Literature

It's true what they say. Sometimes, a picture really is worth a thousand words.

Especially when those pictures are drawn by Robert Crumb.

And especially when those words come from the Bible.

The other night, at one of those standard-issue media cocktail parties at a bar on the Lower East Side—the type of casual post-work affair that was a dime a dozen in 2005, back when people had both work and the desire to congregate at a geographically convenient watering hole after it—I ran into Q, a former colleague of mine. We'd worked together for 18 months at the same magazine a couple of years back, after which he left to take a gig at a fashion rag and I went to work at a newspaper.

Naked Lunch, the chaotic masterpiece by William Burroughs, turned 50 this year, and odds are you probably haven’t read it. Not unlike Ulysses, War and Peace or anything by Thomas Pynchon, Naked Lunch is often lauded but seldom read, even by admitted bibliophiles. But for those who have indeed read it, the book packs a literary punch that continues to ripple through Western culture, particularly among avant-garde writers and (strangely enough) musicians.

In the 1946 essay “Confessions of a Book Reviewer”, George Orwell writes that “the prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job … until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.”