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.

 

[0bleak]

no, a friend and I tried to figure out how to make homemade dmt, but gave up

 

[william_kent]

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.

there are many of who have :done: pure DMT on the forum, why the need for poisonous side effects? I don't want to spend an evening puking into a bucket while some creepy self appointed shaman fiddles with the love of my life

 

[william_kent]

this segment of this VICE video disturbed me



some failed MMA CAGE FIGHTER puts on a white shirt and gets some promotion girls to prance around with fucking crystal bowls and he sets himself up as a "shaman" because he is on a "journey" and the promotion girls who should just be handing out cans of red bull are astonishingly inarticulate "the bowls cure cancer" and he is no better and nonced people who should NEVER touch psychedelics are breaking down and these clowns are no fucking use...

I despair sometimes...

psychedelic drugs are not for everyone and they shouldn't be marketed as such

even with weed, I can smoke ounces but other people will freakout after one puff, not everyone can cope, and with psychedelics it's even more a case of if they cross your path and they sing to you and your spirit guide navigates you through then yeah, maybe go for it, but a fucking MMA cage fighter and some ringside girls holding some fucking crystal bowls that "cure cancer because, um, yeah, they just do" and a shitload of mushrooms is not the best recipe for mental health

 

[version]

It's been said before, but it's striking how fresh this stuff feels. I have to really think about it to picture it being written by an old man in a suit and hat at a typewriter. The 'substitute flesh' sequence still feels cutting edge with films like The Substance coming out this year and that article I posted last night on skin treatments. All the talk of melting bodies, organs dissolving into one another, how fluid all the sexual stuff is. I can't see how it doesn't become increasingly relevant over time. It's so vivid too. Those are the strongest sections, imo. When he gets moves into one of those dense, descriptive passages full of colours.

 

[woops]

I have to really think about it to picture it being written by an old man in a suit and hat at a typewriter.

 

[Benny Bunter]

The 'substitute flesh' sequence

Loved this section. So disturbing and such a bleak worldview though.

"There are no good relationships - There are no good words - I wrote silences -"

"My God what a mess - The difficulty is with two halves - other parasites will invade sooner or later - First it's symbiosis, then parasitism - The old symbiosis con - Sew him up nurse" -

Actually that last bit's pretty funny, especially if you imagine him reading it.

 

[version]

... what is peculiar to Burroughs is the way that randomly chosen or observed details survive and mutate through book after book.

In keeping with Harris' emphasis on the musical in this particular book, I can't help thinking of Burial and his collection of signature sounds. At some point he decided to reuse some of the little incidental samples and they'd keep popping up in various tunes. The lighter flick, the trolley sound, the tape being ejected from a car stereo.

 

[woops]

If you don't join in on this you're not a proper dissensian

I'm in Paris and I've left my copy at home

 

[woops]

I'm in Paris and I've left my copy at home

but

 

[Benny Bunter]

The Beat Hotel!