CARNAL NATION

Participants: Bill Berkson, Diane di Prima, Oliver Harris, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Ron Loewinsohn, Jonah Raskin, DJ Spooky
Hosts: Jonah Raskin and Peter Maravelis

A celebration—through public readings, interpretation, and critical analysis—of both the author and his greatest work a half century after its initial publication, the colloquium William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch at Fifty offers participants an opportunity to explore historical, literary, sociopolitical, and biographical elements of Burroughs’s work with a view to making clear its pertinence to today’s global artists and cultural theorists as well as to a contemporary reading audience.

Participants include poets, writers, scholars, artists, and musicians, each of whom will attempt to bring out aspects of Burroughs’s seminal and revolutionary work—from the general influence on him of the Beats to his more specific friendships with and literary connection to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Other themes to be discussed include Naked Lunch and the issue of obscenity; drugs and literary “inspiration”; Burroughs’s influence on other writers, artists, and purveyors of culture; and experimental writing, surrealism, and the avant-garde.

The colloquium William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch at Fifty is sponsored by SFAI’s Film department and City Lights Booksellers & Publishers.