"The Ticket that Exploded" by William Burroughs

Again Burroughs uses the cut-up technique to scatter images of gay sex, hanging, drug addiction, poverty, warfare, telepathy, and insect and crustacean life through what you might call a plot. Again we meet some of his favourite characters, including Carl, and Agent Lee.

For several pages the cut-up technique involves cutting out a few words of the lyrics of a variety of love songs, some inevitably used more than once, and splicing them together. This causes some interesting curious such as "Got you under my skin on my mind." (p 35) and I suspect there are some who will celebrate the postmodern irony that makes love look so repetitive and yet so unique at the same time ... or is it trying to tell us that the creative process is merely remixing and that originality is dead? Hmmm.

"(ironically the format is banal to its heart of pulp ambivalently flailing noneffectual tentacles of verbal diarrhea)" (p22). Quite.

The plot seems to revolve around the potential of tape recordings played in some sort of synchrony to cause people to hang themselves but it is also mixed up with an intergalactic virus that seems to take the form of street boys. Or have I got that wrong? It was difficult to work out what was going on and even harder to care.

Despite Burroughs being an American author Agent Lee meets 'Genial' a drug addicted gay assassin, in Boots the Chemist in Piccadilly London; Boots of Piccadilly was famous in the 1960s as being the all-night chemist where addicts could fulfil their scripts; I wonder if it still is?

More than with any other Burroughs book (the others I have linked to from this post are quite good) the reader needs to tolerate a certain amount of being taken for a ride for the occasional nuggets of poetic beauty: either a perfect phrase, or an interesting idea, or a wonderful image:

• "it was across the table raw and bloody as a fresh used knife." (p 1)
• "who am I to be critical few things in my own past I'd just as soon forget." (p 2); Burroughs has a nice way of subverting grammar while leaving the sense entirely clear
• "Winds of time" (p 5)
• "The two beings twisted free of human coordinates" (p 6)
• "You can run a government without police if your conditioning program is tight enough but you can't run a government without bull shit." (p 15)
• "The dreamer with dirty cheeks" (p 52)
• "These our actors bid you peaceful opaqueness in this monument of tiredness." (p 135)
• "John stood there with a cup of coffee late morning sunlight in his eyes." (p 143)

Books by Burroughs which are reviewed in this blog include:

• The Soft Machine which shares some of the same characters and themes as The Wild Boys 
• The Wild Boys
• Naked Lunch.
• The Place of Dead Roads
• The Ticket that Exploded

April 2017; 168 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Naked Lunch" by William Burroughs

Naked lunch? William Burroughs remembers Jack Kerouac as coming up with the title and he himself didn't understand it at first but now he says that it is "a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork". Jack Kerouac remembers it as being entitled when Allen Ginsberg was reading it aloud and misread 'naked lust' (which never made the final text).

This book starts well, with an account of a junkie evading capture by the Narcotics police by jumping on a subway train. But the text at the start is pocked with explanatory notes woven into the text. Nevertheless, some of Burroughs razor sharp images come through.

But then the book degenerates. It becomes a procession of rude remarks about women, black people, Arabs, religions: Burroughs seems to be trying his hardest to offend everyone he can. He is obsessed with shit, there is the usual smattering of gay sex (reprising the idea in the Soft Machine that men ejaculate when they are hanged), and as with the soft machine he has a morbid fascination with insects and crustacea. And after the first few pages, the crystal observations seem to have deserted him, although there is a late stand. "It's a wildly unpretty spectacle" (p 177)

This is the book in which Steely Dan makes an appearance (there are three of them, they refer to robust metal dildoes). In this part, Burroughs becomes interested in 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and I wondered with John Livingstone Lowes would have made of Burroughs had he analysed his work rather than that of Coleridge in his study of the imagination, The Road to Xanadu.

