Capturing the beat of 1950s Paris
Journalists, cameramen and fashion designers relax in the Beat Hotel in 1960
BBC News
June 25, 2009
Writers and artists have been gathering in Paris to celebrate the 50th anniversary of William Burroughs's book Naked Lunch. The book was written in the Beat Hotel - a hangout for photographers, models and writers - and Christine Finn recently visited to try to find remnants of beat culture.
The members of this international literary crowd have been trying to lose themselves here in Paris. Literally.
They are doing what the French call "deriving". It means throwing out the map, going with the flow, taking to the streets in a form of cartographic anarchy that can lead anywhere, or nowhere. Left, right, left ,right, right, left, left, left.
The syncopated rhythm of this random traversing is entirely appropriate. The group are all fans of the Beat culture, the movement that celebrated jazz and doing things differently.
Naked Lunch was initially banned in the US.
The people who have come here to mark the Burroughs anniversary and to remember Beat culture, are attending
a host of events and exhibitions.
But for many of them, the highlight is the pilgrimage to a thin street on the Left Bank, to that beat-up refuge of creativity, the Beat Hotel itself.
A portrait of the author on show at an exhibition called Naked Lunch at 50 shows William Burroughs staring out of the frame, behind him a series of metal baskets.
It seems the author compiled this particular book by randomly placing pages of his writing in whatever basket he fancied - top, middle, top, bottom, middle, middle.