Transcript of Video:
My name is Jeryd Pojawa and I have chosen two books, one is Frank Herbert’s Dune which is an epic story of humanity and it is an analogy of the imperialism of the middle ages until modern day and it is actually a pretty good analogy for what is going on now.
I read the book first when I was ten and it really blew my socks off because I had never read a book that large in terms of the scope. The fact that this man created the whole universe that had politics and interactions and all kinds of things. Much more than even a Star Wars type of situation because he gets into the interpersonal type of situation the families and the warring families.
There are people fighting for power and all sorts of pathos. There are all sorts of characters good guys and bad guys. It is just this tremendous human drama set in a slightly other world in a slightly other time.
If you think of it as Science Fiction, well yes it is. There have been two films or more done on this particular book. Both major takes have been very interesting and quiet different. But I think the best movie what the one that I made in my head when I was ten when I was reading it because it was the first time that I read anything that grabbed me and made me say “yeah, I want to be a part of that” I want to be writer this is amazing that this guy could write this wonderful story and influence people as he did. Frank Herbert is a brilliant writer and Dune is a major piece.
The other book is a book by William S. Burroughs called Naked Lunch. Naked Lunch is less a novel than an entire group of booklets or novellas, I guess you could say. Burroughs style is very disjointed and in many ways has a quality of magical (?) Now his work, which he was also interested in a homosexual who lived for years with his wife who wound up shooting his wife accidentally under the influence of drugs.
This book was influential to me because, this was around when I was 13 years old or so, I’ve read it several times since. This book showed me that there are other ways to write and other ways to tell a story. I have always been interested in performing and storytelling.
I am an actor and filmmaker now. I think that these two books pushed me in that direction as much as anything else. I learned two ways of telling a story, two valid ways of telling a story. One the epic saga, which I enjoy the historical novels; the Vikings, the Romans the story of the Greek migrations just the wonderful building up of culture or our own cultures in south America the Mayan & the native American cultures how they interacted and all these things came to me from a better understanding of reading Dune.
The understanding of the human id, the human psyche as I understand it came more from the works of Burroughs. Naked Lunch being a good example because it has a series of stories that are very unusual and tell a different kind of story but with a laconic bazaar style and it made me realize that you could tell a story in many ways. You can tell a story of a down and out character as easily as you can tell the story of a hero. In many ways the characters in Burroughs books are very heroic in their own way it is just that they are more human because they are more broken. They are more like ourselves in a lot of ways.
In Dune we identify with Baron Atrides who is this tremendous figure, this King Arthur type figure and in Burroughs books who are junkies and peculiar characters and I think that is the one note that has always kept me interested in both these books and that is what keeps me from coming back to them and read them. I enjoy Burroughs style of writing. He has an odd sense of language but a wonder sense of language. It is a strange almost kind of a Beat poetry. That is what I enjoy about his work
Summing the whole thing up the two books together as polar really talk about the same thing which I find really interesting is the human condition from history into the future. I think that is basically the summary that I would like to leave with. My name is Jeryd Pojaw and my books are Frank Herbert’s Dune and Naked Lunch by William Burroughs.
