version

Well-known member
There's a bunch of notes in the back of this copy with material he didn't use.

"And he rips into action - I mean he jumps right onto board and they are in a car three hundred miles an hour across solid ice - The Board Director at the wheel with the Kid clamped on him shoving his foot right down to the floor - 'All right you board g**ks - You called me - You want action - I'll by God show you action - faster! Faster! Faster! Faster and uglier' - and The Board is shitting and pissing themselves as they begin to see just who they have called and just how much of a shit he cares what happens to them in the blow up - The whole fucking machine in a long fast skid for nova - [...]
 

version

Well-known member
Some of them are minor alterations, but there are some pretty hefty chunks too.

"The planet earth has been invaded - This is war to extermination - The entire planet is infected by virus weapons of the enemy - The enemy is in you controlling thought feeling and apparent sensory impressions - Fight cell by cell through bodies and mind screens of the earth [...] Who and what is the enemy? - Even told with symbols it sickens - They are known as Thetans - They run on Theta brain waves which are the brain waves of pain and deprivation - They eat pain - Your pain - Organism is precisely anti-human - it is also completely parasitic"
 

version

Well-known member
There's a bit in an earlier draft about the "association blocks" where he starts going on about Rimbaud.

"correlating a certain smile an accent a way of holding a cigarette - The Color Alphabet is useful training - Take a name like IAN - Now assign colors to the letters [...] Associate to the poetry of RIMBAUD without words seeing the images in his work - Live ember raining in gust of frost - I embraced the Summer dawn - Corridors of black gauze - banner of raw meat - silk of seas - pensive drowned - a young man has grown up anywhere - perfumes of wine gas - etc. - Images free of word that shift and permutate improbably desertion on the suburban air - candor of vapors and tents - associate other image poets sad as the death of monkeys - "
 

catalog

Well-known member
just don't wanna get into it. i feel like it could be an ordeal. been avoiding it by reading other things, but it's staring at me.
 

catalog

Well-known member
yeah, i'll maybe make a start this week. give me something to do on the train. will also have to abstain from this thread till i've actually got something to say about it
 

version

Well-known member
He really didn't get along with DMT.

"Souls torn into insect fragments by the Iron Claws of chess masters - Who Synthesized Dim-N"

Apparently he referred to it as "the oven drug" in another text. There's also a bit more on what "Iron Claws" is in the notes and on how he performed experiments on prisoners with the stuff.

"The technician who performed the experiments is known as Iron Claws - (Actually he has no hands as a result of a birth injury - He exists in a speed up film and was himself an experiment in film technique)"
 

catalog

Well-known member
read about 40 pages. good stuff. good staccato writing. it's like performance poetry or something.
made me smile to see the phrase about mapping things out - that's you luka.
and all the classic lines pretty quick - minutes to go, ticket that exploded etc.
i also like the repetition of certain key phrases - 'boards and syndicates' in that first chapter for example.
good evocation of colours 'blue mist' and i also liked the phrase 'white hot agony act.'

that's all for now. good book though.
 

luka

Well-known member
Glad you're enjoying it. I was saying to my friend yesterday there aren't those kind of writers anymore. I suppose this is something for the is a counter culture still possible thread.
 

luka

Well-known member
'Alongside drug addiction, pornography serves as one of Burroughs’ chief examples of a control process. Pornography assumes a privileged position in Burroughs’ cut-up texts because it exemplifies the process he calls “image addiction”, exposing the mechanisms by which desire is simultaneously artificialized and channelled. What Burroughs derives from psychoanalysis - and his study of scientology* - is principally the idea of the subject as a recording - and recorded - system. The “reprogramming” of the human nervous system - the major theme, as McLuhan says, of Burroughs’ Nova Express - is a neo-Spinozist model of the production of sad passions. Like addiction, pornography is an ostensibly participatory process which commensurates the organism to exogenous - and arbitrary - stimuli. For Burroughs, the consumer of pornography, like the addict, is ultimately himself consumed, locked into ever-more predictable circuits of dead affect; desire learns to love its own repression by allowing itself to be looped into the desolate repetition of mechanical stimulus-response patterns.'

http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/2004_08.html
 

catalog

Well-known member
i'm over a 100 pages into 'nova express' now.
i think there's a few too many hyphens maybe.
it reminds me mostly of 'gravity's rainbow' but without anything threading it together.
hilarious description on the back talking about how there's a story - there's no story at all.

i think a lot of the cut up sentences though, they're really good. like there's a lot of poetry in there.
 

version

Well-known member
Gravity's Rainbow's miles better, I'm into both though. luka will say the opposite, but if it came down to it GR's the heavier weapon.
 

luka

Well-known member
Yeah I think Burroughs has more to tell. GR is just about history. It's a more quotidian book. Both well worth reading though.
 

version

Well-known member
“The word is now a virus. The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word.”
 

catalog

Well-known member
finished it now.
enjoyed all the gay/colour stuff towards the end.
i don't think i'll bother with the others though.
will now read this thread from the beginning.
 

catalog

Well-known member
power is a result of bargains struck with alien life forms, with entities whose interests are mutually opposed to those of humanity at large.

there is a conspiracy theory, a compelling one, which interprets climate change as the terraforming of planet earth for its secret reptilian overlords. The minions of the reptilians, that is to say boards, syndicates and governments, burning coal and destroying forests in preparation for their return.

here cancer is allowed to replicate on earth in exchange for corporeal power. Here the orgasm-death gimmick is introduced. Here the ovens are in operation. The ovens I find very interesting partly because they also figure in Blake. Control Punishment Torture ovens. As if both men had stumbled upon the same terrible secret.

what does blake say about ovens? I know i can look it up, i want it in your words?
 

luka

Well-known member
Well, as with Burroughs, they're part of his map of the spiritual-psychic universe. They're one of the worst places you can end up and they are manned by malevolent forces.
 

catalog

Well-known member
It comes up in Gravity's Rainbow a fair bit too. Brigadier Pudding being made to eat Katje's shit as part of some program of control, Slothrop's fantasy of crawling down the toilet, through the shit, whilst dosed on sodium amytal.

the shit bit i thought was really good in Gravity's rainbow is where he's talking about colonialism, and how the real reason for colonialism is the white man wanting to go back to a place where they can smell their own shit, that it's therefore about wanting to return in some way, like it's an admittance that all the 'progress' of europe is an iron cage. but i always thought that image he evokes was very good.
 
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