Your thoughts on Junky? I think it's one of his best, don't

My first by him, and also my favorite.

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>>8923230
It's his best work, I believe. Cut-up technique was just an attempt at what the prose poets of the 19th century accomplished, but alot worse. Had he attempted what Baudelaire and Rimbaud did, he might've had something, but maybe not, maybe he didn't share that level of talent.

Anyways, yeah, it's good, and the best confessional Beat novel.

>>8924901
>Cut-up technique was just an attempt at what the prose poets of the 19th century accomplished
What did he mean by this?

>>8924904
That at its core the merits that this technique aims for are very similar, but Naked Lunch is a lazily executed version of it.

>>8924911
But what were those poets doing to achieve those merits?

>>8923230
Might read it when I get the chance since Deleuze kept praising Burroughs. In the mean time, what does the concept of coldness mean exactly? Not asking for spoonfeeding, it's just something I've stumbled upon several times in authors discussing Burroughs and don't fully understand (my experience with drugs is limited as well).

>>8925267
I'm not familiar with this concept of coldness. If you can post some links/references, it would be nice

Is it referring to the matter-of-fact style the book was written in?

There were some pretty funny parts, like when he's describing pot heads, queer bars, the peyote experience and the new hipsters

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I don't remember any cut-ups in Junky.

>>8925267
coldness is when you drunkenly put a shot through your wife's forehead while trying to do a William Tell act, and then get on with the narrative.

>>8924901
>Cut-up technique was just an attempt at what the prose poets of the 19th century accomplished, but alot worse.

name even one 19th century poet who tried to do anything at all like the cut-up method. the Dadaists don't count, they were 20th century.

>>8926414
Supposedly it's something junkies feel. Like a cold sensation before the high kicks in or something like that, I'm not sure on the details.

junkie is fucking boring. Naked Lunch and The Nova Trilogy are a riot but anything of Burroughs' that is straight up biographical is almost unreadable to me. queer was a slog as well, but i guess if like junkie I reccomend that, it's almost a direct sequel.

>>8924901
you're telling me that naked lunch doesn't kick the shit out of its source material like junky and queer?

>mfw

>>8925267
It's his intentional lack of mood, introspection and emotion in his characters. Things happen with a insect-like mechanical inevitability in Burroughs' work. Understanding what he calls the "algebra of need" for heroin addicts, and how it applies to every other human need. Control is the drug.Everything merely a transaction between disinterested actors.

He shares that with other modernists like Beckett. Junky is his best work as in "most coherent", but everything that followed was a meta-fiction where the story was told though the medium of cut up.

>>8926472
Me neither

>>8927817
Thanks anon! It actually makes perfect sense now.

>>8927817
"I could never have been a doctor. I would have been treating a sick child while people I didn't like were dying in the hallway."

>>8931442
Well now I have to read him.

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>>8931921

"Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down you dig farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard.

"This ass talk had a sort of gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell.

"This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventriloquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called 'The Better 'Ole' that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it but it was clever. Like, 'Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?'

"'Nah! I had to go relieve myself.'

"After a while the ass started talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time.

"Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy incurving hooks and started eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole said to him: 'It's you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we don't need you around here any more. I can talk and eat and shit.'

"After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpole's tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have amputated spontaneous -- (did you know there is a condition occurs in parts of Africa and only among Negroes where the little toe amputates spontaneously?) -- except for the eyes you dig. That's one thing the asshole couldn't do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn't give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes went out, and there was no more feeling in them than a crab's eye on the end of a stalk."

>>8932359
Burroughs is not a favorite writer of mine, but his prose really makes me squirm unlike anyone else's, and that says something.