this is better than naked lunch
The fuck is this a sponge bob episode?
>>8223360
my same thoughts
Nova Trilogy is god-tier, even if Nova Express is like 60% rehash of the previous two novellas. contain some really fascinating musings on language and systems of control, and provide a pretty compelling justification for his cut-up technique.
reading it now. I love the book (I think) but im sort of confused as to how he wrote it. Did Burroughs write somewhat-coherent shit, cut it up, and then pick random sentences out of a hat and voila, this-is-how-I-arrange-my-passages? Regardless of the actual content, I like to imagine some of the imagery and sequencing of events is a little more deliberate than that.
Life's white machine
>>8223417
it's more accurate to call burroughs' technique a cut up and fold in. cutting up is an older method traceable to dadaism in which a text is quite literally cut up. what burroughs did, in addition to that, presumably because he typed on a typewriter and was a drug addict with piles of unordered manuscripts lying around, he also did what was called a fold-in technique. the fold-in technique, according to wikipedia is, "the technique of taking two sheets of linear text (with the same linespacing), folding each sheet in half vertically and combining with the other, then reading across the resulting page"
essentially, what this does in regards to the bigger goals behind burroughs' work , is something derrida-esque. If you recall the Derrida essay "signature event context" he talks about how things like citations of other works essentially takes them out of their original context and recontextualizes them to a new meaning. this is a point of deconstruction.
Burroughs' goal, it seems, is to quite literally disrupt and deconstruct how we read and interpret a sentence, even words. He has a famous quote of "language is a virus". language is like the heroin burroughs did in his junky days. It is a mechanism of controlling and shaping others. Burroughs essentially seeks to disrupt these control mechanism and turn them into something delineated, random, with no power over others.
>>8223420
This. I bought my first copy of The Soft Machine from Grove Press. Ain't shit to it. These editions give HELLA context and is all around fucking awesome.
>>8223465
>Burroughs' goal, it seems, is to quite literally disrupt and deconstruct
i agree that thats what he was doing, but i dont think that was his *goal* i think this was a technique he employing to achieve his actual goal.
what that actual goal was is a more interesting question.
>>8223850
sorry should've expanded - disrupt and deconstruct in order to change our entire thought process on language and its power, reconstructing it in wholly new forms
>>8223926
Joyce already did it with Finnegans Wake. Burroughs just made it more accessible to plebs.
