Chicago - A message from the station manager

Naked Lunch, Big Table

From A Secret Location

“‘I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves.’ So starts Naked Lunch, the touchstone novel by William S. Burroughs,” Peter Schjeldahl wrote in the New Yorker in 2014.

That hardboiled riff, spoken by a junkie on the run, introduces a mélange of “episodes, misfortunes, and adventures,” which, the author said, have “no real plot, no beginning, no end.”
It is worth recalling on the occasion of Call Me Burroughs (Twelve), a biography by Barry Miles, an English author of books on popular culture, including several on the Beats. “I can feel the heat” sounded a new, jolting note in American letters, like Allen Ginsberg’s “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” or, for that matter, like T. S. Eliot’s “April is the cruelest month.” (Ginsberg was a close friend; Eliot hailed from Burroughs’s home town of St. Louis and his poetry influenced Burroughs’s style.)
In Burroughs’s case, that note was the voice of an outlaw reveling in wickedness. It bragged of occult power: “I can feel,” rather than “I feel.” He always wrote in tones of spooky authority – a comic effect, given that most of his characters are, in addition to being gaudily depraved, more or less conspicuously insane.

Read More

Posted on June 26, 2018

Challenging The Media’s Distorted Images Of Incarceration

By SIU Press

“Essays in this volume illustrate how shows such as Orange Is the New Black and Oz impact the public’s perception of crime rates, the criminal justice system, and imprisonment.
“Contributors look at prison wives on reality television series, portrayals of Death Row, breastfeeding while in prison, transgender prisoners, and black masculinity.
“They also examine the ways in which media messages ignore an individual’s struggle against an all too frequently biased system and instead dehumanize the incarcerated as violent and overwhelmingly masculine.”

Read More

Posted on June 14, 2018