sound plausible. Kerouac would have been too Buddhist to laugh at another's suffering
Kerouac's interest in Buddhism was largely intellectual. He always remained a Catholic and renounced Buddhism at one point in his life.

>>10502997
Kerouac was a sociopath (as was Burroughs) any laughs he had were at someone else's misery.
His interest in Buddhism (feigned) should clue you into the fact that he was a pseud with a glass ego.

>>10505132
Kerouac studied Buddhism quite seriously, and went the route of Tibetan Mahayana vs. the trendy and hip Zen. His narrow focus on stream-of-consciousness writing and opposition to proofreading/editing were a disservice to his work overall. But he was far from a pseud, he knew and loved the English language and was a passionate writer. It's easy to overlook this if you just read a couple of his books and take them at face value.

He was a sociopath but I don't care, I value a writer by their work not their lives. His life was like that of many post-WWII Americans. Combined with his father and, most significantly, his mother issues, he was a mess. He later emulated his father and tried to hide his sensitivity and grief by playing the anti-intellectual, blustering drunk. It killed him and ruined his productivity and writing.

>>10502997
>but for those of us that understand his conception of the language virus and his subsequent attack on consciousness
kys

>>10498672
it's a fish. it makes a noise when you catch it.

that is the joke.