Naked Lunch - Who are you

Music video

Category:

Music

Tags:

• naked
• lunch
• who
• are
• you
• sweden
• gothenburg
• göteborg

[georges3601]

I don't know about that. Burroughs wasn't weird that way. When Ginsberg and Kerouac were hippy-dippy Buddhists writing odes to the lotus petals, Burroughs was still writing about heroine and pedophilia. That's the thing about Burroughs; he was a normal man who was just smart/eccentric/screwed over enough to see through the hypocrisy of American society.

In his view, every American (indeed, everyone anywhere) is, essentially, a pervert who acts civilised. Burroughs just got sick of pretending.

[Beatnuk]

This is the type of shit Burroughs would have listened to had he still been alive.

[PinkProgram]

lol ^_^

[yararu]

Bukowski's sense of cynicism > Burroughs' sense of cynicism

[TheSlimySeconds]

@georges3601 True.

[georges3601]

Yeah, I can see that. I think that a generation separates Joyce from Beckett such that Beckett is not a modernist (Godot is usually seen as a definitive postmodern text), but I understand your point. I also think that American postmodernism is a separate tradition, and that Burroughs is an important figure in it. The American tradition seems to have none of the more academic qualities that French or Irish pomo writing is so (in)famous for. Burroughs did not write 'intertextual" fiction.

[TheSlimySeconds]

@georges3601 Borges was very important as well; Beckett I saw more as one of the original modernists along with Joyce. Burroughs had a very important role in the postmodern movement though(at least the American one), for helping influence postmodern writers like Pynchon, Ballard, Gibson, and even more current examples like Welsh. Though the more and more I read Burroughs, the more he seemed sorta isolated from the Beat scene.

[georges3601]

@TheSlimySeconds

ummm, I don't agree that Naked Lunch "foreshadowed" the postmodern literary movement. That strikes me as a very American take on things; what about Beckett (now that you've mentioned him), or Borges?

I like the Beats, mostly, but I don't think they were really that important.

[TheSlimySeconds]

@georges3601 Yeah, that is true. Though his intense psycho-sexual homoerotic nightmarish sequences is definitely not for all tastes. Kerouac and Bukowski seemed to follow more in the footsteps of writers like Hemingway, while Burroughs seemed to be more in the avant-garde/modernist vein is such writers like Joyce or Beckett. Surprising enough, it was his text Naked Lunch that foreshadowed the post-modernist literary movement.

[georges3601]

@TheSlimySeconds

yeah, I can see that.

I wrote that post a few years ago, and I have to say I don't agree with it entirely any more.

But I still think that Burroughs was more about realism than the other members of the Beats. He made use of horror and fantasy mostly to illustrate his social commentary.

also, this song sucks.....

no offence to Burroughs, to the poster, or to the lovely people prancing around in the video.

[georges3601]

@aufumier

yep, but he hated "beatniks" as well.

People tend to see the hippie movement as a derivative of the "beat" movement, and I'm sure that hippie "spirituality" comes largely from Ginsberg's, and Kerouac's, exploration of Buddhism (which they wrote extensively about, like in the Dharma Bums).

Kerouac seems to have been fed up with all the kids who looked up to him. First he dismissed the beatniks, then he dismissed the hippies.

[TheSlimySeconds]

@georges3601 Actually, Burroughs was always more of the surrealist.. Ive read quite a nice amount of his stuff... Beautifully strange and poetic.