Naked Lunch Week 2

I have recently reached the 80 page mark of Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs and I have entered the no-dropping zone so no matter how crude and nihilistic Burroughs hipster-esque masterpiece gets I will continue to read. A main character has been fleshed out in a man named Bill Lee, who is really just a device to reflect Burrough's own junkie thinking. Lee is stoned out of his mind and has weird narcotics-induced dreams. One in which his paid by the President to get him high by taking some weird drug and transferring it through bodily fluids. The book is hilarious, but if you read too much it can hurt your head and your stomach. Yesterday as I was reading the vignette on the Informants visit to the fake area of Interzone, I nearly barfed reading Burrough lucid descriptions of the jail for drug abusers. This is the most disgusting book I have ever read, but I have to admit there are parts of the book I really enjoy. For it's short length I can think of worse things than reading a book praised for being the best counter culture book of the 20th century.

Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

After finish the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, I picked up one of the most important books written recently Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs, the book is a mix of drug paranoia, funny vignettes about odd people with odd names, and horrific detailings of how addiction effects everyones life and that everyone is addicted to something whether it's drugs or money and that addiction will ruin your life. I've only read the first vignette of the book which was left untitled and was a runthrough of the different peoples involved in the drug culture and the many drugs (C,H,M) that dominate the lives of the addicted. The first vignette is told in a harsh almost biographical and could serve as a precursor to future novels by Vonnegut, Kerouac and Thompson. The next vignette is much darker about Dr. Benway who is employed by Istanbul Inc. a fictional company who pays Benway to go to the fictional country of Annexia and set up a police-state. Even though Benway steadfastly denies his involvement in the use of torture he continue to torture the citizens of Annexia. The book at times is hard to follow, but it's disturbing themes and detail offer a polarizing view of the ill-fated life of junkies.