The Ticket That Exploded

This 1962 "novel" is the second in William S. Burroughs' Cut-Up Trilogy, and--in my opinion--the most difficult to read. There are some interesting passages, but the cut-ups herein have a clunky, jarring quality as opposed to the ones in The Soft Machine and Nova Express. In that final book, especially, Burroughs got a handle on his cut-up/fold-in obsession and produced a text that flows almost poetically (though it never comes close to qualifying as an actual novel). I concur with Burroughs biographer Barry Miles that the highlight of The Ticket That Exploded is "do you love me?", a chapter in which WSB ruthlessly mocks the lyrics of popular love songs: "Love Mary? - Fuck the shit out of me - Get up off your big fat rusty-dusty - It's show more a long way to go, St. Louis woman - Remember every little thing you used to do - fish smell and dead - jelly jelly in the stardust of the sky - i've got you deep inside of me enclosed darling in my fashion - Yes, baby, electric fingers removed flesh my way..."

Of interest primarily to Burroughs completists. Features a closing calligraphic message by Brion Gysin, who happened upon the concept of cut-ups in the first place, and an epilogue that WSB wrote in 1967 to address his fascination with tape recorders. (He believed, or professed to believe, that tape recordings could incite revolution and literally alter reality.) This final section--utterly devoid of punctuation--is essentially unreadable, and one wonders if Burroughs wanted it to be read and understood. These tape recorder concepts are explained much more coherently in Daniel Odier's The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs (which I've also reviewed). show less

Abandoned on page 77.

NOTE: I did not buy this in a porn shop. William S. Burroughs is not shelved on the "Porn" shelf. Why, I'm not certain, but he isn't.

If George Orwell, Hieronymus Bosch, and Larry Flint got together to smoke some peyote and collaborate on a detective novel, it might look something like The Ticket That Exploded.

No! No! Wait! If Aldous Huxley, Roald Dahl and Philip K. Dick got together to drop some LSD and then direct a porno... yeah, it would probably come out looking like this.

How to describe the contents of this book?

Well for starters... you know how the beginning of [book:The Sound and the Fury|10975] is narrated by the mentally impaired Benji? And it's nearly impossible to read or make sense of? The first fifty show more pages or so of this book are like that, because- as near as I can figure- a totalitarian police state has injected the narrator with the psychadelic drugs and mild-altering viruses they use to subdue their population.

So that part is... interesting, but incomprehensible. Mindfucked automotons go to stores attended by grasshopper creatures to buy green frog-boy sex slaves, to grow in the sewage canals which are guarded by a cadre of armed gestapo in guard towers. If you run afowl of the paramilitary police, they put you in a prison where frog eggs are implanted in your testicles, and they collect your sperm for three weeks before hanging you. (I'm not making any of this up.)

Or maybe none of that actually happens- because, you know, the drugs.

OH! Fans of [author:Guy N. Smith|317159]'s "Killer Crab" novels will be delighted to find that the countryside is plagued by roving colonies of murderous giant land crabs. If they aren't an hallucination.

Through the mid-portion of this book (as far as I got, at least), I really had no idea at all what exactly was going on. From my notes, I have assembled a list of plot points, but I'm not sure how to weigh their significance, or how they interrelate. For all I know, there may be spoilers ahead... or it could just as well be that these notes are all completely irrelevant:

1) The "Nova Police" enforce the will of the "Nova" syndecate of gangsters- who may or may not be extraterrestrials. They all have entertaining gangster names like "Sammy the Butcher", "Willie the Rat" and "Hamburger Mary".

2) Using a mind altering virus, in conjunction with a "program" on a recorded audio tape (this was written in 1962, btw), the government and/or the Novas can completely erase a person's memory and personality, leaving his brain an empty vessel, which can be filled by the psychic invasion of an alien entity, who controls the victim like a puppet.

3) A detective is chasing a criminal nicknamed "Genial" for the murder (maybe... it might not have really happened) of [somebody?]. Like Agent Smith in the Matrix movies, Genial can replicate himself into erased brains, using the virus/audio tape technique above.



