Collective List of Book Lusts

Long-time readers of TLOTE (if you exist) may have noticed that updates to the site have been somewhat scarce as of late, following a blitz of postings and columns and announcements. I do apologize for this, but the sad truth is I appear to have burned out my fuses and have had a hard time embarking on new projects. There are several things in the works, but between being unemployed and pursuing freelance projects outside of this site I have not been able to keep to my schedule.

So, I just wanted to take a brief moment to assure you that this site is not dying out – I love it and the content I’ve created too much to throw it on the pile of dead blogs I’ve already contributed two or three URLs to.  Content will continue to be posted from my contributors and myself, but rather than keeping to a weekly schedule will be posted “when it gets done.” Regular schedules are hopefully not too far off once I catch up to life, but some minds do need time to recharge.

In the meantime though, for a bit of filler that might also help you get inside the heads of our writers, please enjoy these lists recently compiled in our spare time. The theme was to pick fifteen books that have special meaning or that have stuck in your head, and compile them in a list that takes the quickest amount of time to create. Carrie did one first, then Anna, and then I felt I should join in as well. I hope such a listing gives you an idea of what we like and how our creative energies skew.

And yes, I am aware that each of our lists have sixteen titles rather than fifteen, but here at TLOTE we have a hard time keeping in the boundaries.

Les:

1. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson
2. Junky, William S. Burroughs
3. A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway
4. Watchmen, Alan Moore
5. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle
6. Quinn’s Book, William Kennedy
7. Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
8. This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald
9. Dune, Frank Herbert
10. A Catskill Eagle, Robert B. Parker
11. The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolano
12. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne
13. The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac
14. All the President’s Men, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
15. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
16. Assassination Vacation, Sarah Vowell

Anna:

1. Atonement, Ian McEwan
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles
4. The Accidental Tourist, Anne Tyler
5. Proust was a Neuroscientist, Jonah Lehrer
6. The Night Watch, Sarah Waters
7. Little Children, Tom Perotta
8. The Things That Matter, Edward Mendelsohn
9. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
10. The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot
11. The Awakening, Kate Chopin
12. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
13. I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
14. Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery
15. Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris
16. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

Carrie:

1. East of Eden, John Steinbeck
2. Franny and Zoey, J.D. Salinger
3. The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolano
4. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
5. Notes from the Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
6. The Wind Up Bird Chronicles, Haruki Murakami
7. Ariel, Sylvia Plath
8. Mason/Dixon, Thomas Pynchon
9. The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster
10. Ulysses, James Joyce
11. what matters most is how well you walk through fire, Charles Bukowski
12. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
13. Fall on Your Knees, Ann-Marie MacDonald.
14. The Hairy Ape, Eugene O’Neill
15. House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski
16. The Lost Lunar Baedeker, Mina Loy

Classic Review: Anna Karenina

A quintessential classic like Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is the type of book that many modern readers will approach with reluctance and even more will avoid all together. It’s a monstrously long epic written in late 19th century Russia, and therefore one might expect it to be similar to Dostoevsky or Henry James – long-winded, pontificating, even preachy. While it is similar to Dostoevsky or Dickens in that it takes a sweeping view, following many intertwined lives over a span of land and years, Anna Karenina is surprisingly modern, tossing off the cumbersome heavy-handiness of its contemporaries.

Anna Karenina focuses on the high society of Moscow and Saint Petersburg in the late 19th century and the inter-connecting lives of members of this world. More particularly it is concerned with two romantic relationships, those of Anna and Vronsky and Levin and Kitty, and through these couples Tolstoy examines two types of love: a carnal, whirlwind romance and a steady, conventional marriage. Such a plot and backdrop feel surprisingly relevant to a modern reader. While of course there are important differences (like the limited role and double standard for women), in many ways the society of Russian nobility is comparable to, say, upper class, Vogue New York society today. They both have the same lavish lifestyles, cliques, social climbers, and groups such as the fashion plates and pseudo-intelligentsia. Tolstoy’s observations and critiques of the Russian upper crust are easily applied to today’s Jet Set. Moreover, Tolstoy writes with such urgency about his two sets of lovers, particularly Anna and Vronsky, and the two approaches to love he examines still exist for couples today, which further makes Anna Karenina a living, breathing novel.

