Finally finished the entire Nova Trilogy (The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, Nova Express) and its my favorite fucking thing in the universe. I’ve managed to understand and deeply appreciate many of its symbols, though some still elude me. Ticket is my favorite, Operation Rewrite is genius and also hilarious, and the whole TSM/Ticket rewrite is incredibly interesting (halfway through Ticket he openly retcons/rewrites space police into the story, saying something has to do be done about all the criminals he’s writing). His final philosophy on all this is groundbreaking.Discuss anything about this
I'm a book away from returning to the trilogy, I've just got Nova Express left to read. I don't think I remember the Ticket retcon though, it's been a year though so I might have to read it again. Also, I read Ticket first, so it probably wouldn't have occurred to me as a retcon
>>25543079Yeah Soft Machine and Ticket both have an original edition, and rewrites, and in the rewrite of Ticket, he just deploys hos new Nova Express characters/symbols (The Subliminal Kid, expanded Uranian Willy chapter) into the previous texts, and saying he needed to write cops to arrest all these character criminals, but that no cop on planet earth is good, so if they are good cops they must be space cops so that’s what they are.Its pretty funny especially because he says he’s doing it while he does it and characterizes it as a real retroactive reality shift
Love all the Burroughs shilling i've been seeing recently. More please. He's great.
>>25543328It's probably 90% me, this shit is really working for me.>Roman Contessa lures hundreds of youths into her hidden complex using drugs and a good time>puts them in a big room together and drugs them with sex drugs to cause a giant orgy>the youths all suddenly start cheering for 'the film, the film!' and go wild as a movie is projected against the wall>laughing gas is dispensed into the room as they are shown film of the orgy they just had, which have just filmed from multiple different angles, they are laughing their ass off from the gas and continuing to fuck from the orgasm drug. These films are kept in a massive archive>the cops come and begin to raid the complex>switch the laughing gas to nerve toxin, the youths all laugh and cum to death as the cops come in and kill everyone, and the rest get the fuck out of thereAnd we call it 'The Case of the Celluloid Kali'
I read Nova Express before The Ticket That Exploded.The Soft Machine was my favourite.
>>25544086I read it mostly in reverse, too, lol. Was hooked by a reading of The Mayan Caper after hearing Uranian Willy in this song/album https://youtu.be/nabwWMO-kYU?But Soft Machine itself was really difficult for me, so I went to Nova Express to find out what this alien business was all about first (also Last Words is a crazy fucking awesome starting chapter) and then went backwards to Ticket then finally TSM. And at the end of everything TSM is probably my favoriteTackling the Western Lands next, yes probably going to do this one backwards too. I need to know about Khu first.
ive been reading the soft machine for a few years now, ill finish eventually
>>25544123>the Western LandsI read the first book of that series but didn't have the 2nd book at the time so never continued reading. I suppose the order doesn't matter that much with an author like Burroughs. I like when he shows up in Kerouac's books heh
>>25544125I just mainline it and let it flow over me
>>25544141The extended universe within his own books and in other people's works is hilarious. Western Lands has these segments where he's just arguing with his previous characters, "'Why do you get to be the District Supervisor, I wrote the District Supervisor', District Supervisor 'No you didn't, you discovered the District Supervisor' very funny shit.
>>25544145Pretty much. After having read these things, I got the Restored Text audiobooks and just play them any time like they were music. Kind of pissed Spotify doesn't let me auto-shuffle the chapters.
Also Uranian Willy is so fucking fascinating as a character and concept.And this whole Nova Trilogy business about astral possession of one-track life scripts by coordinate point is fucking amazing. Does anyone know what I mean by that? How the Crab People of the white hot skies of Minraud are only able to enter bodies that smoke cigarettes and exist on a planet that has launched a nuke, because they are only comfortable in burning smoking radioactive environments just like their home planet?
>>25542779Might restart after the Barry Miles biography on Burroughs I'm reading
>>25544145Any other authors you can just let flow over you? Claude Simon sometimes.
Naked Lunch movie is awful by the way. Something really deplorable about saying everything in the book is unfilmable and then making it a documentary on how the author is gay and killed his wife (and a 'schizo', like the most pleb reading you can have. The guy's crazy imaginative and has the faulty human equipment to let all messages in and out, but the only mention of schizophrenia is in Junky where he says the army called him that which kept him from being drafted, and I hardly trust a draft officer as a peace-time psychologist, or that this isn't another episode in our author's manipulating and evading authority (dude vacationed in Weimar Germany and left right before the Nazis took power because he could feel the heat closing in, and that was before the draft. Master fucking eluder))
Also really obsessed with this guy's internationally famous role as grandson of the inventor and patent owner of the Adding Machine, who had extreme personal contracts with the government, banking, and mass business, and it's no fucking mistake why some cops even in Mexico City might get a signal to wave away a clear murder, or a draft officer might wave away conscription, or District Supervisor might ask 'what are you doing over there with the apes' and pull him back to Washington to learn how this writing the news before it happens is done.
>>25542779Is this better than Naked Lunch? I didn't care much for it, too splintered and fragmented for my liking.
