Customer Reviews

Ticket That Exploded (Calderbooks)

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This book is the final word in cut-ups and Burroughs' tape experiments of the early 1960's. This is Burroughs' most beautifully written text, if somewhat overrepetitive at times. Moreso than in "Naked Lunch" or in "Nova Express," Burroughs fleshes out his ideas about language "being a virus from outer space," and looks forward to his essay, "The Electronic Revolution." This is a tough and uncompromising book, filled with beautiful nonsequitors, funny anecdotal tales, and plenty homoerotic sexual fantasies and realitease.

Burroughs's The Ticket that Exploded, the second installment of this early trilogy (The Soft Machine and Nova Express, respectively) is a literary pleasure. It encompasses many ideas (Jung's Synchronicity, Foucault's Structuralism, Korzybski's linguistic theories, to name a few) in a post-modernist style. With many texts in the post-structuralism/post-modernist period and vein-like Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow-this book teaches the reader how to read the text as one continues through the work. As such, it is a must reread, for as entertaining as the work is throughout the first reading, Ticket is more interesting and more insightful with each successive read.

Out of the three books in Burroghs' "cut-up" trilogy (the soft machine, the ticket that exploded, and nova express) this i feel is the best and most creative. Included in this book are Ginsyn's tape recorder experiments which produce a psychological analogy for the way our brains opperate as well as an interesting pass-time for anyone who finds the concept of words being a virus of the mind of any interest.

I know its meant to be experimental writing that plays with meaning and such, and I'm normally pretty open, but this is just gay sex, more gay sex, and more gay sex, with a plot that twists, meanders, and repeats itself.

At last, a novel that makes ejaculation seem like a normal reaction to every situation. I get the feeling mr. Burroughs tried to include the word "ejaculate" twice on each page. When the word becomes a part of the book's personal vocabulary, you will either become a repulsed read-stopper, or you will have to accept it as something everyday and common in order to get through this nightmare.

You will also have to accept that the penis is an important feature when describing a man's physique, it often gets as much attention as the face and clothes. But by merciless repetition, all this seems natural, you get to regard ejacultating
in pain as normal as screaming. Mr. Burroughs certainly creates an alternative reality where nobody and nothing acts the way we expect.

It is difficult to attach the concept of attainment and climax to Burrough's texts, the act of reading as a sexual encounter is never teleoligcial: as an historical moment, and these moments lace in and out of his work, The Ticket That Exploded marks the final move in his journey through Nova control lines and the elucidation of techniques of subversion. The text marks a cleft and an absence rather than a revolution, which Burrough's shows to be an act always already ingested by Nova logic. "Nova" itself signs the problematics of the new and original. The words writhe uneasily in gestures of self canabalism, and indeed here is one of the few places where the author speaks explicitly of repetition. Deleuze reading Burroughs...Burrroughs reading Deleuze? Neither. The Law is moving in - This is Nova Heat. Once the movement to Difference occurs, and to my mind this is located as a singularity in the last quarter of the text, the text is freed and seethes in a vertical spiral about any singular point in the work. This is a horizontal play of words in which chance regulates a different logic of alterity. We as readers are free to pin the work at any point with the stabbing singualrity of an "I" (the nails from a crucified God?). We are free to chose our own Sils Marias. This work is a monstruous and ephemeral monument to the hollow idols of our Humanity. It is a payground of chance. "do you get the picture" Read the text and feel yourself re-written. "Even better than the real thing? There is no real thing - Maya Maya - it's all show business"

That's all I remember from this book is something about a blue boy with a green penis or vice versa.That and Burroughs notion that we should all go to parties with prerecorded conversations and simply allow our tape players to talk to each other because it isn't as if we are having conversations. I remember this because it ruined the next three or four parties I went to because I kept thinking that everyone might as well have brought their taperecorders because they are all talking about what was already being talked about. These theories come at the end of the book. Up until then there is a lot of words which sound good together but the Cut & Paste experiment really did not do Burroughs good

This is the parallel text to The Soft Machine and Nova Express. But the qualities of these two almost unreadable but awesome works of art are only partly presented here. It shows that Burroughs did a lot of rewriting on this one, the repitions seem not all intended, and what he added to or changed in the original, which would have been a beautiful further view in the repelling cut up universe, undermines the visionary character of the trilogy. Technical prose about recorders and idealistic musings about what you can do with them makes this book sound dated. The idea itself, revolving around a prerecorded universe and how to unrecord it, is essential, but it gets a too political and too oneminded unhumorous treatment here and there. Where he can be such a laugh if he tries. The attacker of preachers falls prey to preaching. But then this turning into your own enemy is inherent to his work. Those who haven't yet read the first two novels of the cut up trilogy should start there, although there is no chronological need to do so. In the end you will have to read this as well, if you come as far. The hypnotising power of the trilogy shines through despite 'the dr frankenstein goes for recorders' pasages.

This is the parallel text to The Soft Machine and Nova Express. But the qualities of these two almost unreadable but awesome works of art are only partly presented here. It shows that Burroughs did a lot of rewriting on this one and what he added to or changed in the original, which would have been a beautiful further view in the repelling cut up universe, undermines the visionary character of the trilogy. Technical prose about recorders and musings about what you can do with them makes this book dated. The idea itself, revolving around a prerecorded universe and how to unrecord it, is essential, but it gets a too political and too oneminded unhumorous treatment here and there. Where he can be such a laugh if he tries. The attacker of preachers falls prey to preaching. But then this turning into your own enemy is inherent to his work. Those who haven't yet read the first two novels of the cut up trilogy should start there. In the end you will have to read this as well, if you come as far. The hypnotising power of the trilogy shines through despite 'the dr frankenstein goes for recorders' pasages.

Yes, it's a cut-up. Yes, it can be difficult to read, but what Burrough's accomplishes is the denial of Derridia/Lacanian deconstructionism that is so rife in current textual analysis. By his explicit "cuting word lines," and efficiency Burroughs disallows the reader a moment to decompose his catacombs of metaphor and derive subtextual data. Like all masterpieces, TTTE is mimetic, as it functions as a text exactly the way Burroughs explicitly states language should function. This book broke down my established mental habits of textual analysis created by a liberal arts degree, and brought me to some frightening parallels between Derridian deconstruction and Burrough's "word lines."