However, there is much more than plot and setting that make this novel pleasurable and intriguing for modern readers. Immediately one notices that Tolstoy’s prose is smooth and clear – a reader digests the sentences as easily as if they were reading a book published in 2009 and will never have to reread a paragraph to grasp its meaning, unlike with, say, Henry James. Many of his sentences are as simple and satisfying as “Princess Betsy drove home from the theater without waiting for the last act.” Tolstoy narrates without preachy or pretentious asides and never halts the action or the inner movement of the characters to muse about the meaning of life. In section seven, Tolstoy even verges on a very modern stream-of-conscious style as he follows Anna’s fevered state-of-mind:

“I don’t know these streets at all. Hills it seems, and still houses, and houses. And in the houses always people and people. How many of them, no end, all hating each other!”

One might accuse Tolstoy of being overly detailed (and in a near one-thousand page book lots of details are to be expected), but his details are carefully picked to draw readers further into the world and allow them to better understand the characters. The descriptions are vibrant and beautiful; this world is rainbow colored and the reader can nearly taste its flavors. Not only does one not mind learning that Anna wears a “black dress, with …sumptuous lace,” one hungers for it. Tolstoy is also the master of writing magnificent scenes – like Kitty’s labor, Anna’s reunion with her son or Levin mowing with the peasants – and their power often doesn’t hit readers until after they have set the book down.

What perhaps holds up best is Tolstoy’s truly modern approach to his characters. Unlike in a Dickens novel there are no clear-cut good and bad characters, no moral judgments made upon them. Instead, they are full-fleshed characters with all the ambiguity of actual people, and Tolstoy is fair and compassionate to all of them – an approach that reminds one of the very modern Anne Tyler, who never judges her very flawed characters but instead seeks to understand. His characters are true: everyone knows a Levin, a Kitty, and hopes to meet an Anna.

Of course, this book was written over a century ago and therefore it comes with some of the conventions of a 19th century novel. One must have the time and patience to read a one thousand page book. Also, there are some parts that are a bit tedious, particularly if one doesn’t have the stomach for Russian political history. The last fifteen or so pages also slam the reader with what might seem like Christian propaganda. However, readers’ eagerness to discover the fate of these wonderful characters will more often than not give them the fortitude to push on through these sections. For a reader who has never read a grand 19th century novel (or who has and was scared away), Anna Karenina is pleasurable, intriguing, and captivating.

Link: The Espresso Book Machine

I had originally hoped to get a column to you today, but after writing for a few hours it became very apparent that what I’d written for you wasn’t up to my usual standards. Instead, as filler while you wait for next week’s column, please enjoy these links to the Espresso Book Machine by On Demand Books – a remarkable little gadget that could very well add another edge to small presses.

Find some images here, a news article lauding its potential here and some footage of the device in action here.

Column: In which Carrie looks back at her first attempt to write about poetry

(Lesismore’s note: As an introduction to our new contributors, here’s an earlier column written by Carrie Lorig for the Daily Cardinal on February 14, 2007. See author comments annotated below, as well as a mission statement at the end regarding future articles.)

One of contemporary pop culture’s favorite pastimes is pushing the limits of ‘shock value’ when it comes to sex and sexual innuendo. Today, unfortunately, addressing sexuality is not usually associated with making your mother proud, but with making her cringe.

Even though Fergie thinks she’s being really clever with hooks like “How come every time you come around, my London, London bridge wanna go down?,” we know the “meaning” the Duchess is trying to convey does not hail from her previous woes as a working class bridge operator, forced to raise and lower said bridge for perhaps, a large fishing dinghy or cruise ship loaded with those pesky bourgeoisie. (This paragraph was submitted for carbon dating. Samples were compared to the weave Fergie wore on the cover of this horrible album. Results suggest that this was definitely 2007.)

Listeners engage in their own cover-up games. We coyly feign scandal at allusions to sexual excess and exploitation while secretly sliding up the volume on our iPods. In truth, sick beats do their job well and we rarely concern ourselves with the thought that a song can be too vulgar.

But the tradition of covert sexuality in art and culture is capable of engaging in a much more complicated, and probably a much more healthy game of social tug-of-war. When poets imagine sex in a way that challenges or differentiates from what is considered the “social norm,” a space for real conversation and action is created. While they may contain the similar kinds of gratuitous sexual references as these songs, poems seem to strive to retain the intimacy and poignancy of sex in its snapshot-like frame.