>>25545884The journey from Naked Lunch to Soft Machine -> Ticket -> Nova Express is basically the author putting his brain and notes back together. Naked Lunch is literally a compilation of drug-addled goon session writing pieced together from pages found on his trashed apartment floor. The Nova Trilogy is basically him trying to (and in the end very beautifully and successfully, I say) turning that into something meaningful. That being said, the trilogy is still an impressionistic scattershot of surrealistic and pervert/addict ideas. But he's analyzing them and making sense of them. A lot of the Nova Trilogy is actually about going back and analyzing and arresting the characters in Naked Lunch for the myriad of crimes against biology they commit freely in the bookThe Western Lands, on the other hand, goes down like fucking butter. When this guy gets to writing like a human, it's really great
>>25542779>>25545896This all sounds like incredibly profound stuff if you're a faggot with AIDS that's been getting high on a daily basis for 5+years
>>25546055Yes actually if you have been addicted to drugs for more than ten years and have a history of hateful sexual activity and gooning, as I have, this series will deeply resonate with you. And I'm not kidding when I say that.
>>25546165"hateful sexual activity"...?
>>25545896Nta, but you have sold me. I will continue my Burroughs reading after taking a break when I finished Naked Lunch.
>>25547796Hatefucking, hating your sexuality, being a self-hating homosexual or even a self-hating heterosexual, hating people for not being able to fuck them, hating the people you fuck for being so gullible as to be fucked by you, hating yourself for being fucked, chronic isolated masturbation, sexual shame at large, thrill-seeking sexual violence, desire to hurt and cause hurt during sex, race dominance fetishism, you know.
>>25547833From Nova Express
>>25544641
Honestly ask me anything about anything in this series. It’s full of euphemism and code word of course, I think I understand most of them (like what is a death dwarf for example and what is this Mr Martin Mr Bradley business)
is junky really just a shock-novel or have i not read it deeply enough? kind of dismissed it because of how Burrough's always lumped in with Kerouac. Do you get that he was dissatisfied with his earlier works how he kept coming back to them?
>>25549848Yeah he's constantly frustrated with the incompleteness of his writing, and it makes each next work better for it. I will say Junky has a lot of useful information regarding addiction, I don't really get the feeling it was written for shock at all, I just think Burroughs especially then was an angry person
>>25549848Also Burroughs is in a totally different league than the rest of the Beats, Kerouac was just fucking around and had zero courage to face his addiction.
>>25542779wow rare good thread on here op. what are your reading next?
>>25549061I've heard of this series before but how can it be good if it's written by cutting up sentences and mixing them up? That sounds very chaotic and random for no reason.
>>25542779I know it's lowly to talk in memespeak and whatever but I really can never shake the feeling that Burroughs was a massive glowie, especially once you do a background check and realize shit like this >>25545850 and that he managed to get away with this lifestyle despite him making it very explicitly known to an audience of hundreds of thousands of people in an age where that would typically lead to some repercussions. If Leary and Gysin (trained spy) and Ginsberg are accepted as glowies, then why not him?
>>25550304He didnt just publish random cut-up shit, he randomly reorganized his notes and sentences, and selected the most meaningful configurations Its also an impressionist work, broad strokes and high repeating symbols to create a larger gestalt effect
>>25550343His insert character is frequently begrudgingly working for the CIA (see chapter ‘Where You Belong’, and most interactions with District Supervisor) and they are often scouting him, and he humorously quitting or running away to do drugs in the jungle etc. Both IRL and in the text, Burroughs says he is infiltrating and exposing via his writing, and makes a lot of reference to how being a gay upperclassman allows you to fuck your way or be fucked into all sorts of classified information So yeah something there. Either way he learned the secret black 1930s Harvard Writing techniques when he went to school there. He fancies himself an exposer and leaker of these and other real mass manipulation techniques
>>25550906Oh and he rewrote and wrote over his first draft random cuts. A lot of the books are actually just severed sentence fragments near eachother, but a lot of it is direct prose (though loaded with euphemism and multiple meaning)
Alright and you know what, let’s cut to the chase, I forgot I hadn’t shown these to youMeeting of International Conference of Technical Psychiatry - Naked Lunch - https://youtu.be/LtcEvKj0mMs - hyperbolic fiction regarding the actions and sentencing of the man who invented the frontal lobotomy Where You Belong - The Soft Machine - https://youtu.be/eoU725HK0ao - regarding a forced enlistment into the reality-manipulating news monopoly, and learning how that works and how to use subliminal messaging to manipulate the public. The author realizes you can input ‘dismantle thyself’ on the subliminal, does so, and destroys modern reality as the news machine goes berserk Inflexible Authority - Nova Express - https://youtu.be/o80T2pXDcx8 - regarding the interrogation of one ‘Mr Winkhorst’, a space entity who is an expert and manipulating entire planets into destroying themselves. He explains through a body-mind-and-soul rotten human ventriloquist dummy the process of blasting the electrical waves of a planet with viral hate-sex and porn-death cognitohazard images and how you can directly imprint them into addictive drugs. KINO and as far as I can tell PERFECTLY MAPS ONTO WHAT HAS BEEN DONE TO THE ANONYMOUS 4CHAN USER DOWN TO TALKING IN ‘GREEN WORDS’ written BEFORE THE INTERNET Might be just what you are look, who lookout different?
