Nova Express (24 page)

69 “
Towers, open fire—”
: the four-page draft (OSU 2.3) continues with more text and with an unevenly spaced layout variation:
“A tidal wave of defectors pouring in. And a cry from those trapped behind enemy lines—‘For God's sake come and get them'

Ground forces moving in—Shift cut tangle word lines—­Dismantle Time Machine—Bleep Blop Bleep—Death to the guards—Prisoners of the earth come out—

TOWERS OPEN FIRE

Coordinates Bleep bleep death to the Vampire air hammers

Bleep 8 2 7 6 stutter FIRE guards Bleeeeeeeep

On Board books TOWERS OPEN FIRE Light flak

Tourists— bloop cut bleeeeeepp Vibrate

FIRE Vibrate shift FIRE

FIRE Death dwarfs— tangle FIRE Bloop spuut

Stab cut Bleeeep Death to The BLeeeeeep

Pound shift TOWERS OPEN FIRE Novia Guard FIRE

Flicker blast tangle cut word lines

stab light blasts shift Photo falling

word falling in Grey Room Taken

Break through
Board Books Blue

Word Break Taken Movies

Falling through

Photo in grey

Falling room

TOWERS OPEN FIRE

BLEEEEPBLEEEEPBLOOOPSPUTT!”

Crab Nebula

CRAB NEBULA

This section must have been completed shortly before Burroughs submitted his March 1962 manuscript, because it quotes from the February 12, 1962 issue of
Newsweek
. That issue's cover would have caught Burroughs' eye since it featured “GUERRILLA WARFARE,” a report on the escalating war in Vietnam, which admits that guerrilla war is “a dirty, no-holds-barred kind of business, but it's one the U.S. has to learn how to master.” The original title of the section, up to and including the October 1962 MS, was “PLANETS OF THE CRAB NEBULAE.” A complete eight-page typescript (OSU 2.2) includes a small number of variant passages. The quotation from
Newsweek
was also used as a footnote to “They Just Fade Away” in
Evergreen Review
8.32 (April 1964).

72 “have escaped with the prisoners”: one early typescript continues:
“And formed underground movements in the alien planet called earth—”
(Berg 4.42).

73 “smouldering slag heaps”: the full eight-page typescript has
“shag heaps”
here and in what follows (OSU 2.2). Both “slag” and “shag” were used in
The Soft Machine
and
The Ticket That Exploded
.

75 “carbon dioxide withdrawal”: the eight-page typescript continues with lines that were partially canceled, beginning,
“
‘Sick picture calling Hospital—Sick Picture calling Hospital,'”
and concluding:
“Patient out of control—Need means of restraint—Need apomorphine—”
(OSU 2.2).

78 “Three thousand years of flesh”: the eight-page typescript has a longer variant:
“Two
thousand years of flesh—Look at the word and image bank of life time fortune—Enough word and image there to start the whole show rolling some place else—”
(OSU 2.2).

79 “keep the show on the road”: the eight-page typescript continues with the canceled line:
“Never was a technician myself—”
(OSU 2.2).

A BAD MOVE

Shortly before submitting the March 1962 MS, Burroughs mailed Gysin a two-page typescript, illustrating his new “fold-in” method, that overlaps this section and includes its specified literary source texts: “Enclose sample of juxtaposed closing page of
The Great Gatsby
and
The Soft Machine
[
. . .
] I intend to use these preparation[s] in
Novia Express
” (Burroughs to Gysin, March 2, 1962; Berg 85.6). While the typescript enclosure has fragments from the end of Fitzgerald's novel not used in
Nova Express
(e.g., “boats against the current” and “borne back into the past”), it has other phrases that were used (e.g., “word scrawled by some boy”). This cut-up section is especially dense with words from a range of literary sources, from Shakespeare to Wordsworth, as well as from Burroughs' own
Soft Machine
and
Naked Lunch
, and he reworked this material many times. The section's genesis is reflected in its manuscript history, which comprises scattered variant passages and fragments in numerous miscellaneous cut-up pages (OSU 2.2), before he produced the final, near-verbatim three-page typescript (OSU 4.9).

