>>25608659
I guess i'll start with the obvious, what the fuck is nova express even about? read it at some point but got kinda filtered by it. Enjoyably insane prose and short enough to not overstay its welcome but couldnt really figure out what i was supposed to be getting out of it.

>>25609352
What its about
- The planet and its citizens have been poisoned by malevolent astral projecting alien criminals, who must be identified and caught before it is too late and they achieve their process of destroying the world
What is its purpose
-To share and imprint mental heuristics and understandings that allow you to investigate and arrest such criminals in your own mind and body, and to better identify when a drug pusher country or reality is parasitic to you, and at the very least how to realize and confront that
And
- Do both of these things at once in such a way that creates a new space age monomyth for people to handle their life being fucked up, how to address it, and cope with it in the modern age which seems to become more proficient every day at fucking up everyone’s lives.
And
- inoculate and recover the reader against the information overload of the then-new and upcoming media age, by showing them exactly what a pile of disturbing junk information looks like, and then teaching the reader thought termination methods, methods of internal silence, how to put a thought down without having a firm answer to it, how to ignore information flack, and general practices of not having your mind boggled by so many images and words. He wisely figured people were really going to need this once we invented electronic mail, and will all just be a bunch of digital avatars reading the most fucked up digital moving newspaper and pornography distributor of all time.

The big trick here is that every event or relationship that can happen, happens at every scale in the universe. Aliens attacking and poisoning the planet works the same way as individuals and media invading your mind does. A civilian riot against the government in order to carry out a change of policy, is precisely what your organs are doing when they send pain signals to get your mind’s attention to get it to stop poisoning the organs with drugs or whatever else. Selecting nuclear targets on a map and choosing civilian population centers to nuke to force surrender, is what your chemotherapist does when he looks at your x-ray and points out the spots they’re gonna hit with chemo. Stop the government from collaborating with the alien invasion before it’s too late? Why don’t you stop your brain from intentionally bringing in foreign poison that kills the organs, and go the fucking doctor? Your cells are all screaming at you the way you’re screaming at the President.

Really cool stuff

>>25609515
https://groveatlantic.com/book/nova-express/
The Excerpts section at the bottom is actually the first 20 pages or so, and covers or starts to cover most of what I have discussed here

>>25609515
Oh, it also covers a ton of real-life techniques that became available in the telecommunications age, that people use to start wars, drive people crazy, and destroy families and entire countries. Such as going to one demographic or political parties, location, recording the most offensive statement they make play it back to the opposing faction, record their most offensive response, play that back to the first party, and repeat until they kill each other (we do this on 4chan). He manages to get into discussing samefagging, DDOS attacks, meme culture, vulgarity and pornography as control tools, image and communication addiction, and image hoarding, before the internet was invented

>>25609515
Very interesting, thanks. I think i'll give it a reread with this instruction-manual aspect of it in mind.

What do you see Burrough's goal as being in applying these, what for lack of a better term i'll call anti-memetic techniques? is it a sort of quietist/mystic aim to get rid of the 'word that scared people into time, into shit'? or something kinda Deleuzian in creating lines of flight, deterritorializing, etc? something inbetween? or simply creating the space for something new entirely?

>>25609716
>>25609716
His goal is to both teach the methods of, and immunize people against, information and culture manipulation, such as seen in newspapers and on television (particularly this stuff that jumps between stories and commercials and tracks, you need to be able to notice when someone is manipulating you with ersatz media, and when you’re becoming distressed due truly unplanned and random media combinations). He wants you to be aware of the sensory, word and color associations that people force on symbols and ideas to control them and you (for example, socialism being red fucks up a lot of other red things, and makes people think of socialism when they see red and see red when they think of socialism. Why don’t we pay red back to the blood where it belongs?). He is hugely interested in authority languages such as scientific reports, religious statements, appeals to self and partisan manipulation. How sex, hate, love, porn, violence, race, slurs, language and music can pretty much make an unaware person believe anything. Learn to control those authorities yourself for yourself and you can finally be and believe what you want. He also basically says take the needle out of your arm or at least approach it with enough awareness that you’re not just a clueless addict..
There’s also a real life personal interview with L Ron Hubbard in one chapter. He also does a lot of stuff with sensory deprivation and awareness of your own bodies rhythm so you can actually be in tune with yourself and not only controlled by all the words and shit around you.

>>25609838
What else, he makes fun of and kills Picasso. This whole massive theme about ‘coordinate points’, if you achieve a set of vices or habits, such as smoking, lying, perversion, weapon making, you are liable to be possessed by its associated alien (a drmon basically). When they launched the nuke, it opened up way more alien demons to possess us because earth is now hospitable to them because the environment on their evil home planet is pure radiation (attics won’t go somewhere that doesn’t have their drug, and if they try, they either won’t survive or they’ll mutate back into somebody who doesn’t need the drugs.) this all started because Oppenheimer was a smoker and a weapons scientist, so an explosion alien was able to possess him and invent the nuke so the Earth could be invaded by the radiation aliens. So be careful what habits you pick up because there are way more types of aliens you can become nowadays, because we keep trashing the planet, and when you become an alien you trashed the planet more than anyone which allows more aliens to come in (same way cascading organ failure works)
Prose is so good and intelligent that my reading writing and life comprehension levels have gone up vastly over the course of reading his works. I’m only being a little hyperbolic here when I say this book actually has the effect of curing ADD and improving communication issues caused by autism.
If I had to say it he is adapting Zen Buddhism very loyalty as a necessity for individualism in a world that is polluted by noise. How to achieve inner peace or outer peace in any given moment avoid mind poison by learning how to set your mind in a sub verbal state, and when you want make up any bullshit you want because Nothing is true, Everything is permitted. Take control of your own life using the exact same methods the authorities have used to control you.
Lots of things to talk about