French public-service announcement, counseling safe sex in the age of AIDS. Found on the Web.

Who knew that whip-tailed scorpion boy from Aldebaran would morph, in flagrante, into the real thing? Must’ve been that bug powder we’d both been sniffing…

WHAT: The Las Vegas Weekly, an alternative newspaper, has just published my essay on the 50th anniversary of William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch .

TIME-CONSERVATION PULLQUOTE:

If Finnegans Wake crystallized the collage consciousness of industrial modernity, Naked Lunch presages the multitasking, mashed-up sensibility of our remix culture, where we always have at least a half-dozen windows open in our minds: “This book spills off the page in all directions, kaleidoscope of vistas, medley of tunes and street noises …” In a laconic, corner-of-the-mouth drawl that crosses the St. Louis upper class into which he was born with the underworld whose brutal honesty was always more congenial to his cast of mind, Burroughs channels the comic-strip unconscious of American society in all its nightmare hilarity.

GRAF YOU SHOULDN’T BE READING WHEN YOUR BOSS WALKS PAST YOUR CUBICLE:

Fifty years on, Naked Lunch still delivers the gut-grabbing jolt of the autoerotic hangings that punctuate its pages, every death erection and post-mortem ejaculation described with a grim relish that walks the line between cry of conscience and shudder of fetishistic pleasure.

UPDATE: LINK LOVE FROM DAVID PESCOVITZ AT BOING BOING. (Thanks, David!)