The Ticket That Exploded

[Benny Bunter]

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.

Does sound good, maybe it'll get republished some day.

 

[Benny Bunter]

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.

You're never going to finish this book with that kind of attitude, it's 90% "drug nonsense and random buggery"

 

[Benny Bunter]

The repetition is a flaw but also one of its strengths.

 

[Murphy]

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.

Cities of the Red night is flush sick-full of these repeating sepia greens as it pushes into the last third, one of the females with trans-medium powers but it’s accumulative too in that, despite containing chunks of South American detail, the green bleeds through with far more vertiginous impact and strangely repellent hues

 

[Mr. Tea]

You're never going to finish this book with that kind of attitude, it's 90% "drug nonsense and random buggery"

Well it is a bit more coherent than TSM, from what I remember, and I'm about halfway through and enjoying it so far. The semi-coherent parts about the interplanetary conspiracy are the best bits, I think.

 

[version]

I haven't read cities of the red night so I dunno.

It's really good. You might prefer it to the cut-ups as he dials that stuff right back and uses it sparingly. He never seemed to fully drop the technique, but it became a tool rather than the primary strategy.

 

[Mr. Tea]

It's really good. You might prefer it to the cut-ups as he dials that stuff right back and uses it sparingly. He never seemed to fully drop the technique, but it became a tool rather than the primary strategy.

Yeah, it's the most effective thing by him that I've read. Having said that I should probably read Naked Lunch again at some point, as it's been an age since I've read it.

 

[woops]

Yeah, it's the most effective thing by him that I've read. Having said that I should probably read Naked Lunch again at some point, as it's been an age since I've read it.

i reread it after 25+ years and it was as if i had read it last week

 

[Mr. Tea]

i reread it after 25+ years and it was as if i had read it last week

In terms of how well you remembered it, you mean?

 

[Benny Bunter]

This is good supplementary material to the cut-up/fold-in era, definitely worth a read

Burroughs’ Statements at the 1962 International Writers’ Conference – RealityStudio

In 1962 William S. Burroughs appeared at the International Writers' Conference in Edinburgh. He read statements at the panels on ...

realitystudio.org

 

[Benny Bunter]

Anyone here read any Lawrence Durrell? He gets mentioned in that Burroughs lecture and sounds interesting

"Mr Laurence Durrell has led the way in developing a new form of writing with time and space shifts as we see events from different viewpoints and realize that so seen they are literally not the same events, and that the old concepts of time and reality are no longer valid."

 

[Mr. Tea]

If you were to cut out all the references to naked youths, ejaculation, penises, rectums and things being "metallic", this book would be about five pages long.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Come on Mr Tea, don't be so basic.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Come on Mr Tea, don't be so basic.

Don't get me wrong - like I said, I am enjoying it, and of course I understand that the repetitiveness of certain phrases is a key part of the intended effect.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Smell of KY and rectal mucus

No good no bueno we fuck now meester?

Open shirt flapping

Knees up to the chin

 

[Benny Bunter]

After a while you feel like you're going mad reading this stuff, it's true

 

[version]

Wonder if there's a phrase or line he used more than any other.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Flak holes told him khaki pants shifted ejaculating hostile land - Flash of rectums naked in whiffs suddenly clicked to color

 

[Benny Bunter]

No good no bueno

 

[Benny Bunter]

The cock flipped out and up