Naked Lunch - Restored vs. Normal

It's quite amazing, he's going on at the beginning about how legal prescriptions would "cure the junk disease by the end of the century" or something like that. Famous last words...

Mine also has the Naked Lunch on Trial transcript featuring Allen Ginsberg, and the Introductory "Deposition" by WSB. It's a big yellow paperback with the graphic logo from the film. This is slightly different than the one I bought when I was 14, it didn't have the trial transcript and it said "Now a major motion picture", etc on the front, otherwise it was the same yellow book. I lent that out when I was 17 and never got it back.
I had another small black paperback edition at one point, gave that one away.

Never read this JG Ballard intro, any good?

i wonder if the majority of media-level junkies were less known for shooting their wives in the head, whether such a situation could come about (doubtful i guess, but Burroughs hardly helps his own cause, as far as the 'straight' world is concerned)

On the one hand, I do think that he's a brilliant writer, and I enjoy his work immensely. Even rereading Naked Lunch as an adult, I'm amazed by how inventive, and also how *funny* it is in places.

As a teenager and in my late teens, I loved the whole self destructive junkie mythologising aspect of it, because I was young and stupid and self destructive. In a lot of ways, my friends and I kind of held up this whole indestructible viewpoint of "Well, Bill Burroughs is still alive, so it doesn't matter what I do to myself." There's a part of me that's nostalgic for that whole thing, even though there's a bigger part of me that thinks "some of my friends are dead because of this crap, god, that was so harmful and awful".

But he does make up for all that damage because at the end of the day, the writing is so good. I suppose if the writing wasn't good, it wouldn't have made the whole thing so glamourous and attractive in the first place.

I like this exchange from "The Job":

Q: The Beat/Hip axis, notably in such figures as Ginsberg, want to transform the world by love and nonviolence. Do you share this interest?

A: Most emphatically no. The people in power will not disappear voluntarily, giving flowers to cops just isn't going to work. This thinking is fostered by the establishment; they like nothing better than love and nonviolence. The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window.

I'm surprised that no one has sampled "Thou shalt not blow potsmoke into the face of thy PET!"

I think that's what kept him from being pretentious and annoying in the style of many of the other Beats. He just had this dry, midwestern sense of self depreciation and seeing the funny side of very dark things.

That's part of his bit "Words of Advice for Young People". There's a version of that on his album Spare Ass Annie, with backing music from the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, and there's another spoken word version on the Giorno Poetry Systems comp Smack My Crack. Somewhere in my boxes of tapes I have a live performance of him doing this, too.

I've not heard of the "restored" version - it sounds like a bit of a cash-in bad idea - the only major thing to be restored to it is the chapter "WORD" which you can get in the collection "Interzone". As a chapter it's a lot more free-verse than the others and a lot more obscene, everyone involved says it "got lost" at the time but somehow I think that they'd've got into a far worse censorship battle if it had been in there.

The chapter orders are apparently from the random way that it came back from the typesetters, although Burroughs switched I Feel The Heat to the beginning and Hauser and O'Brien to the (near) end to make the shooting of the policeman "frame" the book. I really don't get someone trying to re-order or restore it as there is certainly no "directors cut" version to restore. After all this is a book that tells you that you can "cut into it at any point" and from a man who said "the novel form is dead and arbitary - I can't use it". Pandering to structure seems a little wierd, unless of course Grauerholz needs a holiday or something.

If you want a new take on the material or whatever get "The Letters of William Burroughs" which shows all the material and stylistics emerging in letters to Allen Ginsberg. Or get "Interzone" which collects a lot of superfluous (often equally as good) stuff from the era, and the "missing chapter".