2008-07-13 Most important novel since Ulysses, and only gets more important

I read Burroughs first when I was in my teens. The homosexuality was just like reading about the sex-life of Martians or something; his whole world was so bizarre that it just seemed like part of his freak show - I thought he was just trying to be as disgusting as possible. But that's not the point about Burroughs - if you can get hold of any recordings of Burroughs reading from the Naked Lunch, or the Soft Machine, the Ticket that Exploded, or Nova Express, you'll 'get it' more - it's a sort of beat poetry, stunningly inventive, imaginative and hilarious, if patchy. A lot of fuss is made about his 'cut up technique', which is just the equivalent of scrap iron or turds in art galleries - pretentious drivel. But actually, it throws up some interesting effects when he uses it on his own stuff. You'd have to read the first four novels in a row to appreciate that - Don't worry, he only uses it here and there. I don't think he uses cut-up in this one though, which makes it an easier read than the others.
The Naked Lunch would be enough to be going on with for most people, though. David Lynch's film is great, and as good a stab at it as you could get, but it's really only a few selected scenes and themes from all his books and his life - great but not the book.

Don't expect a straightforward story, but there are recurring themes and threads, that sort of link it all together. It was apparently written in Tangier, in installments which he then posted to Allan Ginsberg, as 'reports from Interzone', just for his own amusement. Ginsberg persuaded him to publish it all. That was the story a while back. I daresay this new edition will have some new insight on all that.
As to the substance: consider when the Naked Lunch was written, and what he was writing about, and what others were writing about at the time. It's not the homosexuality that's the point, or even remarkable. While everyone else was writing about the 'cold war', he was writing about the expansion of the drug-trade, and the symbiotic and parasitic expansion of law enforcement to parallel it, using heroin as a metaphor for all sorts of parasitic political and economic forces that insinuate themselves into the human world and deliberately create a dependence, and behind them the alien, child-sacrificing Mugwumps, and the Heavy Metal Kids, alien lizards from a high density world, with all their scams and projects, like 'the Oven Gang' (the nazis). Burroughs is sometimes credited with introducing 'heavy metal' into the vocabulary, but encountered other stories about that.
I haven't read it for a while so I can only give some hints off the top of my head, but I disagree with those who say Burroughs is someone who you read when young and never revisit - he gets better with age. The Naked Lunch is a remarkable work, and a remarkable prophecy which is getting truer by the day, unfortunately - 'the moment when everyone sees what's on the end of every fork'! The most inspired and bizarred science fiction ever!