The Nova Trilogy

william_kent

william_kent

Well-known member
Mr. Tea said:
Eh, I'd just enjoy my hols if I were you.
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Oh, I am....

just checking that the flat that I am “sitting” isn’t in flames and polishing off a bottle of 8 Euro rum and smoking what remains of my 6 euro for 30 grams baccy before heading back out

Edit: just so @Mr. Tea doesn’t look too insane, the sentence above originally continued, before I deleted it in a drunken fit of pique:

“....before heading back out to clear the streets of human waste while I listen to psychic TV deep cuts on my cheapskate Chinese knockoff Android”
 
william_kent

william_kent

Well-known member
Mr. Tea said:
Sounds pretty great apart from the human waste bit.

Edit: now I look insane, thanks a bunch.
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Heh, yeah I deleted the “cleaning the streets of human waste to a soundtrack of Psychic TV deep cuts” paragraph because... self snitching? Or because the running joke is in poor taste?

Edit: it’s the latter, honest
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
william_kent said:
Heh, yeah I deleted the “cleaning the streets of human waste to a soundtrack of Psychic TV deep cuts” paragraph because... self snitching? Or because the running joke is in poor taste?

Edit: it’s the latter, honest
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Heh, no worries. I was starting to wonder how much of a 'holiday' this holiday really was.
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
V

version

Well-known member
Benny B said:
Finished Nova Express (brilliant) gonna read Minutes to Go now until my copy of Soft Machine arrives.

You seen this @version ? Pdf of Minutes to Go, loads of proto-Nova trilogy material in here, Rimbaud cut ups and stuff, looks great

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Yeah, they have a few things of his on Monoskop.

This is a cool one.

William Burroughs: Time (1965) — Monoskop Log

Digital library of arts and humanities
monoskop.org

“Burroughs created his own version of Time magazine, including a Time cover of November 30, 1962, collaged over by Burroughs with a reproduction of a drawing, four drawings by Gysin, and twenty-six pages of typescript comprised of cut up texts and various photographs serving as news items. One of the pages is from an article on Red China from Time of September 13, 1963, and is collaged with a columnal typescript and an irrelevant illustration from the ‘Modern Living’ section of the magazine. A full-page advertisement for Johns-Manville products is casually inserted amid all these text; its title: ‘Filtering’.” (from Robert A. Sobieszek, Ports of Entry, 1996, 37)

The “Fliday Newsmagazine,” “Proclaim Present Time Over,” “File Flicker Tape” are some of the texts. The November 30, 1962 issue of Time was chosen, because the magazine reviewed the Grove Press edition of Naked Lunch in an article entitled “King of the YADS” (Young American Disaffiliates). The looming face of Mao symbolizing the threat of Red China adds an aura of nuclear disaster.” (Jed Birmingham, 2006)

With drawings by Brion Gysin
Publisher C Press, New York City, 1965
[28] pages

Burroughs_William_Time_1965.jpg
 
V

version

Well-known member
Benny B said:
Nah, kicking myself now. Is the text itself that much different apart from the additional material in the notes?
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The Soft Machine has been printed in four different editions, the first three revised by the author, the last by Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris.
  1. The first edition was printed by Olympia Press in Paris, in 1961, as number 88 in the Traveller Companion Series. It featured 182 pages arranged in 50 chapters of about 8 pages each. This edition was colour-coded into four different Units, and it was heavily fragmented. This edition is rare and the text is not widely available.
  2. The second edition was printed by Grove Press in the United States, in 1966. In this edition, Burroughs removed 82 pages and inserted 82 new pages, and the remaining 100 pages were rearranged and restructured using further cut-ups. Much of the added material was linear, narrative prose, which is arguably easier to read than the disorganized first edition. Many chapters were renamed and rearranged in this edition, and the colour code from the first edition was removed.
  3. The third edition was printed by John Calder in Great Britain, 1968. This time most chapter titles were intact from the second edition, but they began at more natural places in the text, whereas the second edition could place them in the middle of a sentence. The chapter 1920s War Movies was renamed The Streets of Chance. Twenty pages of new material had been added, plus about eight pages from the first edition which had been removed in the second edition. About five pages of material which was present in both the first and second edition was removed. This edition also included an "Appendix" and "Afterword".
  4. The fourth 'Restored' edition was printed by Grove Press in the United States in 2014. Drawing on the discovery of a manuscript of The Soft Machine that was to have been published by Olympia Press in 1963, this edition restores a short cancelled chapter ('Male Image Back In'), restores the 1961 edition's heavy use of capital letters, and has some different chapter breaks. The edition also includes an introduction, extensive notes and appendices.
Burroughs himself was very displeased with the first edition and this was the main reason for rewriting it so thoroughly: in 1961 he wrote to his friend Allen Ginsberg that he rewrote it extensively while he was working on Dead Fingers Talk, mostly because he was displeased with the balance of cut-up and more linear material. However, his revised editions included much new cut-up material as well as more conventional prose.
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
All this stuff in Soft Machine about the Trak Service, Trak Board, Trak Sex and Dream Utilities, Trak Home Office (the black obsidian pyramid) Trak Police and Trak Reservation is so brilliant.

