Can't wait to see this film about William S. Burroughs. Too bad the screening and afterparty is $60...
A preview quote from the article:
"Burroughs also spent some formative years on the shores of Lake Michigan, though he didn't speak as fondly of them. In a passage he later excised from Naked Lunch, he wrote, "There is something about Chicago that paralyzes the spirit under a dead weight of a formalism dictated by hoodlums, a hierarchy of decorticated wops . . . And everywhere the smell of atrophied gangsters, the dead weight of those dear dead days hanging in the air like rancid ectoplasm . . . You suffocate in the immediate past, still palpable, quivering like an earthbound ghost . . . Here the dream is suffocating, more real than the real, the past actually, incredibly, invading the present."
Note to self: read "The Naked Lunch." Also, upon reading the wiki on Burroughs I find it hilarious that he went to my former roommate's preparatory high school in St. Louis, if only because most of my fellow Von Steuben MSC graduates in Chicago become gangsters, drug-dealers, and, at best, middle-managers at downtown corporations.
Also I'm definitely regretting my decision not to take the Columbia seminar on the Beat generation. REGRET!
2 comments:
I say just show up and try to talk yourself into the seminar! Supposedly it has worked for people in the past...
Ahhh I wish, but the guilt would overwhelm me! It's supposed to have the most applicants of any English seminar! I would feel like a complete tool.
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