83 “flesh-smeared counter orders”: one typescript page continues with a rare self-reflexive fragment:
“Form a cut up of it”
(OSU 2.2).

84 “dont”: here (and on p. 187) the lack of punctuation seems to have been intended; Burroughs often typed “dont” and let copyeditors insert the apostrophe, but these two instances were not corrected on the galleys and seem consistent with the use of “dont,” three times, in
Nova Express
material published in the January 1962 issue of
Evergreen Review
.

THE DEATH DWARF IN THE STREET

The first draft of this section was “Chapter 16” of the March 1962 MS, so that, as well as lightly revising it, Burroughs moved the section from near the end toward the middle of his October 1962 MS. He also drafted numerous variant pages, parts of which clarify the narrative scenario, extend ideas and make explicit one of his key sources: Rimbaud.

85 “Biologic Agent K9 called for his check”: K9 enters (and leaves) a café in “Crab Nebula,” so Burroughs seems to have let stand a continuity error, the result perhaps of cut
ting the longer scenario in an earlier draft:
“K9 walked into the cafe and saw an enemy telepath at the end of the bar—he immediately put on a talk record and left it on while he monitored the mind screen and implanted juxtaposition formulae—”
(Berg 4.35).

85 “L'addition—Ladittion—Laddittion”: the incorrect French punctuation and spelling are in all witnesses and long galleys.

85 “Garcon—Garcon—Garcon”: corrects
NEX
82 (missing the last em dash), but again letting stand the incorrect French (lacking the cedilla).

86 “sliding in suggestion insults”: several typescripts continue with an illustration:
“(Walked in a fag bar and ordered a dry Martini ‘Dry Martini—Dry Martini—Veddy dwy Martini—' The Green Octopus perfect that art along fag lines of the earth)”
(OSU 3.5, Berg 48.17).

86 “in the right—in thee write”: the longest of several variant drafts of this passage is probably the earliest:
“RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT—Forming nerve patterns to the insult building you into the patterns—Any tape recorder can do the same they are tape recorders machine manipulated by distant fingers—Others can dissolve erogenous holes
and leave the sex words tattooed in flesh and bone and spine—Or spit out supersonic light blats of derogatory down grade image of you that burn into the being like acid leaving horrible festering open sores
—
So
the plague of the virus people flashed round the world
through the devitalized hosts eaten by The Erogenous sucking dummies and softened for the tearing supersonic buzz saws of the Talk dummies—”
(ASU 7).

86 “Agent K9 was with The Biologic Police”: one draft has
“Agent William ‘K9' Lee”
(Berg 48.17), a line later canceled (on OSU 3.5), clarifying Burroughs' identification with the agent via his fictional alter ego and former nom de plume.

87 “K9 left the café”: the first draft typescript has:
“Biological Lee left the cafe and
walked to the corner repeating at supersonic frequencies: ‘Billy in a Taxi—Billy ina Taxi—Billyinataxi—' A taxi swerved over to his feet and he got in muttering: ‘Billy in a taxi'”
(OSU 3.5).

88 “The basic law of association”: one miscellaneous draft continues:
“From this principal our agents learn to read newspapers and magazines for the juxtaposition statements rather than the contents of individual news items—and we can express these statements in association formulae—There are of course many ways of reinforcing a juxtaposition association—One is the short time hyp—The commonest is sexual images used in all advertisements”
(Berg 48.19).

90 “Or feed in a thousand novels”: a miscellaneous draft has a longer variation:
“Or another simple illustration—Put a thousand novels in the machine all of them good if there are a thousand good novels—Now let us look at the last pages of all these thousand novels—That is something of quality no?
[
. . .
]
Of course the old machine worked in the other way with bring down and degradation juxtaposition formulae—The machine can be reversed—”
(Berg 48.17)

91 “on the association line”: a miscellaneous draft continues with final lines that make explicit the connection Burroughs saw between his “association blocks” and Rimbaud's poetics, citing fragments of several poems, including “Voyelles”:
“correlating a certain smile an accent a way of holding a cigarette—The Color Alphabet is useful ­training—Take a name like IAN—Now assign colors to the letters
[
. . .
]
Associate to the poetry of RIMBAUD without words seeing the images in his work—Live ember raining in gust of frost—I embraced the Summer dawn—Corridors of black gauze—banner of raw meat—silk of seas—pensive drowned—a young man has grown up anywhere—perfumes of wine gas—etc.—Images free of word that shift and permutate improbably desertion on the suburban air—candor of vapors and tents—associate other image poets sad as the death of monkeys—”
(Berg 48.19).

