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BURROWING_LOWER

                                             July 21, 2010

William Burroughs, "Naked Lunch":
                                                  NAKED_LUNCH
  "'So long flatfoot!'  I yell, giving
  the fruit his B production."

But really, it's *all* B production,
of one sort or another.

Burroughs is playing Tough Guy throughout,
posturing as an insider letting you in on
the grubby, gritty, gray world of the
Real Reality.

Naked Lunch kicks off with contempt for
"character collectors", squares who think
it's hip to talk to crazed characters on
the street...

   "I am evidently his idea of a character.
    You know the type: comes on with
    bartenders and cab drivers, talking
    about right hooks and the Dodgers,
    calls the counterman in Nedick's by
    his first name.  A real asshole."

       In other words, a man trying to
       live in the world of Damon Runyon,
       while Burroughs and friends were
       digging deeper. Or lower.

But that's the natural audience
for the book.  Who else would
read this, if they weren't
addicted to the notion that              Ginsberg, addressing Hunke
addicts know something, have some        (from a joint interview
important, secret connection to          included in "The Source"):
reality not given to the mere
mundanes such as you and I?                 "We thought you were Eviiil, or
                                            not evil, but possessed of some
                                            secret knowledge, in the sense
                                            that the bottom had dropped out
                                            of your world in a way we had
                                            never had to deal with."

                                            "We were on a quest for
                                            Supreme Reality! Didn't I
                                            mention something about it
                                            at the time?"




           "Into the interior: a vast subdivision,
           antennae of television to the meaningless sky"

           "In lifeproof houses they hover over the young, sop
           up a little of what they shut out.  Only the young
           bring anything in, and they are not young for very
           long."

           "America is not a young land: it is old and
           dirty and evil before the settlers, before
           the Indians.  The evil is in there waiting."

              -- William Burroughs, "Naked Lunch"




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