conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the first five paragraphs for a book with the title 'The Ticket That Exploded'?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Ticket That Exploded
  All Burroughs' cuts and insertions are documented in the Notes section, which also gives details of editorial changes involving about a hundred minor corrections and includes significant selections from the major archival variants. The aim is not only to show exactly how Burroughs updated The Ticket and to carry out some necessary restorations but to make visible for the first time the bigger picture of the manuscript sequences from which the published text was cut.
  More coherently, Burroughs extended his experimentation with punctuation, which went back to the use of parentheses and ellipses in Naked Lunch. Like Nova Express, but unlike The Soft Machine, the 1962 text of The Ticket had used the em dash ( — ) as radically as one of Burroughs' major influences, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, had used the ellipsis (...). The Olympia edition of The Ticket had just a single three-dot ellipsis but some four thousand em dashes which function, as the French novelist said in the mid-1950s of his own punctuation, like the rail tracks on which the metro of the writing depends. But just as Céline surprisingly made the ellipsis, normally a sign of suggestion and enigma, the electric dynamo of prose that "charges right into the nervous system," so the surprise of The Ticket is to find the dash used for more than a sense of urgency.37 Burroughs never explicitly theorized punctuation as Céline did, but he was well aware that the material he added in 1967, containing some four hundred two-dot ellipses, a dozen three-dot ellipses, and about a hundred more em dashes, transformed the page. All these dots and dashes make the entire text of The Ticket an encrypted signal, a code or "system," as one draft typescript puts it, "like Morse with scales of intensity and speed."38 Because they cannot be spoken aloud or put into words, the em dashes and ellipses are crucial to the physical sensation of the reading experience, but Burroughs' practice was more than a generalized aesthetic. On the contrary, on close inspection The Ticket shows how subtle and precise his use of a dash was in literary terms. Take the example of the section "combat troops in the area."
  The first half of "combat troops" appeared in the 1962 edition, shown in its use of the em dash some 250 times, an average of every ten words. The second half of the section, added in 1967, has only a single em dash and the main punctuation is the two-dot ellipsis, of which there are more than seventy. The placement of the one em dash—so visibly out of place in a paragraph sprayed with a dozen ellipses—is carefully contrived in lines that refer to the experimental poet e.e. cummings: "his gentle precise fingers on Bill's shoulder fold sweet etcetera to bed — EE Cummings if my memory serves and what have I my friend to give you? Monkey bones of eddie and bill?" The obvious anomaly is that Burroughs puts the poet's name in upper case, rather than using the lower-case letters that exemplified cummings' famously nonstandard orthography. This is the tip-off to three more subtle manipulations. First, there's the title of cummings' poem "my sweet old etcetera," which Burroughs alters by inverting the word order and turning "old" into "fold" to make a self-reflexive pun on his fold-in method. Second, the phrase "eddie and bill" has also been subject to a precise restructuring, since Burroughs has separated the run-together names "eddieandbill" from another cummings poem. Finally, and not by chance, this other poem has an em dash in its very title: "in Just—" Although it's easily missed, Burroughs has named the second poem just through his use of the dash, and encoded his work in a tradition of typographic poetic experiment.
  The final feature that makes the ending of the Olympia edition so intriguing is the precise transition between Burroughs' text and Gysin's drawing. The transition not only silences language but spatializes time, as the temporal march of words from left to right gives way to a spatial arrangement. This farewell to Time draws attention to what lies beyond words literally on the page, as the 1962 Ticket ends with the word "good-bye —" hyphenated and split at the end of the line, so that all six lines of text on the final page end with either an em dash or a hyphen:
  On the last page of his 1962 typesetting manuscript Burroughs signaled his attention to visual detail by typing, rather than his usual two dashes, five dashes after the final word "good-bye," indicating his aim to end with an especially elongated line. The archival record also shows that the key feature of the Olympia Press ­design—the printing of Gysin's artwork immediately after his text to form a single and complete last page—was not some happy accident. On the contrary, an editor at Olympia put a note on the penultimate sheet of the page proofs requesting that lines of text be moved precisely in order to make this happen: "faire passer au moins 4 ou 5 lignes à la p. 183."41 As regards the actual layout of text on the last page of the Olympia edition, with its striking line-up of dashes and hyphens, there's no evidence to suggest that this was determined by anything more than the number of words and the narrow line width. In which case, the hexagram of lines for Heaven was the product of a material accident, which is entirely fitting given the role of chance in the philosophy and practice of both the I Ching and cut-up methods. We are left not with a choice between meaningful creativity or meaningless mysticism but with a way of reading beyond the binary of belief and skepticism.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know two more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Combat troops to fight the Insect People of Minraud for control of this planet — Crab guards gathered around the machine, sliding forward to feel with white-hot claws for the human spots of weakness opened up by The Green Boy of the Divide Line — The crab guard was not finding the spots — He pressed closer breathing the dry heat of Minraud, while flying scorpion men sank stingers into empty flesh, injecting the oven poison — Too late the crab guard saw the jade body and the disk eyes pounding deep into his nerve centers — The eyes converged in a single beam forcing the guard back like a fire hose — The pressure suddenly shut off as the eyes vibrated in air hammer synchronization — pounded the guard to writhing fragments —
  The Scorpion Electricals buzzed away screaming — His converging eye beams exploded them in the air and they fell in a shower of blue sparks — He was standing over the green boy spitting words into his nervous system —
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the last three paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: This section appeared verbatim in the 1962 Ticket but its length almost tripled for the 1967 edition through the addition of one short and two long inserts. The new material expanded the original by emphasizing that machines are "an externalized section of the human nervous system," terms that go back to Dr Benway in Naked Lunch ("Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets" [22]). However, The Ticket updates Naked Lunch in tape recorder technology, chiefly inspired by Scientology techniques first taken up in late 1959, and it both references actual experiments carried out by Burroughs at the time of writing the 1962 edition ("I recorded sound tracks") and invites the reader of the 1967 edition to follow suit ("Go out and buy three fine machines on credit"). Parts of this material—including the rallying cry, "Carry Corders of the world unite"—appeared in April 1966 in Jeff Nuttall's British mimeograph magazine My Own Mag 15, where Burroughs again misspelled the name of the tape recorder ("Phillips"), and ended with an appeal to the sixties generation: "So get out there with your Carry Corders young fellers."
