Joshua West

Joshua’s Bookshelves

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Joshua is Currently Reading

Joshua West is currently reading

Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1)

by Mervyn Peake

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Sep 13, 2025 09:39AM

Joshua West is currently reading

Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

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May 29, 2025 08:00AM

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Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

by William S. Burroughs

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Reading for the 2nd time

read in January 2016

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Joshua West said: " "For it is only in the Dionysian mysteries, in the psychology of the Dionysian state, that the fundamental fact of the Hellenic instinct--its will to life--is expressed. What did the Hellene secure himself with these mysteries? Eternal life, the eter "For it is only in the Dionysian mysteries, in the psychology of the Dionysian state, that the fundamental fact of the Hellenic instinct--its will to life--is expressed. What did the Hellene secure himself with these mysteries? Eternal life, the eternal recurrence of life; the future promised and hallowed in the past; the triumphant Yea to life despite death and change; real life conceived as the collective prolongation of life through procreation, through the mysteries of sexuality. To the Greeks, the symbol of sex was the most venerated of symbols, the really deep significance all the piety of antiquity...Not in order to escape from terror and pity, not to purify one's self of a dangerous passion by discharging it with vehemence, but to be far beyond terror and pity and to be the eternal lust of Becoming itself, that lust which also involves the lust of destruction."--Friedrich Nietzsche
Naked Lunch is William Burroughs' jissom spattered Fire Sermon. An eyeball kick to the groin. The literary equivalent a Hieronymus Bosch painting.
If the sleep of reason produces monsters, this is surely one of them.
"What is it that the soul of the tragic artist communicates to others? Is it not precisely his fearless attitude towards that which is is terrible and questionable?"--Nietzsche
Naked Lunch is a diatribe against authority, a swan dive into the non-interventionist Interzone of Tangiers in the 1950s.
"William Burroughs is in my opinion -- whatever his conscious intention may be -- a religious writer. There is a sense in 'Naked Lunch' of the destruction of soul, which is more intense than any I have encountered in any other modern novel. It is a vision of how mankind would act if man was totally divorced from eternity."--Norman Mailer
In 1962 Naked Lunch was declared not obscene in court of law. First let me say that laws against obscenity are inherently ridiculous, but if such laws exist Naked Lunch must surely fit the criteria. It's the kind of book that makes you feel like you could catch the clap from just touching it. Its pages are filled with sodomy, intravenous drug use, torture, pedophilia, murder and any other depraved activity the human mind can conceive.
"Gentle reader we see God through our assholes in the flash bulb of orgasm...Through these orifices transmute your body...The way OUT is the way IN..."--Burroughs
And through it all rings the call of paranoia, the sense that some singular force has organized itself against us, against life. Burroughs is an extreme libertarian, not in the crass corporatist sense that the word has come to be associated with in America but something closer to its original meaning, a rage against those institutions--be they corporate, governmental or psychological--whose only aim is control, the strict regimentation of society and the individual.
"...control can never be a means to any practical end...It can never be a means to anything but more control...like junk..."—Burroughs
The dividing line between symbiosis and parasitism is thin. A parasite dies when deprived of a host.
"Bureaus die when the structure of the state collapses."--Burroughs
"All great periods in political culture have been periods of political decline..."--Nietzsche
Throughout the novel there are recurring emblems of ignorant outbursts, tokens of an order based on fear and trembling; lynchings, figures engulfed in gasoline, "mangled insect screams."
Eventually one must realize that the mind is malleable substance, the self an illusion, or else a foreign entity imposed on the animal body via the medium of language.
“Voice is not an organic part of the human body. Whenever we talk to another person there is always this minimum of ventriloquist effect, as if some foreign power took possession…A voice, a voice in its obscene dimensions… Our ego is an alien force distorting, controlling, our bodies.”—Slavoj Zizek
"Language is a virus from outer space."—Burroughs
Drugs for Burroughs, as for Rimbuad and others before him, represent a deranging influence, a means by which one undermines the alien within, the usurping ego, and transmutes it into an imaginative body, displaced from time and sent spiraling into space, into the nether regions of the psyche, and brings back the eternal lust of Becoming, “that lust which also involves the lust of destruction.” ...more "

Feb 05, 2016 10:49PM · see review

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Joshua’s Quotes

“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.”
― Edward Abbey

2462 likes

“I was able to correct the first half of Ulysses for the third edition and to read the first two volumes recommendés by Mr Schiff of A la Recherche des Ombrelles Perdues par Plusieurs Jeunes Filles en Fleurs du Côté de chez Swann et Gomorrhée et Co. par Marcelle Proyce et James Joust.”
― James Joyce

3 likes

“The meat's so tough that it got up off the plate and beat the shit out of the coffee, which was too weak to defend itself.”
― Harry Brandt

tags: fine-dining

9 likes

“It is better to arm and strengthen your hero, than to disarm and enfeeble your foe.”
― Anne Brontë

1760 likes

“We live in weird times in which we are compelled to behave as if we are free, so that the unsayable is not our freedom but the very fact of our servitude.”
― Slavoj Žižek

26 likes

More of Joshua’s quotes…