Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

Product Information

Griffith-Jones set this question to the court: “would you approve of your young sons, young daughters—because girls can read as well as boys—reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?” (This would prove a grave misstep—it was evocative of a time and set of values too far past.)

That person is standing on solid earth and hasn't obviously walked off a cliff and is about to plummet to their doom like an oblivious Wile E. Coyote. This book is actual reality. And it has inspired more of our world than you can even measure. David Cronenberg adapted Naked Lunch into a movie, but every movie since Naked Lunch is really an adaptation of Naked Lunch. Especially all of Cronenberg's films. But all films, really. Film itself as a medium is now just an adaptation of Naked Lunch. This book is purely crazy (tons of crazy shit have gone on in this story), that's all I can tell you after I finished reading the Chinese translation (published in Taiwan). I also admit I don't think I fully understand what William S. Burroughs tried to tell us, and some parts of the story really tend to drag on and on for no good reason. If all pleasure is relief from tension, junk affords relief from the whole life process, in disconnecting the hypothalamus, which is the center of psychic energy and libido.”

The beat generation has been recast in recent years as a wandering band of literary minstrels, but their achievements are inseparable from death and derangement, which stalked the leading members ("I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness ...") Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs had all seen the insides of prisons and mental hospitals by the age of 30. In 1951, while living in Mexico City, where he had gone to avoid a drugs charge, Burroughs shot his wife Joan in the head during a game of William Tell. After two weeks in custody, with the help of bribes paid out of Adding Machine profits, he was released, whereupon he resumed the life of a fugitive addict, first returning to New York, then travelling to Central America in search of hallucinogenic vegetable drugs, before settling in Tangier, Morocco. The Ugly Spirit moved in, too. For a time his regular companion was a teenage boy called Kiki. When Burroughs left Tangier temporarily in 1957, Kiki took up with a Cuban singer, who killed him after catching him in bed with a woman. Burroughs gave the news three sentences near the end of a letter to Ginsberg, which dealt mainly with the organisation of Naked Lunch. Unabridged readings of both the original text and the Restored Text edition have been made available through services such as Audible. Burroughs himself made many recordings over the years of excerpts from the book, many released on albums from Giorno Poetry Systems (GPS) and on Burroughs' later pseudo-musical albums Dead City Radio and Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales.

William S. Burroughs, Bill Morgan (ed.), Rub Out the Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1959-1974 (New York: Harper Collins, 2012), pp.360-386. PS: so aside from drugs and homosexuality, the story is also about conspiracy and mind control? Wow, my mind is blown! Gibson, William (1 January 2021). "William Gibson: 'I read Naked Lunch when it was still quasi-illicit' ". The Guardian . Retrieved 25 July 2023.Also contrary to what you've heard a million times by now, Naked Lunch is not incoherent. It is perhaps the most coherent novel ever written by a human being. A masterpiece. A cry from hell, a brutal, terrifying, and savagely funny book that swings between uncontrolled hallucination and fierce, exact satire' Newsweek

Chris Walas was hired to perform the special effects for the film. The film required fifty bug typewriters. [15] Music [ edit ] Provocative, influential, morbidly fascinating, Naked Lunch is an apocalyptic ride through the darker recesses of the human psyche. Naked Lunch" is the unnerving tale of a monumental descent into the hellish world of a narcotics addict as he travels from New York to Tangiers, then into Interzone, a nightmarish modern urban wasteland in which the forces of good and evil vie for control of the individual and all of humanity. By mixing the fantastic and the realistic with his own unmistakable vision and voice, Burroughs has created a unique masterpiece that is a classic of twentieth century fiction. There, laid out before my ignorant eyes, were multitudinous arcane references to the mysterious paraphernalia of heroin addiction. In her book about J.D. Salinger and his most famous novel, Raychel Haugrud Reiff identifies “four main reasons” for the constant censoring of The Catcher in the Rye: bad language, “‘scandalous episodes,'” bad role modeling on the part of Holden, and Holden’s disavowal of “American values.” She notes that “from 1966 to 1975, forty-one attempts were made to keep The Catcher in the Rye out of public education institutions, making it ‘the most frequently banned book in schools’ during these years.” Some examples:Production [ edit ] Development [ edit ] The film is based on the works of William S. Burroughs and his biography. The film has been selected for a Criterion Collection release, an organization that releases high quality Blu-rays and DVDs for important classic and contemporary films. [ citation needed] Accolades [ edit ] Another powerful inspiration was self-hatred. Burroughs existed in two selves, one of which felt a deep loathing for the other. In a letter to Ginsberg on the subject of a "resolution of my queerness" - a matter that also troubled the recipient - he described a dream in which he was introduced to "my non-queer persona". Burroughs No 1 walked into a room to see Burroughs No 2 "looking at me with hate. So I said, 'I don't seem to be exactly welcome'." The replica screamed: "I hate you!" With good reason, too, Burroughs added. Later, he would give this intruder the name "the Ugly Spirit". Wain, John (December 1, 1962). "The Great Burroughs Affair". The New Republic . Retrieved 2 July 2023. Naked Lunch is considered a key influence on the cyberpunk genre. [44] William Gibson has cited it as one of the novels that most influenced his own writing. [45] Obscenity and censorship [ edit ]

Hardcover. Condition: Fine. 1st Edition. The restored text edited by James Grauerholz and Barry Miles and first published by Grove in 1961. With additional material by Burroughs, a note on the text by the editors, and an afterword by Barry Ulin. Viiolet and white boards decorated with pattern from the 1959 Olympia Press edition, as new in printed green slipcase. Contemporary Literature, Volume 39, Number 4 (Winter 1998) - includes an essay on William Burroughs and Naked Lunch by Ron Loewinsohn Lydenberg, Robin (1987). Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs' Fiction. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-01413-8.Schjeldahl, Peter (26 January 2014). "The Outlaw: The extraordinary life of William S. Burroughs". The New Yorker . Retrieved 2 April 2022. And nobody denies reality quite as much as a censor. They are wonderfully strange cretins. Hilarious creatures wrapping their heads in cellophane and pretending it makes them invulnerable to bad ideas. Stumbling around like those nurses in Silent Hill. NO SUDDEN MOVEMENTS. Everybody knows only the tin foil can protect you from Tom Cruise's thought signals.