The poet John Donne wrote several notorious poems that, under the guise of metaphor, were rather flowery suggestions to his plentiful mistresses as to what they could, you know, do later on in the evening after some very important study of course, some stately court dancing (The Galliard! The Sinkapace!), and maybe some drinks.

Donne was a very religious man, and his poetry directly comprised and contradicted his dedication to a Christian lifestyle. However, he believed in expressing love as his body dictated him to, sans the guilt imposed by conservative (or perhaps simply repressed or tragically unattractive) leaders in the church. Though poetry instinctively caters to the imagistic imagination, Donne’s work was less of a fantasy than the “pure” world Jacobean moralists insisted was reality.

More contemporary poets, like Carol Ann Duffy, covertly address notions of gender and homosexuality. In poems like “Warming Her Pearls,” she creates a female-to-female relationship that is unapologetic and assertive about its sexuality. “She fans herself / whilst I work willingly, my slow heat entering / each pearl.” (This is the only contemporary poet I reference in this whole article. She’s finally the poet laureate of Great Britain now. I would like to know how the cigars taste inside the boys club, Carol.)

And we are not only invited to view a refreshing, and perhaps more accurate view of sex through such poems, but we can also marvel at their abilities to manipulate and flirt with language. “She being Brand” is a scandalous poem by e.e. cummings, but it’s also light-hearted and vibrant, making it suitable for virgins eyes. “she being Brand / new; and you / know consequently a / little stiff i was / careful of her”

Be comforted. There is more to love poetry than meets the Hallmark card. (That’s the closer? Really, 2007 Carrie?)

This article definitely documents my awkward undergrad poetry awakening. I can’t believe I referenced John Donne because I’ve always sort of hated his poetry. (That doesn’t mean I don’t respect him, though.) I think I did it to feel credible. A big name like that is safe and easy and sure to get you in the door. Anyone moderately interested in literature is acquainted with the same poets for the most part. Someone mentions Pound was a fascist and wins a pie wedge in a game of trivial pursuit. “The  Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” remains as lovely as ever, doesn’t it? We all agree.

But I’m not going to write about those poets we’re comfortable with. I want to talk about poets who are putting out issues of magazines that are available online for free, making free e-books, and keeping small presses alive with their print work. It’s nice to think of a poet checking the same 10-day weather forecast as you. You see your own issues inside their poetry and it feels like a place of resistance and your local Perkins at the same time.  I hope I can show readers that young poets are saying and doing exciting, relatable things. They are driving some fast cars. Let’s go hack their blogs while they’re out, okay?

Column: A Classic from Classical Anna

(Lesismore’s note: As part of an introduction to our new contributors, here’s an early column from Anna Williams written on November 29, 2007 in the Daily Cardinal. Check back on Thursday for the first installment of her “Classical Anna” feature.)

(Author’s note: This is one of my favorite columns because it captures both my mental and physical connection with books. It highlights the sensual experience of reading a book, which is often overlooked. There are a few things I would change about the writing (particularly the sentence structure), but it shows off my voice. I hear the Kindle is doing well lately and that makes me sad.

“No, no, no, no!” That was me as I read an article from the latest issue of Newsweek entitled “Books Aren’t Dead (They’re Just Going Digital).” In this horror-inducing article, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos promotes his new electronic doo-hickey “The Kindle” as the savior of reading. Apparently, the Kindle is a gadget that holds over two hundred books and displays the pages on a screen.

Now, one might suppose that being the literature lover that I am, I would be in support of any new device that promotes and spreads reading. After all, Bezos says the underlying idea of the Kindle “is that you should be able to get any book – not just any book in print, but any book that’s ever been in print – on the Kindle, in less than a minute.”

But no. Despite all its advantages and possible benefits for reading, I do not support the Kindle. In fact, it makes me want to vomit. I love books, and by that I mean not just the words that when strung together form ideas, convey emotions and create a story, but also the physical book itself – feeling the soft pages of a book beneath one’s fingertips, dog-earing the pages, bending the binding. For me and many other readers, reading is not only a mental and emotional experience, but a physical, sensual one as well, and if books become mainly electronic, an essential part of the reading experience will truly be lost.

For instance, one of the best parts of reading is the smell of the book. In fact, I even consider myself a connoisseur of book smells: my sense of smell is so refined that I can detect a difference, no matter how small, between every book I’ve ever read. Even more than that, these scents are tied to my memory – all I have to do is flip through the pages of a novel, breath in the scent, and I am instantly taken back to the time when I first read it. Imagine me and other book-scent experts pressing our noses against a Kindle! All that would accomplish is smudging the screen.

