ask an armchair Burroughs major anything
(also I made a chart)
the GOAT author gets a bad rap around here and I'd like to change that
>>8091548
Very nice. No one ever talks about The Nova Trilogy here, which makes me sad.
>>8091548
>expecting /lit/ to have good taste
That's your problem right there.
How do you think Burroughs squares up with the other Beats and American counter-culture writers. I've only just started Junky, but I've always rated Kerouac and Brautigan at bit higher.
>>8091580
Burroughs out-does Kerouac and Ginsberg both in terms of scope and definitely in terms of substance. Kerouac at his best though is another thing /lit/ memes itself into missing out on. Visions of Cody is a masterpiece.
tbqh I haven't read Brautigan.
>>8091548
thanks my man, only read junky and the place of the dead roads of which i dont understand anything, will folllow the chart.
>>8091605
Yeah, Brautigan is distanced from the beats by time and even a in lot of his humour.
It's not that hard to outdo Ginsberg. Howl was fantastic, and his Whitman poetry is the best since Pound, but he really crippled himself by believing that everyone else was a better author and poet than him, even Karl Solomon, whose work reads like a budget version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
>>8091580
>Kerouac above Burroughs
Burroughs makes Kerouac look like a privileged schoolboy dipping his toe in the waters of counter-culture, Billy Boy dives in head first.
>>8091623
They were both privileged schoolboys though.
>>8091548
I've only read Naked Lunch, Queer, The Wild Boys and The Soft Machine but I plan on reading all of his work. Burroughs is excellent.
>>8091618
>and his Whitman poetry is the best since Pound
No offense, but this statement screams to me that you haven't read much poetry.
Whats a good way to interpret all the culturally specific language he uses?
>>8091548
>The pictured edition is a good one
>unabridged - read by Mark Bramhall
Breh
naked lunch and the nova trilogy were glorious. particularly i enjoyed burroughs' musings on language and media. at times the cut-up method was a bit grating, but it always served its aesthetic purpose quite effectively. the comprehensible bits in the trilogy were really cool and i'd like to see more of his material in that style. i recently purchased exterminator and my education and am excited to get started on them.
>>8091890
well when you are looking for the paperback try to imagine the exact same cover without the final line of text
>>8091963
Okay, sorry for being retarded.
>>8091935
if there is a way to make cut-ups "new" again, they'll return sometime or another.
one time my printer ran out of ink and printed only one line for every five of a story I'd written. together they formed surprisingly coherent sentences, and most were usable "if not better" than what I had written before, true to Burroughs' observations from his own experience.
>>8091548
I read him a little too young, got turned off by the form. Read about his life, didn't admire the sort of person his was. I might give him another shot down the road.
how long did it take you to work out what "the outraged squawk of the displaced bullhead" was? ausfag here, and we don't have fish that scream when you catch them.
Was Burroughs deliberate with his cut-ups? Or was it just a random process?