Although Naked Lunch is hailed as a prime example of the Burroughs 'cut-up' technique, where he supposedly wrote narratives and then chopped them up so that scenes and characters recur, this book has this technique less obviously than The Wild Boys, my favourite Burroughs so far, and The Soft Machine though it is done with rather more effect than in The Ticket that Exploded. Rather, it is assembled into vignettes in which one character or one theme is briefly explored. In the book, Burroughs claims that "You can cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection point" (p 187)(although the book is structured in that the cop chase at the beginning is mirrored by a similar scene very near the end) and "There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing ... I am a recording instrument ... I don not presume to impose 'story' 'plot' 'continuity'" (p 184). I thought the book was summed up in another quote: "Vast adolescent muttering." (p 98)

Nevertheless, the book does have some fascinating moments. Burroughs had a vivid if diseased imagination and there are some ideas that make me want to write a story about them. Here are some other moments where the observation was acute, or the concepts original, or he was just funny:

• "Fingers of rotten ectoplasm" (p 5)
• "You know how old people lose all shame about eating, and it makes you puke to watch them?" (p 6)
• "I am a ghost wanting what every ghost wants - a body" (p 8)
• "mosaic of sleepless nights" (p 9)
• "Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat. The Mark Inside ..." (p 11) 
• "the threat of torture is used to induce in the subject the appropriate feeling of helplessness and gratitude to the interrogator for withholding it. And torture can be employed to advantage as a penalty when the subject is far enough along with the treatment to accept punishment as deserved." (p 21)
• "Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand ..." (p 56)
• "Guess he can make his own penicillin" (p 60)
• "ribs you could wash your filthy overalls on" (p 85)
• "Sucking terror from needle scars" (p 194)

But when all is said and done, it wasn't his best. July 2016; 196 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Page references refer to the paperback of the restored text edited by James Grauerholz and Barry Miles and published by Fourth Estate in 2010

Books by Burroughs which are reviewed in this blog include:

• The Soft Machine which shares some of the same characters and themes as The Wild Boys 
• The Wild Boys
• Naked Lunch.
• The Place of Dead Roads
• The Ticket that Exploded

"The Soft Machine" by William Burroughs

I think I have figured out a rationale for the William Burroughs technique. Because any fool can write gay porn and cut it up and reassemble the pieces randomly.

Think of the Burroughs style as a symphony. Early in the book (but also at intervals elsewhere) he plays a theme. This theme has to be a crystal clear image, as vivid and as unforgettable as a line in a poem. The elaborate around the theme. Bring in other themes. Experiment with variations (but never so varied that you cannot spot the theme). Use different tempos, vary the volume and the style. A Burroughs book is like a symphony.

What makes a theme is its ability to set an idea down in a few brilliantly-chosen words.

I noticed in The Wild Boys, also by Burroughs, that "there are lots of colours in this book; they are almost his favourite adjectives. Yet his palette isn't terribly extensive and the same colours are repeated again and again." This is an example of his use of themes.

Some of the themes are also found in other Burroughs books. He does seem to be fixated on the early sexual experiences of 'Johnny' and 'Kiki'. Early in this book "he threw himself across the wash basin pressing his stomach against the cool porcelain. I draped myself over his body laughing. His shorts dissolved in rectal mucous ans carbolic soap." We will meet with dissolving shorts, rectal mucous and carbolic soap later in the book. Other repeated themes include boys being hanged and the urban myth that as they die their penises become erect and they ejaculate. It sounds as if Burroughs experimented with autoerotic asphyxia (which allegedly causes a semi-hallucinogenic rush) as well as gay sex and heroin.

There are an awful lots of mentions of molluscs and crustaceans: these often inhabit the bodies of young boys. He also likes lists. Carl (another character found in other cooks) paddles his canoe into a "lagoon infested with" a whole aquarium of exotic life including and "aquatic panther and other noxious creatures dreamed up by the lying explorers who infest bars marginal to the area." Note that 'infest' is used twice in the same sentence; Burroughs didn't seem to believe in editing.

Burroughs is wonderful at one-liners that are perfect images like sparkling little diamonds of prose:

• His eyes flickered the question
• Trace a line of goose pimples up the thin young arm.
• The sick dawn flutes of Ramadan
• My time was running out its last black grains
• Dead young flesh in stale underwear vending sex
• Plaintive ghost in the turnstile
• I'm Johnny Yen, a friend of - Well, just about everybody
• You're dead nada walking around visible
• caustic erogenous slime
• 'Salt Chunk Mary' had all the 'nos' and none of them ever meant 'yes'.

