Best Minds of My Generation by Allen Ginsberg

Author:Allen Ginsberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2017-03-24T14:57:01+00:00

CHAPTER 26

Burroughs and The Ticket That Exploded

I stopped at a newsstand on Shaftsbury Avenue and bought a copy of Encounter. Contemplating on their eros the feet of prose abstracted to a point where no image track occurs.121

Burroughs is putting picture image track as an equivalent of the tape recording in the mind of the word. He mixes here, cuts out some of his plot, his cosmic detective story consciousness plot, with some parodies and prose, which I believe are actual cut-ups of Encounter prose. Encounter magazine being a British Anglo-American literary magazine which was subsidized by the CIA during the early fifties.

(desperately effete negation of societal values fecundate with orifices perspective and the ambivalent smugness of unavowed totalitarianism.)

I knew why he was standing there. He didn’t have the ready to fill his script. He was waiting for somebody he could touch.

(foundering in disproportionate exasperation he doesn’t even achieve the irrelevant honesty of hysteria . . .122

That is one of the phrases that George Steiner or somebody in Encounter wrote as a negative review of Naked Lunch. “Foundering in exasperation of hysteria.” Burroughs is pointing out, as Orwell pointed out, it’s just attitudinal abstractions and has absolutely no referents for these words, there’s no sight, sound, smell, touch. They are just referring back to other abstractions. One abstraction referring to another abstraction, receding infinite.

“Need bread for your script, man?”

He turned and looked at me decided I wasn’t the heat and nodded. I passed him a quid. “That should buy six jacks. I’ll see you outside.”

He nodded again went in and sat down in the script line.

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

I waited half an hour of word sludge123

This is Burroughs’s parody of manipulative prose. If you cut it up you realize the essentially empty nature of it. Burroughs was also trying to cut up his own thoughts, feelings, and his own sexual obsessions, which he felt were tied to certain sensory impressions.

Another notion of cut-up is whenever you find a sender, a sender like Nixon, or the CIA, or Encounter magazine, your mother, your father, yourself, the great ego self the sender, then the way to deal with the sender is by feedback. So if you wanted to destroy the CIA, you just trace along the word line to find where the human put-down language imagery came from, and then you cut up that negative human language put-down imagery that’s being fed to you and you feed it back to the CIA or your mother. “Cut-up and spray back of all minds living.” “To see or switchblades are preferred cut the word lines.” “No one can con cut-up. Cut your own . . . cut the.”

What he does in Soft Machine, Nova Express, and The Ticket That Exploded, structurally, is to use random cut-up material. He still has his plots, his routines, just like Naked Lunch, like the blue movie, or like Dr. Benway, and then he’ll take several of

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