Seriously: does anybody know if the Warshawski brothers were influenced by this book?

4) This novel is set some time in the unspecified future. Far enough in the future that Earth has large colonies ON Saturn (this is impossible, because of Saturn being gasseous in composition, is my understanding, but that is the very least of Mr. Burroughs crimes in this book). Anyhow, despite the far future setting, popular activities include pinball, rollerskating and hula hoops. For everything else, you push the boundaries of imagination, but for the entertainment of the future, you give us pinball?



5) In one scene, the frog-boy sex slave egg store owner gives a customer directions, which include something like

"...you go down to the canal, two blocks past the giant penis statue, past the place where everybody ejaculates into the water, whenever they masturbate down by the river..."

And the customer finds the place he's looking for! ...because, lo and behold, there's a bunch of dudes masturbating down by the river, where the store owner said they would be. It's like GPS!

6) The government dissolves the corpses of prisoners to make a nutrient slurry for unspecified reasons, but a Soylent Green-type situation is definitely implied.

7) I'm not saying Burroughs has a phallic obsession, but the erect penis of nearly every male character is described at some point. You hardly ever see that in detective novels.

8) Alien fetuses need to be grown in giant vats of human sperm. Really? How did that evolve? GIANT VATS? Jesus. So how big are these vats? Well, a terrorist act tips one of them over, and the thousands of gallons of sperm prevent the passage of traffic.

I don't know what else I can tell you. I abandoned this on page 77. It could get better after that point, but skimming ahead, I really doubt it. Overall, this book was like reading the lyrics to Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds, if Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds was a fourteen hour long song about hardcore porn, jackboots kicking in doors, and psychic aliens. show less

Burroughs' 2nd cut-up novel (if I have the chronology right) & the beginining of what's, for me, his strongest period. After writing my quickie 'review' of "Naked Lunch" in wch I mentioned Balch's "Towers Open Fire", I moved onto this one & 'randomly' opened to page 110 to read:

""This way - To the Towers" - Ali pointed to an office building that dominated the square - Kiki ran toward the building covered now by tower fire - Hands pulled him into a doorway - On the roof of the building was a battery of radios and movie cameras that vibrated to static - A green creature with metal claw hands was giving orders to a group of partisans who manned the gun tower - From the radio poured a metallic staccato voice -

""Photo falling - Word show more Falling - Break through in Grey Room - Towers, open fire" -"

Yep, Burroughs was in his stride of having a breakthrough in the brain w/ this one. Unlike "[b:Naked Lunch|7437|Naked Lunch The Restored Text|William S. Burroughs|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1219259455s/7437.jpg|4055]", this no longer seems like a collection of notes but a coherent report from a parallel universe where the true faces of the enemy are revealed. My having opened to this page where "Towers, open fire" is written isn't just an indication of Burroughs' repetitiveness of certain phrases - it's also an indication of how magikal it all seems, of how oddly one can link into the writing - a proclamation for the effectiveness of Burroughs' formal strategies for breaking thru into deep levels of the mind. show less

I wasn't expecting this to be as mind-blowing as it is. Texts of the Nova Trilogy Plot are cut-up and folded-in with texts explicating the very method by which they've been cut-up. There's also some passages written in the style of song lyrics, and the literary equivalent of time travel.

Just amazing--a glimpse inside the manifesto of The Rewrite Department with practical demonstrations throughout. The last 30 pages are mindblowingly good. A bit less sparkling in wit and black humor than The Soft Machine, but still a master class in postmodernity.

"Visionary and majestic, The Ticket that Exploded is the grand climax to Burroughs?s ?cut-up trilogy?. The story begun in the previous books escalates to its conclusions as Inspector Lee and the Nova Police engage the Nova Mob in a decisive battle for the planet. In The Ticket that Exploded, Burroughs paints an at once frightening and enthralling nightmare vision of scientists and combat troops, of ad men and con men whose deceitful language has spread like an incurable disease... The Ticket That Exploded is a postmodern science fiction novel. Burroughs expands upon his ideas about language "being a virus from outer space". It's the second novel in the Nova Police Trilogy."--