Furthermore, if this Kindle creates the revolution in reading that Bezos predicts, we will lose the human mark and history that the physical book records. And readers love this history – why else would so many people collect used and first editions? I have many books my grandparents once owned, yellowed with age, their margins scribbled with notes. Sometimes I even find old newspaper clippings tucked between the pages. I just don’t think a future kid will appreciate it in the same way if his grandfather passes a Kindle along to him. (Grandpa, this is just a regular Kindle. I already have the Kindle 2.0!)

The idea of a world where people sit curled by the fire reading from an electronic screen or read to their children at bedtime from a Kindle sends a chill down my spine, as it should for any true book lover. So, here’s my plea to all readers out there: don’t buy the Kindle! Never ever! Instead, I suggest we all celebrate the launch of this little gadget by going to a local bookstore, buying a real book or two, flipping them open, and deeply inhaling the pages.

Announcement: Welcome New Voices

As I mentioned in last month’s manifesto for the future of The Lesser of Two Equals, a large goal of mine for this second year of operation is to bring both a broader scope and sense of consistency to the blog. On my personal perspective this is going well – regular updates and more detailed features  – but the issue has also come up that I simply do not have the energy to do everything I want with the site.

While I am one of the 12 percent of Oregon’s population who doesn’t have a job to occupy their day (utterly depressing number that, isn’t it?), I do devote a good portion of each day to looking for one, and as anyone who has hunted for work knows this is an exhausting routine that saps creativity and rapidly turns one into an antisocial alcoholic. I also like to break up the monotony of constant book reviews by writing reviews of films/video games/albums for other locations, as well as a novel or two that I go to when I feel the urge.

The bottom line is, I by myself am incapable of doing everything I feel I could be doing with TLOTE. I have only a certain amount of words I can call up per day, and to remain sane I have to split them between other topics.

So, I would like to take this moment (and 100th post of this blog, conveniently enough) to let you all know that starting this week, my work at TLOTE will be joined by two other contributors: Anna Williams and Carrie Lorig. Both are already charter members of the family, as my direct successors in The Daily Cardinal’s literature column which served as the foundation of this blog.

Both our new contributors will supplement my media/memoir mindset. Carrie, author of “Conceal and Carrie” in the academic year of 2006-07, will be filling the poetics void by taking a look at contemporary poets and telling us which ones are worth reading. Anna, author of “Williams Shakespeare” for 2007-08, will contribute more of the classic literary perspective with her series “Classical Anna,” which takes a look at reading old reliables in these modern times. An exact schedule is still in the works, but expect us to get regular updates fairly soon, as well as more information on both as part of the upcoming site redesign.

As an introduction to our new contributors, we will be reprinting a few of their personal favorite Cardinal columns on the site over the next couple of weeks. In the same fashion as my columns, they will be offering thoughts on the completed work and some updated commentary. A schedule of regular updates is still being generated, so keep your eyes open for posts on our status.

So, I hope you’ll join me in welcoming these new voices to TLOTE, and that the attention you give my work will be shared with both new members in full.

Link: Librophiliac Love Letter

If my last column filled you with any sort of rage, then may I cheerfully offer you this (also via Neil Gaiman’s blog) to mellow you out: a collection of pictures of the world’s grandest libraries, courtesy of Curious Expeditions.

Here’s a couple of samples to whet your appetite:

Biblioteca Angelica, Rome, Italy

Herzog August Library, Wolfenbüttel, Germany

Bibliothéque Nationale de France, Paris, France

More relaxing than any herbal bath in my estimation.

http://curiousexpeditions.org/2007/09/librophiliac_love_letter_a_com.html#more

Column: Attempted Book Burning in WI

Apparently, the CCLU forgot the Inquisition is over

By Les Chappell

The Lesser of Two Equals

June 17, 2009

(I had been planning to write my column for this week on as a musing on just how much blame we as a consumer base are to blame for the closing of independent bookstores, but a link on Neil Gaiman’s website has pushed me into diatribe central today.)