And the little thrills of recognition from all those phrases you get if you've read nova express/naked lunch first - no good no bueno, clom fliday, cut word lines, cut time lines, minutes to go, bread knife in the heart, enter the nabors, Minraud etc etc
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Definitely feels like Nova Express is the one that makes the overall framework of that era of his writing most explicit - if you have that one under your belt it's easy to understand the others as documenting the activities of Nova criminals and it all starts to make a lot more sense.
 
V

version

Well-known member
Benny B said:
And the little thrills of recognition from all those phrases you get if you've read nova express/naked lunch first - no good no bueno, clom fliday, cut word lines, cut time lines, minutes to go, bread knife in the heart, enter the nabors, Minraud etc etc
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I'm reading The Adding Machine and he does this in his nonfiction too. You get the same names and characters and anecdotes popping up and he slips into routines even when he's writing about how to write a best seller or whatever for a literary journal. There's also a lot of overlap with The Place of Dead Roads. I'm not sure which came first, the essays or the novel, but one's lifting from the other almost verbatim at times.

There's a great bit in his Gatsby essay where he cuts up Fitzgerald and some other unnamed sources.

It was an extraordinary gift for hope not likely I will ever find again - what dock? The wind had blown off his dreams. Described the fallout as eating the trees. An ashen figure to this blue lawn. And his dream was standing by the swimming pool. Inessential houses began to melt away human dreams the quiet lights in grass outside . . . darkness blew through the room pale flags like ashen trees twisting and then rippled a transitory moment face shadow. What I had almost remembered old unknown world Gatsby Jones borne back into the past. The green light at the end of romantic readiness loud night wings foul dust floating in the wake of negligible fallout. A fragment of lost words frosted wisp of startled air. A breeze blew through the room blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags at the end of Daisy's dock. Lips parted a wisp of startled air a small gust of wind the touch of a cluster of leaves revolved its slowly tracing, like the leg of transit, a thin red circle in the water. Paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found how raw the sunlight was on the scarcely created grass, a new world material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted about like that ashen figure gliding towards him through the Old Metropole filled with faces dead and gone so he waited listening for a moment to a tuning fork struck upon a star one autumn night five years before they had been walking down a street when the leaves were falling and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight already crumbling through the powdery air. But above the gray land the spasms of bleak dust you perceive the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg blue and gigantic looking out from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles brooding over the solemn dumping ground.
 
william_kent

william_kent

Well-known member
version said:
I'm reading The Adding Machine and he does this in his nonfiction too. You get the same names and characters and anecdotes popping up and he slips into routines even when he's writing about how to write a best seller or whatever for a literary journal. There's also a lot of overlap with The Place of Dead Roads. I'm not sure which came first, the essays or the novel, but one's lifting from the other almost verbatim at times.

There's a great bit in his Gatsby essay where he cuts up Fitzgerald and some other unnamed sources.

It was an extraordinary gift for hope not likely I will ever find again - what dock? The wind had blown off his dreams. Described the fallout as eating the trees. An ashen figure to this blue lawn. And his dream was standing by the swimming pool. Inessential houses began to melt away human dreams the quiet lights in grass outside . . . darkness blew through the room pale flags like ashen trees twisting and then rippled a transitory moment face shadow. What I had almost remembered old unknown world Gatsby Jones borne back into the past. The green light at the end of romantic readiness loud night wings foul dust floating in the wake of negligible fallout. A fragment of lost words frosted wisp of startled air. A breeze blew through the room blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags at the end of Daisy's dock. Lips parted a wisp of startled air a small gust of wind the touch of a cluster of leaves revolved its slowly tracing, like the leg of transit, a thin red circle in the water. Paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found how raw the sunlight was on the scarcely created grass, a new world material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted about like that ashen figure gliding towards him through the Old Metropole filled with faces dead and gone so he waited listening for a moment to a tuning fork struck upon a star one autumn night five years before they had been walking down a street when the leaves were falling and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight already crumbling through the powdery air. But above the gray land the spasms of bleak dust you perceive the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg blue and gigantic looking out from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles brooding over the solemn dumping ground.
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with WSB treat everything as a "routine"
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Wow, the Mayan Caper chapter in soft machine is probably the best bit of Burroughs I've read so far - the calendar is such a brilliant metaphor/model for how society is controlled.
Maybe the most insightful part is how the controllers themselves have forgotten or don't understand how the system works anymore and don't even need to, they just push the buttons and the whole thing perpetuates itself.

The stuff about moulds and U.T. - Undifferentiated Tissue - is great too. You could read so much into it regarding today's culture of plastic surgery, body modification, and gender identities, photo filters etc etc. The list goes on of what you could apply it today.
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
And the I Sekuin chapter after that reads a bit like a missing section from Blake's Marriage of heaven and hell or something. 'Minraud' could easily have been a Blakeian vision.
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
'No calcium in the area you understand. One blighter lost his entire skeleton and we had to carry him in a canvas bathtub. A jaguar lapped him up in the end, largely for the salt I think.'

:ROFLMAO:
 
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