The Ticket That Exploded

[version]

It totally flies over my head that stuff.

Some of it's difficult, some of it's just a case of being unfamiliar with the terminology and people like Land blasting the reader with it.

 

[Benny Bunter]

I do like how they make up new cool-sounding words and that, but it's too much like hard work for me to try and read it properly, especially off a mobile screen. Also seems a bit dated in a way that Burroughs doesn't.

 

[Benny Bunter]

With this type of theory stuff, they're trying to fold in modernist poetry into philosophy, and I can appreciate the effort they go to, but they just don't have the literary flair of a Burroughs or Joyce or Eliot etc. so it becomes unreadable to me. And I don't know much about philosophy anyway, so I'm in doubt how well it stands up to the philosophic tradition - it could just be total twaddle for all I know.

 

[version]

Also seems a bit dated in a way that Burroughs doesn't.

It's very 90s. Has a similar flavour to the kind of stuff discussed in 'the old internet as psyche'. Lots of "techno-" terms. Drum 'n' bass, the world wide web, wraparound shades.

 

[version]

With this type of theory stuff, they're trying to fold in modernist poetry into philosophy, and I can appreciate the effort they go to, but they just don't have the literary flair of a Burroughs or Joyce or Eliot etc. so it becomes unreadable to me. And I don't know much about philosophy anyway, so I'm in doubt how well it stands up to the philosophic tradition - it could just be total twaddle for all I know.

I think Land could be a good writer, but he had a tendency to overload his writing with irritating scientific-sounding terms. The failure seems to be one of taste rather than ability.

 

[Benny Bunter]

It falls between two stools for me. Obviously very clever people though, and I'm aware there's always the possibility I'm just too thick or lazy to understand it

 

[Benny Bunter]

The in that game? section has some interesting but tricky stuff about sub-vocalisation.

"Your sound track consists of your body sounds and sub-vocal speech. Sub-vocal speech is the word organism the 'Other Half' spliced in with your body sounds. You are convinced by association that your body sounds will stop if sub-vocal speech stops and so it happens. Death is the final separation of the sound and image tracks. However, once you have broken the chains of association linking sub-vocal speech with body sounds shutting off sub-vocal speech need not entail shutting off body sounds and consequent physical death."

I see there's a short thread about it in here too

QUESTION ABOUT READING

When you read do you suvocalise. When I learned I had no sound in my head. Complete silence. When I was teaching myself to read poetry at 16 or 17 or whenever it was i started to make the effort to sound the words inside my head. I then lost my ability to read in silence which has always...

www.dissensus.com

 

[Benny Bunter]

Just got the last (long) section to read now. It looks like a good one, but I do think he could have chopped out a couple of the heavily cut-up sections later in the book, and the overall effect would have been more powerful.

 

[version]

Just got the last (long) section to read now. It looks like a good one, but I do think he could have chopped out a couple of the heavily cut-up sections later in the book, and the overall effect would have been more powerful.

How do you think it stacks up next to the other two?

 

[Benny Bunter]

The best sections for me are when he does a relatively more straightforward narrative, then goes to town chopping and splicing it in with all the previous bits

 

[Benny Bunter]

How do you think it stacks up next to the other two?

Hard to say really. I think this one takes it to the absolute limits, and combines a lot of of the elements of the other two, brings in more of the tape recorder stuff to explain his methods.

Nova Express is probably the best one as a stand-alone book. Soft Machine is the hardest one to get into, and Ticket gives you the key to the whole trilogy. Could have done with a bit more editing.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Makes me want to go back to soft machine. I think I need a break first though cos some of the later chapters in Ticket were really punishing in their repetitiveness

 

[version]

Soft Machine was the first I read of them and I found it dull and repetitive, but re-reading it recently I loved it. My favourite at the moment. It's all the jungle descriptions and diseases and landscapes that do it, like the way Ballard describes scenes as looking like something from a Max Ernst painting. The most intensely visual of the three.

 

[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.

I agree with what you said here. The other two books help you understand what he's doing, but soft machine is the thing itself in its purest form. Need to go back to it.

 

[version]

I agree with what you said here. The other two books help you understand what he's doing, but soft machine is the thing itself in its purest form. Need to go back to it.

I'm curious about the first version Harris talks about in the intro, makes it sound amazing.

The 1961 Soft Machine mixes elliptical episodes of science fiction fantasy with ethnographic travelogue, repetitious sex scenes, pulp genre parodies, and a variety of unclassifiable and uncompromising language experiments. The text is so relentlessly bizarre that it seems simultaneously
impossible to read and yet - unlike the second and third editions, where the reader is left confused by non-narrative sections - not in the least frustrating. Instead of a narrative scenario, it is dominated by long image-lists (redolent of, and sometimes cutting up, the prose poems of Rimbaud and St. John Perse) that depict toxic landscapes - swamps, jungles, canals, rotting cities of concrete pillars and bamboo bridges - and whirling machinery - penny arcades, Ferris wheels, pinball machines, cable cars, elevators. Ginsberg described it as "page after page of heroic sinister prose poetry." Although the polluted wastelands clearly develop out of Naked Lunch , the dominance of South American locations and the recurrent use of Spanish signals Burroughs' vision of a new global colonialism, the planet's occupation by an alien empire: Trak Utilities - the dominant corporation in The Soft Machine, precursor of the Nova Mob in Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded - extends the imperial ambitions of sixteenth-century Conquistadors from the New World to the whole of reality. ("You can't walk out on Trak," Burroughs would clarify for the revised text; "There's just no place to go.")

 

[Mr. Tea]

The best sections for me are when he does a relatively more straightforward narrative, then goes to town chopping and splicing it in with all the previous bits

I've felt this about all the Burroughs I've read. I much prefer the earlier parts of Cities of the Red Night which are more or less coherent and tell an actual story, or rather two or three parallel stories, before it goes all stream-of-consciousness towards the end.

Similarly, I tried to tackle The Soft Machine years ago but kind of gave up about halfway through as I was having trouble making out any kind of story I could give a crap about through page after page of drug nonsense and random buggery.

 

[Benny Bunter]

@version I haven't got that restored edition of soft machine - is the first version not all contained within it?

 

[version]

@version I haven't got that restored edition of soft machine - is the first version not all contained within it?

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]

I've felt this about all the Burroughs I've read. I much prefer the earlier parts of Cities of the Red Night which are more or less coherent and tell an actual story, or rather two or three parallel stories, before it goes all stream-of-consciousness towards the end.

Similarly, I tried to tackle The Soft Machine years ago but kind of gave up about halfway through as I was having trouble making out any kind of story I could give a crap about through page after page of drug nonsense and random buggery.

I haven't read cities of the red night so I dunno. Don't get me wrong, I think the cut-up sections are the absolute best bits, but they work best when you can see what it is he's working with.
You probably have to slog through the whole cut-up trilogy before you properly get it, and then it all starts to make some sort of sense, in a very oblique way, and you can let go of wanting coherent narrative.

 

[Benny Bunter]

I'd say nova express is probably the best place to start as a stand-alone book.