While I no longer live in Wisconsin, having relocated to the greener valley of Portland almost a year ago, I retain a fondness for the state in which I spent the last 12 years of my life and where so many family and friends of mine still reside. As such, I like to keep an eye on how things are going in the state, both to remain up to date on issues I followed before leaving and because I am eagerly awaiting the weeping and gnashing of teeth should Brett Favre make his way to the Vikings.

Usually I enjoy the news that comes out of the state – and occasionally find a moment that pleases my bookish instincts – but this recent article from the Guardian (in the United Kingdom of all places) has been able to rouse a rare anger in me. In the proud tradition of Wisconsin’s housing political extremes on both poles (this is the state that brought us Robert LaFollette and Joseph McCarthy, lest we forget), we now see there are still parts of the state willing to go against the written word and channel the spirit of Tomás de Torquemada.

As the Guardian reported, the lawsuit has been brought by the Christian Civil Liberties Union on behalf of elderly West Bend citizens against Francesca Lia Block’s “Baby Be-Bop”, a young adult novel that focuses on its protagonist Dirk’s struggle to come to terms with his homosexuality. The book was depicted as part of a display in the West Bend Community Memorial Library, and apparently its appearance caused great trauma to the “mental and emotional well-being” of the plaintiffs by containing racial slurs toward gays and African-Americans.

Now this sort of argument is nothing new to the world of literature – books from “Huckleberry Finn” to “Naked Lunch” have been attacked on the grounds of obscene or insulting language. Even in West Bend it’s a familiar story, as some residents recently lost a campaign to restrict young adult titles of this nature. The key point here is what the plaintiffs are seeking: $120,000 in compensatory damages for being exposed to the title and the right to publicly burn the book for being a hate crime, “explicitly vulgar, racial [sic], and anti-Christian.”

I will repeat that: they want to publicly burn the book.

Now, I haven’t read it myself so I can’t comment on how offensive the content is, and in the interest of tolerance I will recuse myself from any religious judgment. What I will not excuse myself from is my anger at this ignorant assault on the concept of a library.

To me, a library by definition exists as a place that holds all books and offers their use in a neutral context, letting its visitors and members sift and winnow through the information at their own pace. The word “public” is put before the word library for a reason, in that anyone who goes there should expect full and unfettered access to its contents. Censoring what content is held in a library beyond exercising reasonable control (i.e. making sure erotica isn’t shelved alongside Louis Sachar) is only a few steps away from the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in my perspective.

Anyone who tries to remove titles from a library based on their own moral objections is implicitly stating that they consider their opinion above any other person’s ability to interpret the book, and that their negative reactions outweigh any potential positive someone else might find in the title – an attitude that implies an arrogant disregard for others thoughts. The argument is made that removing these titles creates an safer atmosphere for children, but I counter that removing these titles is a much more detrimental move. Censoring what children read is a job for the parents, not some authority figure who judges a book based on a few words.

This doesn’t even consider the logical paradox being demonstrated here, which has made blood pour slowly from my ears as I try to comprehend it. A large part of the group’s argument is based on the fact that the book (and I am quoting a legal document here) “constitutes a hate crime,” the words in the book “permeate violence” and that it “degrades the community.” And so to preserve the community, they want to hold a public ceremony condemning this work and destroy it in a gesture that evokes memories of Nazi Germany. There are irony flares going up in all directions.

Now, given the dismissal of the earlier attempts to “clean up” the library and the track record in this country for assaulting titles, I doubt “Baby Be-Bop” will be seeing an inferno anytime soon. But this still holds up as a cautionary tale: people who value their libraries need to keep an eye on them in case of the people who don’t.

Les Chappell encourages all of you to mail copies of “Tropic of Cancer” to Ginny and Jim Maziarka, who pushed for the earlier ban at the West Bend Community Memorial Library. If you don’t share his pettiness, then send your support to the West Bend library board for doing the right thing.

Book Review: Losing Mum and Pup

Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir

By Christopher Buckley

Published May 6, 2009

Twelve Books

272 pp.

ISBN 0-446-54094-3

Reviewed June 15, 2009

Ever since the death of William F. Buckley Jr. in February 2008, his son Christopher appears to have a target painted on his back. Although he chiefly works as a humorist, with satirical government-based novels such as “Supreme Courtship” and “Thank You For Smoking,” a rather vocal group seems to think he is under a moral obligation to preserve the family legacy in the ways they deem appropriate. When he joined the ranks of Republican intellectuals endorsing Barack Obama for the 2008 presidential election, the backlash was so voluminous that he was forced to resign from the very magazine that his father founded and which he still owns one-seventh of.

