If you've read the book and ever watched a Cronenburg film, you're eyes just bugged out and jaw dropped at the idea of it, right? If not, why not? Explain. It still has one of the most apt titles ever. Contrary to what the small-minded prudes who brought the obscenity case against it assumed, this book has nothing to do with some lewd midday meal. "Naked Truth" might've been a better title, if it weren't such a meaningless cliché. Instead, the reader is forced to eat the truth, finally seeing "what is on the end of that long newspaper spoon." For an audience so accustomed to spoon-fed bullshit, Naked Lunch was and still is a refreshing menu option. Forever Amber was one of the best-selling novels of the 1940s, and the fact that it was banned in fourteen states probably has something to do with it. The first of all the states to ban the book was Massachusetts, whose Attorney General, according to Nicole Moore’s The Censor’s Library, cited “70 references to sexual intercourse, 39 illegitimate pregnancies, seven abortions, 10 descriptions of women undressing in front of men and 49 ‘miscellaneous objectionable passages,'” including (in the words of the Customs Minister of Australia, where the book was also banned) “amorous scenes,”“impotence,”“perversion,”“suggestiveness,”“abortion,” and “coarseness.” (If only we could also ban politicians for that last one.) But Winsor herself was nonplussed. “I wrote only two sexy passages,” she said, “and my publishers took both of them out. . . They put ellipses instead. In those days, you could solve everything with an ellipse.”

Time and space shift again to a nonspecific location known as "the Interzone." Hassan and a "notorious liquefactionist" are hosting a violent orgy. A character named AJ is introduced as he crashes the orgy while imitating a pirate and indiscriminately decapitating people. An infuriated Hassan tells AJ to never return. The reader then learns about the multiple political castes in the Interzone, and how their frequent clashing has resulted in a dystopian nightmare. There, laid out before my ignorant eyes, were multitudinous arcane references to the mysterious paraphernalia of heroin addiction. Hemmer, Kurt (2009). " "The natives are getting uppity": Tangier and Naked Lunch". In Harris, Oliver; MacFadyen, Ian (eds.). Naked Lunch @ 50: Anniversary Essays. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. pp.65–72. ISBN 978-0-8093-2915-1. softcover. Condition: fine. 1st edition. Quarto. Pp 128. Illustrated with photos in colour and b&w. Bound in pictorial wraps. Fore edges are a trifle curled and there is slight wear at the corners. Overall, a clean, handsome copy, very good indeed. If you wish to alter or annihilate a pyramid of numbers in a serial relation, you alter or remove the bottom number. If we wish to annihilate the junk pyramid, we must start with the bottom of the pyramid: the Addict in the Street, and stop tilting quixotically for the "higher ups" so called, all of whom are immediately replaceable. The addict in the street who must have junk to live is the one irreplaceable factor in the junk equation. When there are no more addicts to buy junk there will be no junk traffic. As long as junk need exists, someone will service it.”Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs is a corrosive mash-up of Hunter S. Thompson, George Carlin and a hoarse whisper of Jim Morrison, (and the good doctor Thompson no doubt kept a volume of Burroughs on his desk between the dictionary and the thesaurus).

We hitchhiked to the crossroads from which a long, dusty hike past five miles of cornfields awaited us. Fox, David J. (6 January 1992). " 'Sweet' Takes Honors From Film Critics". Los Angeles Times . Retrieved 9 April 2017.In 1972, parents in Massachusetts “claimed that no young person could read this ‘totally filthy, totally depraved and totally profane’ book ‘without being scarred.'”

The vignettes are drawn from Burroughs' own experiences in these places and his addiction to drugs (heroin, morphine, and while in Tangier, majoun [a strong hashish confection] as well as a German opioid, brand name Eukodol, of which he wrote frequently). 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". Burroughs during a William Tell reenactment with his wife, after I’m sure copious amounts of alcohol and chemical assistance had been inhaled, attempted to shoot a drink off her head for the entertainment of their friends. He missed. She died. He called his lawyer. Burroughs scholar Timothy S. Murphy found the film to be a muddled adaptation that reflects Cronenberg's mind more than the novel: he feels that Burroughs' subversive, allegorically political depiction of drugs and homosexuality becomes merely aesthetic. Murphy argues that Burroughs' social and politically situated literary techniques become in the film merely the hallucination of a junkie, and that by using the life of Burroughs himself as a framing narrative, Cronenberg turns a fragmented, unromantic, bitterly critical and satirical novel into a conventional bildungsroman. [29]The only other censorship action against the book outside the State of Massachusetts occurred in Los Angeles, where the novel was cleared of obscenity charges at a trial in 1965." A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century". Alfred de Grazia. "Ed de Grazia: Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Barney Rosset: Their Struggles Against Censorship Recalled". Grazian-archive.com . Retrieved 2011-06-27. Of course we do not count the novels written by the bugs. They are a different species and their perception of identity developed in a different evolutionary circumstance. Who can forget that seminal insect rebuttal to War and Peace: War and War and War and War and More War and Even More War and God I love War, and Don't Stop the Wars Please I Need the Wars by that noted fire ant queen Henry Kissinger. This book is not easy to read if your idea of reading is that it has a linear plot, characters that are either good, bad or somewhere in between, spirit-uplifting narratives and dialogues and inspiring theme.