In the end I found it difficult to read. He runs out of fresh new images and peddles the old ones time and again. There are a lot of gay sexual encounters although many of them seem to be the same encounter told again and again. I guess that is like life. But without the erotic angle this book might be unreadable. I applaud what he is trying to do but perhaps the form needs to be briefer, a short story rather than a novella.

June 2016; 129 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

The theme of ejaculation by hanging also appears in Naked Lunch by William Burroughs

Books by Burroughs which are reviewed in this blog include:

• The Soft Machine which shares some of the same characters and themes as The Wild Boys 
• The Wild Boys
• Naked Lunch.
• The Place of Dead Roads
• The Ticket that Exploded

"The Wild Boys" by William Burroughs

Burroughs, heir to a fortune, dropped out, became a junky, killed his wife and wrote gay erotica. His books are so much of their time. The Wild Boys was written in 1969.

Burroughs wrote a number of his books using a 'cut up' technique: narratives were written, cut and pasted in a different order. This makes it very difficult to talk of a plot. The Wild Boys is about a group of boys near Marrakech who go feral and roam the desert (and. it seems. the Mexican jungle) killing and having ritualistic gay sex. The story mixes in science fiction and supernatural elements: one gay ritual involves boys creating 'zimbus' during gay copulation enabling the tribe to procreate without women.

In the late sixties these books must have seemed daring and avant garde. But now it is relevant to ask whether they are actually any good.

The book starts with a description of a derelict Mexican slum. It appears in the first paragraph and is then forgotten. The first paragraph has a fly-by drone taking photos; the second concentrates on adjectives of dereliction such as choked, rusty, cracked and broken; the third introduces colours. There are lots of colours in this book; they are almost his favourite adjectives. Yet his palette isn't terribly extensive and the same colours are repeated again and again.

Repetition is also a feature of the book and one wonders whether the cut-up style might have been invented to space out the repetitions and avoid them seeming to become burdensome. Certainly, fragments from the erotic couplings are repeated again and again; Burroughs seems to see this as a sort of peep show arcade as opposed to the blue movies which are given rather more story and rather less sex.

After some effort, we arrive at the meat of the novel. A number of named characters, all young boys, including prep-school Aubrey and all-Americans Johnny and his cousin Mark, and poor Mexican Kiki have anal sex. These episodes seem to be retellings of first times. Rather cutely, Burroughs takes refuge in Spanish when it comes to some of the more explicit moments: vuelvete y aganchete means turn around and get down, quiero follarte means I want to fuck, buen lugar para follar means good place to fuck etc. Intrioguingly this, the pornographic heart of the novel, straddles (I think that might be an apposite word) the dead centre of the book.

So far, so undistinguished. Burroughs has produced a shocking book which aspires to literary greatness partly because of its subject matter but also because of its disdain for many of the literary conventions. Does that make it good or merely self-regarding?

The only reason Burroughs gets away with it at all is because of his ability to create vivid images. The whole wild boys adventure is a fantasy and others can go further down this road. But there are some phrases which stand out:

• "A jungle seen through a faceted eye that looks simultaneously in any direction up or down"
• "Occasionally the overseer adjusts a slow worker with his eyes."
• "trailing white-hot wires like a jellyfish"
• "Everyone has reversible linings and concealed pockets"
• "the walking dead catatonic from hunger ... the legs of this river of flesh ... burrows of walking flesh."

In the end, though, it is just another sixties work of art promising a revolution that was never delivered.

Allegedly, David Bowie was influenced by the book when creating his androgynous image (and possibly also by the paragraph which talks of two astronauts, gay lovers, who orbit in a Gemini space capsule which then loses radio contact; this seems a possible source for Major Thom).

Books by Burroughs which are reviewed in this blog include:

• The Soft Machine which shares some of the same characters and themes as The Wild Boys 
• Naked Lunch.
• The Place of Dead Roads
• The Ticket that Exploded

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

November 2015; 184 pages