The Ticket That Exploded

[IdleRich]

I've read junky but it was years ago and can't remember anything about it now. He definitely keeps coming back to it and Queer in the cut up era books.

¡Oye! Are any of you lot gonna read Ticket? I've already started it.

I went to the (enormous) local second hand bookshop and asked if they had any Burroughs (there are too many books divided into too many sections to simply search) and they said they thought they had some Burroughs in the classics sections. And fair enough they did. But not the Ticket That Exploded I'm afraid.

 

[Benny Bunter]

It's not a widely available book in the shops, just order it from Amazon or something

 

[IdleRich]

Yeah they do. But why label it like that? It doesn't seem very helpful to anyone trying to break a bad habit to tell them that. And I don't think it has any objective basis as a diagnosis really. If alcohol wasn't freely available and there as a temptation, if you lived on a desert island, you'd soon get over it. I think the real problem is human weakness in the face of temptation.

But things like AA or whatever that you see on telly when they get up and talk about their weakness for ages. The last thing I would want to do if I was coming off skag would be to hear a load of cunts talking about how they got fucked up on it and did something dumb. I'd rather go somewhere they've never heard of heroin like, er I dunno, Woolstone village, and forget all about it. That bit in Breaking Bad where they start marketing their blue meth to all the recovering addicts at an NA meeting makes perfect sense to me. This is what I get from every NA meeting I see....

 

[Benny Bunter]

Get this edition, it's excellent

 

[IdleRich]

It's not a widely available book, just order it from Amazon or something

Problem is the unreliability of the post. I gave up ordering stuff.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Problem is the unreliability of the post. I gave up ordering stuff.

I hear you, I ordered Luka's book months ago and it still hasn't turned up. Amazon seems alright though

 

[IdleRich]

Not in Santa Iria de Azoia. It's fucking criminal.

 

[Benny Bunter]

But things like AA or whatever that you see on telly when they get up and talk about their weakness for ages. The last thing I would want to do if I was coming off skag would be to hear a load of cunts talking about how they got fucked up on it and did something dumb. I'd rather go somewhere they've never heard of heroin like, er I dunno, Woolstone village, and forget all about it.

The AA thing is strange. If it works for some people then cool,whatever gets you through, but it definitely doesn't appeal to me.

 

[Murphy]

Higher Power crap, fuck that

 

[yyaldrin]

Had almost exactly the same experience last time I was in england visiting my parents, didn't smoke the whole time i was there, didn't even miss it. Should have just kicked the habit then, but I started again as soon as I got back to Spain

but do you think that's solely due to the price? the same happens to me when i visit my family, i quit everything and usually without too much effort. i think it's just the change of environment though and the lack of places and things you associate with smoking i.e. your own balcony or your own kitchen table or your own bench in the park, etc.

 

[IdleRich]

That as well but it feels totally wrong to spend 20 euros on something that costs 4.90 from the cafe beneath my flat. I had half a pack in my pocket when I came over and I smoked them right enough but just couldn't bring myself to pay so much cos I'd just feel stupid I think.

 

[Benny Bunter]

 

[Benny Bunter]

Junky nailed it and how old is that and I don’t subscribe to disease allusions, it’s escaping from emotional scarring and trauma at a basic, fundamental level of existence

If Burroughs had pstd from either childhood sexual abuse, or unintentionally killing a wife, I mean the Ugly Spirit metaphor is beyond accurate and Sheffield put the title to work too

You can see it, partially, with the dianetics flirtation, the need to self-audit/edit out something

The Ugly Spirit - aka Mr Bradly Mr Martin, aka Mr and Mrs D - actually gets arrested by the Nova Police in Ticket, along with Sammy the Butcher. "Operation completed -- planet out of danger." It's an oddly positive moment in the book.

The cut-ups and tape experiments were definitely a form of self-administered therapy for him. Apparently, soon after discovering them he sacked off the psychoanalyst he was seeing in Paris and violently rejected Freud. Unfortunately, it also lead him down a dodgy path of anti-semitism and Scientology for a while, as you mention.

 

[Benny Bunter]

About a third of the way through now and really enjoying it so far. Seems to occupy a midway point between Soft Machine's lurid, nightmarish alien sex scenes and Nova Express' focus on the war on Nova criminality, while introducing some cool new concepts around popular music as virus.

 

[Benny Bunter]

@version

View attachment 20151

"A writing machine that shifts one half one text and half the other through a page frame on conveyor belts - (The proportion of half one text half the other is important corresponding as it does to the two halves of the human organism) Shakespeare, Rimbaud, etc. permutating through page frames in constantly changing juxtaposition the machine spits out books and plays and poems - The spectators are invited to feed into the machine any pages of their own text in fifty-fifty juxtaposition with any author of their choice any pages of their choice and provided with the result in a few minutes."

 

[Benny Bunter]

My memory of reading soft machine and nova express last year is fading a bit so I may be wrong, but it seems that Ticket - along with that invisible generation essay I posted earlier - spends more time explaining his multimedia cutting and splicing experiments than the other two books.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Then after the writing machine there's a really disturbing pornographic section called a substitute flesh where the fifty-fifty "other half" concept is literally embodied, with Bradly getting spliced into the bodies of various boys through the projection of photos and film inside orgone accumulator cubicles.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Junky nailed it and how old is that and I don’t subscribe to disease allusions, it’s escaping from emotional scarring and trauma at a basic, fundamental level of existence

If Burroughs had pstd from either childhood sexual abuse, or unintentionally killing a wife, I mean the Ugly Spirit metaphor is beyond accurate and Sheffield put the title to work too

You can see it, partially, with the dianetics flirtation, the need to self-audit/edit out something

"Since late 1959, when his discovery of cut-up methods coincided with a break in psychoanalysis and his adoption of Scientology techniques for erasing traumas, Burroughs' logic had been that our consciousness and sense of reality are verbally programmed from without, so reversing the mechanistic process should lead to deconditioning: "Get it out of your head and into the machines." Making trauma into a text, the cut-up was one such machine and the tape recorder its obvious technological extension."

 

[Benny Bunter]

Something that became more obvious was how much heavier it is on atmosphere and description than it is ideas, particularly in comparison to Nova Express. There are still plenty of ideas, but there isn't the bird's eye view of the techniques and conspiracy you get in the later book. It's mostly dense description of drugs, sex acts, tropical disease and exotic locales. He's attacking language, control systems, but he isn't telling you that's what he's doing or why he's doing it yet. You're just gripping the wreckage, watching it play out up close.

Good post. In Ticket he actually does tell you what he's doing and why. I reckon for anyone looking for an easier way get into this stuff, Soft Machine would be the last one I'd read, even though it's the first one in the series.

 

[Benny Bunter]

There's a cool bit in the notes about Iron Claws existing in film.

"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)"

He's often referring to fade ins/outs as though we're watching a film in general, also "The Director" suddenly appearing and ranting at everyone. That happens in some of the later books too, particularly The Place of Dead Roads.

I guess The Director is kind of similar to The Arranger in Ulysees in that respect, replacing the traditional narrator in literature as new mediums and methods were invented.

It's like how the cut-up method came from Bryon Gysin saying painting was years ahead of writing in its use of collage, and how cinema introduced new effects that various modern writers later picked up on and incorporated.

Right from the very beginning the Director/Arranger/script writer looms large in this one.

"See the action, B.J.?"

"It's a sick picture B.J."

"Now how's this for an angle? Are you listening B.J.?"