But that excoriation pales in comparison to some of the comments directed at his latest book, “Losing Mum and Pup,” which has been criticized as full of selfish, petty smears against parents who are no longer around to defend themselves. Once again, the reaction is overblown and completely missing the spirit of his actions, as it’s hard to think of a book that feels more like saying a fond farewell. Mixing his trademark wry humor with sentimental honesty, it’s not an insult but a tribute to people who may have been difficult to live with but never impossible to respect or love.

Between April 2007 and February 2008, Buckley suffered the loss of both his parents – a loss whose difficulty was compounded by their public reputations. His father was credited as the founder of modern conservative thought (as well as National Review and “Firing Line” and over 50 books); and his mother was “the chic and stunning” Patricia Taylor Buckley, queen of New York socialites for decades. They were people of immense reputation and charm, and Buckley was their only son – a relationship regularly strained by faith, black humor and intellect.

Buckley traces over these difficult months, from his mother’s deathbed to the final memorial service for his father in Connecticut. He was pushed into a variety of roles, ranging from nursemaid to an often obstinate patient to literary executor to organizer of elaborate memorial services (the book has regular asides on the minutiae of cremation costs and military honors). Along the way we also see how his parents’ loss touched the political world, with vignettes on his father’s close friends from Henry Kissinger to George McGovern.

Detractors will make the claim that Chris Buckley is kicking out the pedestal his parents were placed on, and to some extent this is correct. He does not skimp over his mother’s acid tongue, treating us to uncomfortable dinner scenes where she humiliated her granddaughter’s best friend and refused Ted Kennedy a car (“There are bridges between here and Gstaad”). His father is shown as distant and difficult, not at his son’s sickbed or graduation and reviewing “Boomsday”  in a uncomplimentary sentence (“This one didn’t work for me. Sorry”).

But none of these comments really ever comes across as mudslinging, more presenting pieces of what made his parents such a complicated package. As Buckley himself says, “larger-than-life people create larger-than-life dramas,” and he more than counters their dramas with the reasons they were larger than life. Pat Buckley could be cruel but she was also a hostess without peer, backing every one of her husband’s ventures without hesitation (after first trying to talk him out of it) and ripping into anyone who dared to insult her son. And WFB was for all his faults “the world’s coolest mentor,” teaching his son how to navigate by the stars and then pushing his limits by sailing in a borderline-monsoon storm.

And the complaints by the indignant reviewers also gloss over the fact that this is probably Buckley’s best-written book to date. He has publicly stepped away from “channeling” his father’s ghost, but between the brisk precision of the word choice and the speed of composition (he has said he wrote it in 40 days) it’s easy to picture WFB offering a spiritual boost. Opening with an Oscar Wilde quote on losing ones parents (“looks like carelessness”), literacy permeates the text with references on everything from P.G. Wodehouse to Joseph Conrad to the labors of Hercules. His mother’s ghost also makes an appearance with various barbs to break the tension: “Oh, do pull yourself together and stop carrying on in this fashion.”

But it’s in the moments where he realizes his looming orphanhood that “Losing Mum and Pup” takes on a singular power, needing no narrative devices other than straight reaction. He may portray his parents as weak but he is in almost as much pain, seeking to rationalize his own thoughts and leave things on as even a keel as is possible. The instance where he gets the call on his father’s death is painfully immersive, showing a war with instincts and emotions and wondering if he should continue what he was doing before, the taxes: “Maybe if I do them, this won’t have happened.”

If there are conflicting opinions about “Losing Mum and Pup,” they may be justified as Buckley’s own opinions were conflicted – but anyone who despises him for daring to show William and Pat Buckley as flawed is blind to the wash of affection he shows them, and the affection they had for each other. “Losing Mum and Pup” is a beautiful piece of work, funny and touching, giving a view of Buckley’s own coming to terms and the universal pain of saying goodbye to your parents.

Text-to-Screen Ratio: Naked Lunch Retrospective

(Editor’s note: As always, spoilers may abound for both versions here. Also, I have decided to stop scoring the adaptations as some versions do not seem to lend themselves to a numerical score. Instead, I shall simply discuss how each can be taken and related, mixing it with some film review commentary.)