EXTREMELY SMALL PARTICLES

The date with which this section opens (“Dec. 17, 1961”) suggests both its time of composition and the provenance of the cut-up material that follows, as is confirmed by Burroughs' identification of first draft material as “Newspaper cut ups — 2 pages with pages of source material” (OSU 2.2). The source pages in turn help identify some of the original news items cut up by Burroughs. This section was almost certainly composed in time to be a part of the March 1962 MS.

91 “Time: The night before”: a variant that names Ahmed Yacoubi confirms that this, and following phrases, are a cut-up of Burroughs' text, “Comments on ‘The Night Before Thinking
'
” in
Evergreen Review
5.20 (September 1961):
“(Recorded 1956 Past Time.) The Night Before Thinking came to Yacoubi under the influence of majoun a form of hashish jam”
(OSU 2.2).

92 “Might reach 500”: references in drafts to
“Niteroi hospitals”
identify this as the feared death toll of the Niterói circus fire in Brazil on December 17, 1961 (a tragedy that would have caught Burroughs' eye, bearing in mind a circus fire had inspired the title of
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
, the novella he co-authored with Jack Kerouac in 1945).

93 “two Negro secret service men”: the date December 1961 identifies this phrase as taken from Washington newspaper reports that the first non-whites had been appointed to the presidential bodyguard.

93 “Another Mineral American formed by meteorite impact”: references in drafts to
“Stewart L Udall”
identify the backstory to this phrase, which derives from a speech delivered in December 1961 by Udall, Secretary of the Interior in the Kennedy administration, about the discovery of stishovite, a rare form of silica, at Meteor Crater in northern Arizona.

94 “Error in enemy strategy is switchboard”: the first draft lacks this final paragraph, but has instead further lines cutting up science news material:
“Forgeries from the next years laying the ­Photostats—Spells out in chemical code the genetic instructions on rose wall paper—Ribonucleic acid or RNA—Blue Silence for short—The messengers are electrical flesh shifting his crotch—Each link of pleasure through cracked chain consists of an amino acid—Precise crucial question is what is the genitals electro-genetic code?”
(OSU 2.2).

From a Land of Grass Without Mirrors

FROM A LAND OF GRASS WITHOUT MIRRORS

Burroughs identified the first version in the March 1962 MS as “Chapter VIII,” so that the section remained in the middle of both his
Nova Express
manuscripts. The first full draft, however, an eleven-page typescript (OSU 2.3), underwent significant restructuring as well as rewriting by the time of the October 1962 MS. A thousand words longer than the published version, this early typescript is revealing formally, both for the lack of em dashes in its first five pages and for featuring a passage where words are spaced on the page (as in the “Uranian Willy” section). This typescript is also revealing in terms of content, featuring Burroughs himself and key friends in his circle as characters within the scenario. Although he redacted the material over several drafts, nearly a hundred words remained in the October 1962 MS that were canc
eled only at the galley stage in July 1964. The title reworks the phrase “a land of grass without memory” (which appears in
The Soft Machine
),
taken from St.-John Perse's poem
Anabasis
, in th
e T.S. Eliot translation.

99 “Lee was not surprised to see”: the first full draft has a much longer version naming various friends of Burroughs (“Jerry G” references Jerry Gorsaline, “Miguel” Michael Portman, “Roger” Roger Knoebber, etc.):
“Lee was not surprised or pleased to see many people he knew. ‘I brought them with me,' he decided,
‘so there is no doubt at this point who gives the orders.'