Need more William S. Burroughs. This is his first "novel," and it weighs in at xxxi + 197 = 228 pages.
It was first published as 1/2 of an Ace Double, and looked like this:
35 cents then, $1,900 or so now.
Day 1 (DDRD 2,827), July 29, 2025
Read to page 29...and also to xxxvii and pages 163 to 187*, so much more than 30 pages. And you know what? I STILL feel like reading more. And I just might do that after I eat a little something.
* They put several different prefaces in appendices at the end of the book and I wanted to read them before actually starting the text.
JiC:
Novels and other long fiction
Junky (1953)
Queer (written 1951–1953; published 1985)
Naked Lunch (1959)
The Nova Trilogy
The Soft Machine (1961–1966)
The Ticket That Exploded (1962–1967)
Nova Express (1964)
Dead Fingers Talk (1963) – sections of Naked Lunch, Soft Machine, and Ticket that Exploded re-arranged into a new narrative.
The Last Words of Dutch Schultz (1969)
The Wild Boys: A book of the dead (1971)
Port of Saints (1973)
The Red Night Trilogy (1981–1987):
Cities of the Red Night (1981)
The Place of Dead Roads (1983)
The Western Lands (1987)
My Education: A Book of Dreams (1995)
So 14 books. Of course there's also a fair amount of non-fiction stuff....
Later...
I think this is the first appearance of a centipede in the writing of William S. Burroughs. He is going into withdrawal and is seeing horrible visions: "...I closed my eyes and saw New York in ruins. Huge centipedes and scorpions crawled in and out of empty bars and cafeterias and drugstores on Forty-second Street." (32)
Clearly W.S.B. had a fixation on bugs, and centipedes seem to have been particularly revolting to him.
P.S. I bought this a loooonnnng time ago, but just opened it today:
Mmm-hmm. Good rockin' tonight.
So there's that.
Day 2 (DDRD 2,828), July 30, 2025
Read to page 65.
Watched most of Naked Lunch last night. Remembered going to the theater to see this when it came out back in 1991. By myself. There were at least a few other people in the theater. And what struck me was that when I was laughing--I thought the movie was hilarious at times--no one else was. At any rate, I enjoyed the movie quite a bit, and I'm going to finish it up this morning. This is so different from the Queer movie; far less emotionally involving, far less serious, I suppose... unless it's just me who thinks Naked Lunch funny, which is obviously a possibility.
More on insects:
"Doolie sick was an unnerving sight. The envelope of personality was gone, dissolved by his junk-hungry cells. Viscera and cells, galvanized into a loathsome insect-like activity, seemed on the point of breaking through the surface." (60)
Sounds like the insect nature is in the center of all of us, and that when the societal inhibitions are washed away, what's left is the insect. A disturbing and loathsome thought.
As for Naked Lunch...
It was another box office loser. According to IMDb:
Box office
Budget
$16,000,000 (estimated)
Gross US & Canada
$2,641,357
Opening weekend US & Canada
$64,491Dec 29, 1991
Gross worldwide
$2,665,810
So it lost a little over $13 million.
Now I'm going to watch it with the commentary on.
Later...
Read a bit more. Just kind of got sucked into it. Read to page 94. And now...gonna read some more.
Even Later...
"What I look for in any relationship is contact on the nonverbal level of intuition and feeling, that is, telepathic contact." (149)
Read to page 197. The End.
A strangely compelling book. And I don't feel like my William S. Burroughs stomach is full yet, so....
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