  This short section appeared verbatim in the 1962 Ticket, and in terms of manuscript history the only oddity is that its final paragraph did not appear on the 1962 typesetting MS but was added only at the page proof stage (the only such insert Burroughs made). After the previous section's references to Surrealism and Situationism, it might seem that this begins with a reference to Andy Warhol. Certainly, the idea of shooting and projecting films at different speeds echoes Warhol's Empire (1964), which was shot at the standard 24 frames per second but shown at 16 fps, and Antony Balch did the same when screening The Cut Ups, first exhibited shortly before the revised Ticket That Exploded appeared. However, what is called here "The Short Time Hyp" dates back to before Burroughs' film collaborations with Balch, and some lines appear on a typescript probably dating from 1960, not long after he and Balch first met.
  The final section appeared verbatim in the 1962 Ticket but Burroughs transformed it by making it five times longer, adding a complex 4,500-word insert into the middle of the original section, as well as making two shorter inserts toward the end. Almost all the long insert had previously been published in summer 1964 in The Insect Trust Gazette 1 under the title "Burning Heavens, Idiot," at the same time as the final sixth of the insert appeared in "Who Is the Third That Walks Beside You?" in Art and Literature 2. After a variant opening paragraph, "Burning Heavens, Idiot" is near verbatim apart from minor punctuation and spelling differences, but the overlapping text published in John Ashbery's Paris-based magazine differed more substantially. In particular, it was part of a three-column layout piece, so that the material added to the Grove Press Ticket needs to be seen in relation to a record of variant texts, little-magazine publication and formal experiment.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: This section appeared verbatim in the 1962 Ticket but its length almost tripled for the 1967 edition through the addition of one short and two long inserts. The new material expanded the original by emphasizing that machines are "an externalized section of the human nervous system," terms that go back to Dr Benway in Naked Lunch ("Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets" [22]). However, The Ticket updates Naked Lunch in tape recorder technology, chiefly inspired by Scientology techniques first taken up in late 1959, and it both references actual experiments carried out by Burroughs at the time of writing the 1962 edition ("I recorded sound tracks") and invites the reader of the 1967 edition to follow suit ("Go out and buy three fine machines on credit"). Parts of this material—including the rallying cry, "Carry Corders of the world unite"—appeared in April 1966 in Jeff Nuttall's British mimeograph magazine My Own Mag 15, where Burroughs again misspelled the name of the tape recorder ("Phillips"), and ended with an appeal to the sixties generation: "So get out there with your Carry Corders young fellers."
  This short section appeared verbatim in the 1962 Ticket, and in terms of manuscript history the only oddity is that its final paragraph did not appear on the 1962 typesetting MS but was added only at the page proof stage (the only such insert Burroughs made). After the previous section's references to Surrealism and Situationism, it might seem that this begins with a reference to Andy Warhol. Certainly, the idea of shooting and projecting films at different speeds echoes Warhol's Empire (1964), which was shot at the standard 24 frames per second but shown at 16 fps, and Antony Balch did the same when screening The Cut Ups, first exhibited shortly before the revised Ticket That Exploded appeared. However, what is called here "The Short Time Hyp" dates back to before Burroughs' film collaborations with Balch, and some lines appear on a typescript probably dating from 1960, not long after he and Balch first met.
  The final section appeared verbatim in the 1962 Ticket but Burroughs transformed it by making it five times longer, adding a complex 4,500-word insert into the middle of the original section, as well as making two shorter inserts toward the end. Almost all the long insert had previously been published in summer 1964 in The Insect Trust Gazette 1 under the title "Burning Heavens, Idiot," at the same time as the final sixth of the insert appeared in "Who Is the Third That Walks Beside You?" in Art and Literature 2. After a variant opening paragraph, "Burning Heavens, Idiot" is near verbatim apart from minor punctuation and spelling differences, but the overlapping text published in John Ashbery's Paris-based magazine differed more substantially.