The Ticket That Exploded. William S. Burroughs
in the title: “Johnny’s So Long at the Fair”—or after the act of singing itself—“If You Can’t Say It Sing It.” Far from being a sweet song of innocence, the title “Johnny’s So Long at the Fair” symbolized Burroughs’ acute distrust of “the gimmick” referred to in Iggy Pop’s lyrics as “something called love.” The Ticket not only proposes that love lyrics communicate love sickness but that the essential human activities of communication and love are both a sickness. The other title, “If You Can’t Say It Sing It,” also spelled out the extremism of Burroughs’ book, privileging singing over speaking to point beyond verbal expression and exchange altogether. As the text bluntly says: “There are no good relationships—There are no good words—I wrote silences.” The “ticket” in the title he finally chose is an image of hidden determinism that invokes the insides of music machines, like the punch cards in an old fairground organ or the perforated rolls of a player piano. The Ticket That Exploded also sums up the other titles in Burroughs’ trilogy, The Soft Machine and Nova Express: as a figure for cultural and genetic programming, the “ticket” is written into us on the “soft typewriter” of the body, and it is “exploded” after a countdown to nova that is for Burroughs our only hope of rewriting the scripts that dictate our lives.
Burroughs is relentless to the point of tedium, but eventually we get the point: words don’t just describe something, through repetition they make it happen, so that the future is in effect prerecorded by the past. The “do you love me?” section which precedes “operation rewrite” accordingly slices and dices romantic songs to diagnose desire as an infectious disease, a communicable fever kept going by the repetitious lyrics of mass culture like a fairground ride going round and around, drumming and humming away in our heads. Cutting up old song lyrics, Burroughs sadistically mocks the sentimental longings they evoke and the result is a paradoxical composite typical of The Ticket and one reason this was the book that hooked me as a reader of Burroughs: the viciousness in its treatment of words somehow produces moments of a yet more haunting lyricism. It’s “the old junk gimmick” that identifies Burroughs’ text as both research into and a performance of the self-replicating virus of cultural communication that the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins called a “meme.” From memorable tunes to seductive ideas, memes spread themselves about, influencing and infecting, copying and mutating, and exhibiting their own autonomous and insatiable lust for life. As Burroughs reminded his cut-up collaborator Brion Gysin in loud block capitals in summer 1960, two years before starting his book, “YOU KNOW HOW CATCHING TUNES ARE.”1
Burroughs certainly had an ear for what was catching, and despite its often disorientating difficulty, his work is seductively quotable. This quality went together with a politically sharp sense of his own inescapable complicity in what he opposed: cut-up methods were a way to bring the verbal virus out into the open and to fight fire with fire. Burroughs noted that he and the poet John Giorno once “considered forming a pop group called ‘The Mind Parasites,’” on the basis that “all poets worthy of the name are mind parasites, and their words ought to get into your head and live there, repeating and repeating and repeating.”2 While he probably took the band’s name from the title of Colin Wilson’s novel, there’s also an echo in it of what Burroughs had found back in October 1959, when he first began to work with cut-up methods at the Beat Hotel in Paris. In a typescript explaining how “WORD LINES” dictate our “LIFE SLOTS,” he described how cutting up audiotape revealed noise in the cybernetic system that had a life of its own: “LIKE INTERFERENCE ON THE RADIO. ‘PARASITES’ THE FRENCH CALL THAT SOUND. GOT IT? IT GETS YOU.”3 It is in this sense, of the word as an alien organism, that The Ticket cuts words up and splices them back in together, treating text like audiotape in order to hear how the language virus works at the molecular level: “biologists talk about creating life in a test tube . . all they need is a few tape recorders.”
The Ticket also explores how the meme migrates from one medium to another, modeling the kind of media-crossing, collage-based cultural practices that Iggy Pop and David Bowie experimented with in the late 1970s and that in the digital age we take for granted. Framing The Ticket in terms of not one medium but four, Burroughs starts with an Acknowledgment that credits four collaborators, thanking Michael Portman, Ian Sommerville, Antony Balch, and Brion Gysin respectively for contributions in writing, audiotape, film, and artwork. It’s an astonishing opening note for what looks like a novel. But since The Ticket abjures the development of plot, character, or the texture of daily human life, it is no more a “novel” in any conventional sense than Burroughs is a “writer.” We have to bear in mind that it was part of not only a Cut-Up Trilogy but of a much larger, decade-long experiment—the Cut-Up Project—that crossed media and treated the book as one technology among others. The Ticket was both prescient and productive, inviting the cut-up lyrics of “Lust for Life” and mapping out the multi-media career trajectory of the Pop-Bowie collaboration from the moment the two musicians found inspiration watching TV one day. What prompted them was the U.S. Armed Forces station ID, whose signal ironically echoed the refrain of guerrilla resistance that runs throughout Burroughs’ book (“From the radio poured a metallic staccato voice […] ‘Towers, open fire’”): “At four o’clock in the afternoon,” Pop recalled, “the channel came on with this black-and-white image of a radio tower, going beep-beep-beep beep-beep-ba-beep,” and Bowie reportedly turned to him and said, “Get your tape recorder.”4
Just as television, radio, and audiotape segued naturally into one another in the process of musical composition, so too the song’s success mirrors back the collage aesthetics and cultural appropriations of Burroughs’ Ticket. It’s only natural that “Lust for Life” didn’t become a major hit simply because of its stomping drum reverb and ferociously sung yet witty lyrics but because it was borrowed for the film adaptation of the novel Trainspotting, whose subject matter (heroin addiction) owed a debt to Burroughs that went without saying. What does need to be said is that the success of the song via the film of the novel acts out the viral logic that is the subject of the book by Burroughs that inspired the song in the first place. And if it was inevitable that Pop would quickly cash in and franchise “Lust for Life” for crass commercial use, Burroughs could see that one coming too. In The Ticket he shows his scorn for how lustfully capitalism sucks the life out of everything and everyone by proposing what he calls “creative advertising,” so that his book’s revolutionary hero can sell out to the Nova Mob, the 1% who are screwing our planet, by promoting the deadly top brand of commodity addiction in “advertisements that tell a story and create characters Inspector J. Lee of the Nova Police smokes Players.”
In the context of this Madison Avenue parody, it may seem like a joke about product placement that at this point in The Ticket Burroughs makes numerous references to “the Philips Carry Corder.” In fact, the references establish a point of intersection between his book, 1960s music and the counterculture more broadly—a nexus that in turn predicts possibilities fulfilled by the digital environment of the twenty-first century. Tape recorders played a part in Nova Express through “The Subliminal Kid,” and in the original 1962 edition of The Ticket, but for the 1967 book Burroughs expanded their role through new narrative episodes and, most importantly, in sections advocating their practical use. Burroughs’ invitation to readers to follow his example by conducting experiments in cutting and mixing tape on their own equipment (“Go out and buy three fine machines”) went back to the launching manual of cut-up methods, Minutes to Go (1960), and technically updated it. Giving away a tool for active individual production rather than advertising a product for passive mass consumption, the manifesto had opened with Gysin’s announcement that “the writing machine is for everybody do it yourself.”5 Introduced in Europe in 1963, the compact audio cassette was a major breakthrough in portable technology at affordable prices, and in fall 1965 Burroughs bought a Carry-Corder 150, the model used by Ian Sommerville, his close friend and a technical adviser who Burroughs shared at this time with Paul McCartney. “Guess you’ve all seen the Philips Carry Corder,” he comments, directly addressing