reading Naked Lunch, which surprises me in seeming dated. Burroughs went to the trouble of washing away a lot of niceties, the effect of which is now dulled somewhat by the freedoms that came after. still and all, to read him in the day must've been explosive, because it aint like his work is slack now. the datedness that particularly strikes me, tho, is one that seems common with much of the Beats: their slang. slang ties itself to a time, and can lose power over time (which phrase seems to wobble into other meanings than I started for). and I think much of that Beat slang is pulled from other cultures. once again, that is, ofay commandeered. well wait, slang is a code, a networking implement. when that code is broken, become common, its secret power diminishes. hmmm. I know I twiddle with inconsistencies here, because Shakespeare is rife with slang, and Rimbaud, Villon, and they still rock... I think the point is that the Beats understood their slang AS a code. as Beat writing became Literature, the slang became more of a prop or sign (rather than the signified?). I don't write off the Beats because of this, just note the weakness of that strategy. opening the floodgates seems most marvelous, tho most open to abuse. oddly, what gets called mainstream poetry suffers from a lack of slang. too cautious about seemliness to employ any but canonically approved dynamos, which consists too often of polysyllabic latin clumps, with overabundance of commas and, heaven forfend, semi-colons, the use of which is 99% of the time pretentious as well as plain misused. check out Amy Clampitt for proof.