While adapting books to film is usually a mutually beneficial process for both parties – studios for cashing in on a preexisting audience, publishers for being able to sell thousands of mass market copies with posters as covers – there are several instances where the subject matter doesn’t seem to lend itself to the film. One of the most high-profile titles was Alan Moore’s “Watchmen,” a project which lingered in development hell for years and swapped through a score of directors before Zack Synder’s better-than-expected version earlier this year.

But if “Watchmen’s” story was seen as too intricate to be adapted to film, William S. Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch” was on the other end of the spectrum as too chaotic. While a seminal work that helped shatter literary censorship laws in America and inspired hundreds of writers and musicians, the book is a fragmented work purposely designed to be read in any order “like an innaresting sex arrangement.” There might be a narrative in there, but what the narrative is is open for debate, buried in metaphors and purposely provocative routines.

Fittingly, the director who eventually brought the project to the screen was one whose mindset came the closest to Burroughs’ reality: David Cronenberg. In films such as “Shivers” and “The Fly” Cronenberg demonstrates a proven interest in the concepts of infection and transformation, using science fiction as a tool to get deeper into the human psyche – all concepts that Burroughs used liberally in his writing. Perhaps as a result of this common wavelength, he does not even try to capture the original ’story,’ but creates something that feels both different and exactly what it needs to be.

At first glance, the plot seems bizarre but essentially straightforward compared to the original text. William Lee, a New York exterminator with a history of drug abuse, falls back on bad habits when he becomes addicted to his job’s yellow roach powder. After accidentally shooting his wife in the head while under the influence, he flees to the North African port of Interzone at the behest of a mysterious organization. Assigned to write a report on his wife’s death, he is caught up in a swath of circumstances including black centipede meat, a homicidal doctor, a coven of witches and entopomorphic typewriters.

While this disjointed construction includes little of the original book, this choice is actually doing something wonderfully different in adapations: being faithful to the author before the text. Burroughs was a pioneer in the “cut-up” technique, chopping written text, speeches and recordings up and splicing them back together. His theory was that in doing so, the true meaning of the text would expose itself to the reader, even suggesting it could serve as a form of divination: “When you cut into the past, the future leaks out.”

And in essence, what Cronenberg has done is played cut-up with the Burroughs canon. “Naked Lunch” uses parts of the original book, with the main character William Lee (Burroughs’ doppelganger and pen name) speaking the “Talking Asshole” routine verbatim and confronting the narcotics dicks Hauser and O’Brien. Opening scenes of the book are copied straight from Burroughs’ short story “Exterminator!,” right down to a discussion of roach poisons and elderly Jewish owner (”You vant I should spit right in your face?! You vant?”), theories on telepathy come from “Junky” and a discussion on an old queen named Bobo from “Queer.” And of course, the climactic shooting is based on the most famous story of Burroughs’ life, where he shot his wife Joan Vollmer in Mexico playing William Tell.

But simply presenting the stories would not be enough to capture the spirit of Burroughs’ work, and Cronenberg achieves this with truly ideal casting. Peter Weller nails the Lee character with perfect accuracy, evoking Burroughs’ appearance and drawling speech patterns in an author-actor translation matched only by Johnny Depp in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” Judy Davis and Ian Holm are uncanny surrogates for their real-life counterparts (Joan Vollmer and Peter Bowles respectively), Joseph Scorsiani has the fresh-faced exotic look of the Interzone boys Lee lusts for and Roy Scheider has the quiet sociopathy one would expect from the legendary Dr. Benway.

And like in “Naked Lunch” the book, it’s never quite clear who or where these characters are. Davis plays a dual role as Lee’s wife and later Interzone lover, Scheider literally lives inside the skin of a woman and typewriters speak in the voices of exterminators. Both works leave the Lee character unsure what is real or simply the hallucinations of drug withdrawal, which in turn leaves the audience trying to interpret it for some deeper meaning. While the images frequently turn obscene or nauseating, they never come across as gratuitous – a minefield Burroughs expertly navigated for years.

As an adaptation of the book, “Naked Lunch” could never be mistaken for an exact translation, but after reading the book few people would want it to be. The themes are what matter, themes of addiction, control, conspiracy and excess – seeing, as Burroughs would put it, what is “on the end of every fork.” What is on the end of Cronenberg’s fork is a wholly different recipe than what Burroughs put together, but it uses the same ingredients and leaves the same sharp uneasy taste in your mouth.