Pajiba

Full fifty percent of all English lit majors went through, at some point in college (usually freshman year) a Beatnik phase.

Not I...thank god.

does early Cronenberg include Scanners? Or is this even earlier than that? Because Scanners totally rocks.

I knew nothing of Burroughs until this entry and a 5-minute scan of his Wikipedia page.

Holy crap, old man was messed up.

Um, I liked Naked Lunch.

You're entitled to your opinion; but Naked Lunch Is great. It may be the only "beat" literature worth carrying with us into the 21st Century. (The movie's not bad either.)

The shot-his-wife thing: That was an accident. It was a stupid, drunken/fucked-up accident, but he did it without malice.

If any of you are not familiar with Burroughs, go to YouTube and look up "Thanksgiving Prayer" and/or "The Junky's Christmas."

I normally respect Dustin's opinions, and like I said, he's entitled to them; but this offhand dismissal of William Burroughs is a kick to my teeth. That man was brave in an age when the issues he was brave and open about carried genuine risks to life, limb and liberty.

Thank goodness, Jerce. I couldn't believe I was the only one who enjoyed the book.

Yech. I guess I'm biased because I quite like the beats, but this article came across as pretty obnoxiously holier than thou. It felt as though you were saying that yeah, we all thought the beats were cool, before we got lives and stopped being idiots or something.

I will always have a soft spot for the beats and I will never feel guilty or stupid for it. They wrote some pretty great stuff, and they influenced countless artists and writers. Even though their personal lives were fucked up beyond belief, this was, as Jerce said, way too dismissive for my taste.

Naked Lunch the movie absolutely KILLED any chances I had with this one girl. In retrospect, possibly the worst date movie ever.

Ever since then I've borne an unreasoning resentment towards Burroughs. The only thing I grudgingly acknowledge is that he lent his title to the film Blade Runner.

Granted, my dead sex life wasn't really his concern.

Cities of the Red Night, Place of Dead Roads, and The Western Lands are three of the greatest literary works of the latter half of the 20th century. In those books Burroughs emerged as the Mark Twain of the post-nuclear/late-capitalist age.

The writer of this article needs to pull his head out of his arse and realize that not everyone is/was as shallow and clueless as he is.

Loving Burroughs is not an attempt to be cool, but dismissing him in such a ridiculous way sure seems like one. "Naked Lunch" is a scary, hilarious masterpiece and that book barely scratches the surface of his work. This article sounds like it was written by someone who had just seen "Naked Lunch" (which is not a great film and barely based on the book) and is trying to sound hip and intelligent by dismissing brilliant, heralded writers whose impact and influence will remain long after we're dead.

To call his prose a "jumbled mess" is moronically shallow and off the mark. The man broke down language in incredible ways, pushed it far into areas of consciousness that were nearly impossible to explore with the limitedness of human language. Why do negative creep bloggers feel the need to denigrate actual writers like Burroughs and Bukowksi (who is not even part of the beat generation), men with balls and soul? It comes off as if you're trying to out-hip people who think they're hip for knowing Burroughs. It does not come across an honest opinion. Oh well.

I hate the fucking grammer nazis on this page. They are more pretentious than Perez Hilton is a douche.

I actually did not fit into this cat. U of M has a horrible eng. lit. program .