Naked Lunch | William S. Burroughs

I'm halfway through reading this book right now. I will update this as I go along.

Observations

• Junk (drug) terminology, 50s slang

• Burroughs' reportage. Observations, rich descriptions of people and landscapes (made up or real)

Imagery

• Bugs (insects, centipede, long slug, could this relate to his time as an exterminator?)

Pg. 23 'Her hideous galvanized need (hunger of insects in dry places)'

•  Flesh, mutation, physical deformation/change (flesh, ooze, Mugwumps, fluid)

Pg. 19 '...dissolving the body's decent skin, you expect at any moment a great glob of protoplasm will flop right out and surround the junk'

Pg. 22 'lusts and hungers of larval organs stirring in the tentative ectoplasmic flesh of junk kick'

Pg. 23 'looking down at her bloody haunch with the cold blank eyes of a meat trader'

'When I grabbed the Rube's thigh the flesh came up like wax and stayed there, and a slow drop of pus oozed out the hole'

Pg. 66 'Misshapen overcoat of flesh that turned from brown to green and then colorless...fell off into globs on the floor'

Pg. 89 'his flesh turns to viscid, transparent jelly that drifts away in a green mist, unveiling a monster black centipede'

• Illness and Disease (fictional and real, the junk sickness, addiction)

Pg. 67 'Bang-utot'

• The sickness of the world (ecological damage, corruption...)

Pg. 19 '...into the East River, down through condoms and orange peels, mosaic of floating newspapers, down into the silent black ooze with gangsters in concrete...'

Pg. 25 'On through the peeled landscape, dead armadillos in the road and vultures over the swamp and cypress stumps'

Pg. 92 '...smell of the jungle and salt water and the rotting river and dried excrement and sweat and genitals'

Pg. 93 'The City is visited by epidemics of violence, and the untended dead are eaten by vultures in the streets'

• Drug Use

Pg. 93 - notes about a paragraph Burroughs' wrote during Yage intoxication. He makes notes on the effects of the drug.

Pg. 113 - 'The junky sits with needle poised to the message of blood, and the conman palpates the mark with fingers of rotten ectoplasm

• Homosexuality/repression

Pg. 113 - 'There's a boy across the river with an ass like a peach; alas I was no swimmer and lost my Clementine'