The Ticket That Exploded

[luka]

he couldnt have purchased them with delicate guitar work surely

 

[version]

Surprising Burroughs seemed to view the nova police as a force for good when he generally seemed to hate the police and all forms of authority, likewise that he wanted to be an OSS man and fashioned agent and inspector doppelgangers for himself in his novels. He never seemed to settle on a concrete position when it came to this stuff. Did he genuinely oppose the control system or was he just a scorned would-be controller?

 

[william_kent]

there is a theory he was a CIA hitman so maybe the programmed assassin code had a few bugs?

 

[version]

there is a theory he was a CIA hitman so maybe the programmed assassin code had a few bugs?

Always thought if the theory/theories he was some sort of asset were true then, at least in terms of cultural reach, he was astonishingly successful. He's all over so much of popular culture. I don't know what the tangible benefit of that would be to an intelligence agency though. A bunch of counterculture people having song titles based on his books and things in them doesn't really achieve much, unless it was just supposed to be a flex, "Look how effectively we can infiltrate your culture. All the way down to the language."

 

[william_kent]

yeah, I never really bought into that one

 

[version]

I love the sense of accumulation, as each chapter introduces new material but cuts in phrases from all the chapters (and books) before it.

Yeah, I got that sense reading the nova police section earlier where he recycles the stuff about nova techniques and coordinate points from Nova Express. It's funny the way it makes you second guess yourself. I knew I'd read it in the previous book and that I haven't read Ticket before, but I still had this uneasy feeling about the whole thing.

Burroughs has erected a body of work that is oddly self-contained and self-referential. What makes this odd is that he so prizes the effect of breaking up the linear structure of his writing by chance devices and other interference from the outside. Since Naked Lunch, his writing has been invaded by overheard conversations, newspaper headlines, and similar kinds of texts that settle like airborne microbes. This kind of deliberate disruption goes back at least to Tristan Tzara; what is peculiar to Burroughs is the way that randomly chosen or observed details survive and mutate through book after book. The new novel, for example, begins on September 17, 1899, an innocuous-sounding date. However, it can be traced back to “Afternoon Ticker Tape,” a work he composed for Jeff Nuttall’s My Own Mag in 1964, in which he rearranged phrases from The New York Times of September 17, 1899.

Burroughs’s work abounds in such echoes. A Chinese shopkeeper observed by him in South America in 1953, and described in The Yage Letters, makes cameo appearances in at least five books, the context changing every time, but in every one he is sucking on his original toothpick. As isolated events in the books, such briefly glimpsed incidents and details are merely part of the texture, but their recurrence makes them unsettling, causing the reader momentary subliminal hesitation. They deliberately stir the familiar with the uncanny, and plant red herrings for anyone seeking a pattern.

The Invisible Man, by Lucy Sante

 

[william_kent]

but sometimes confidential informants or snitches or whatever you want to call them, sometimes they get confused and think they are an agent, etc

 

[version]

I like that these Burroughs threads themselves are now stacking up and overlapping. It's like looking at a cork board with crisscrossing strings connecting everything. That's why I'm into linking to threads within threads. The forum becomes a denser and denser network and you can follow ideas around the place and back through time.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Read through the black fruit straight through into all members are worst a century without realising somehow it was a new chapter.

You start to get accustomed to the shifting through time and space after a while - the shifts don't seem as jolting as The Waste Land (the only other thing I've read that remotely compares to Burroughs).
Or maybe that's the effect of it being a book-length exercise where the constant juxtapositions, cut ups and accumulating images over an extended time start to take on a fluid character, I dunno. For all the 'randomness' I think it's a really well organised book so far, within its own logic.

I love this all members are worst a century section with the time travelling theme - heart of darkness on ayahuasca.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Has anyone here actually done ayahuasca? My partner did it a couple of years back in a therapeutical context and she says she got a lot out of it, but it didn't sound like much fun to me.