abbreviated to ROW.
7. Burroughs, Naked Lunch: the Restored Text (New York: Grove, 2003), edited by James Grauerholz and Barry Miles, 249.
8. Carroll to Burroughs, August 17, 1960 (The Paul D. Carroll Papers, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library; 1.18). After, abbreviated to Chicago.
9. Burroughs to Carroll, August 23, 1960 (Chicago, 1.18).
10. Burroughs to Bowles, October 8, 1960 (Paul Bowles Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin; 8.10). After, abbreviated to HRC.
11. Kerouac, in Beat Writers at Work, edited by George Plimpton (New York: The Modern Library, 1999), 132; Corso, in Minutes to Go by Burroughs, Sinclair Beiles, Gregory Corso and Brion Gysin, (Paris: Two Cities Editions, 1960), 63.
12. Burroughs to Carroll, January 20, 1961 (Chicago, 1.18).
13. Minutes to Go, 43.
14. Nine-page typescript, ca. late 1959 (Berg 7.44).
15. All citations in block capitals in this and the next paragraphs are from un-sequenced typescripts, circa 1960 (Berg 48.22).
16. That this phrasing originates in openly anti-Semitic material is clear from several 1960 texts, including: “I RUB OUT THE WORDS OF MARX LENIN EINSTEIN FREUD FRAUD FOREVER. I RUB OUT THE WORD JEW FOREVER” (Berg, 48.22).
17. Nine-page typescript (Berg 7.44). See notes on the “Where You Belong” chapter for Luce’s presence in the “1962 MS” of The Soft Machine.
18. Undated typescripts (Berg 3.52; 49.14; 49.32; 9.24).
19. Parts had appeared in “Brief History of the Occupation,” which Burroughs started to write in October 1960 and which he described as “FROM WORK IN PROGRESS: ‘MR BRADLY MR MARTIN’”—his earlier title for The Soft Machine (Berg 10.47).
20. Ginsberg to Kerouac, September 9, 1962, in The Letters of Allen Ginsberg, edited by Bill Morgan (Cambridge: Da Capo, 2008) 270.
21. Bowles to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, July 24, 1962 (City Lights Books Records, Box 1, University of California, Berkeley).
22. A six-page typescript sequence, which includes elements of Soft Machine material such as Soul Crackers, features cut-up permutations of the “Composite City,” from “Expeditions leave for unknown boys” to “Yage is space games with motion” (William S. Burroughs Papers, Ohio State University, Columbus SPEC.CMS.87, 17.130A).
23. Burroughs, Interzone, edited by James Grauerholz (New York: Viking, 1989), 128.
24. The 1966 text has ten times the number of em dashes, almost 2,000; still far fewer than Nova Express or The Ticket That Exploded. The result is ironic, since the dash appears to be a visible sign of the cut, and the 1961 Soft Machine, the text with by far the fewest dashes, was the only true “cut-up” text in the trilogy, since Burroughs didn’t use “fold-in” methods for it, as he did for all other volumes.
25. The importance of Rimbaud from the start of the cut-up project is evident from references in Minutes to Go and The Exterminator. However, Burroughs’ use of “Voyelles” was more specifically associated with synaesthesia, hallucination, and the physiological effects of flicker, inspired by his reading of Walter’s The Living Brain, as a 1960 typescript makes clear: “WHEN I READ THIS PASSAGE I IMMEDIATELY THOUGHT OF RIMBAUD AND HIS IMAGES THAT SEEM TO BREAK DOWN BARRIERS. HIS COLOR VOWELS” (Berg 48.22). This was an artistic-scientific area emphasized by Ginsberg in his 1961 jacket blurb: “Stroboscopic flicker-lights playing on the Soft Machine of the eye create hallucinations.”
26. Aldous Huxley, “Heaven and Hell” (1956), in The Doors of Perception (London: Vintage, 1994), 76.
27. Gysin, “On The Soft Machine,” two-page typescript (Berg 5.37). Corso, untitled one-page typescript (Berg 5.39). Ginsberg, untitled two-page autograph manuscript (Berg 5.38).
28. Timothy Leary, High Priest (New York: Ronin, 1995), 225.
29. In another case of the trilogy’s misleading publishing history, Nova Express appeared two years after The Ticket That Exploded but was mainly written a year before, straight after The Soft Machine.
30. Of the thirty sections in Dead Fingers Talk, half feature material from The Soft Machine, although in all but three sections it is combined with material from one or both the other texts. In contrast, twice as many sections feature only material from Naked Lunch or The Ticket That Exploded. Burroughs also used more from those books than from The Soft Machine—another sign of his relative dissatisfaction with it.
31. Burroughs to Bowles, November 21, 1962 (HRC).
32. The manuscript is signed “Paris, June 1963”—a date probably added when Burroughs sold it.
33. Girodias to Burroughs, February 8, 1963 (Berg 75.8).
34. It’s likely that in early 1965 Burroughs submitted a manuscript of The Soft Machine to both Seaver and Calder—copies of a 162-page typescript, probably made in late 1962 or early 1963 for Olympia Press, cleanly retyped from the November 1962 MS.
35. Seaver to Burroughs, December 20, 1965 (Grove Press Records, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries). After, abbreviated to Syracuse; Seaver to Burroughs, January 14, 1966 (Syracuse).
36. Burroughs, The Job (New York: Penguin, 1989), 27; Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960–1996, edited by Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e): 2000), 77.
37. Burroughs to Ansen, January 23, 1962 (Ted Morgan Papers, Arizona State University; Box 1).
38. Seaver to Burroughs, October 6, 1965 (Syracuse).
39. Burroughs to Calder, January 26, 1966 (Calder & Boyars mss 1939–1980, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Box 66).
40. Gysin to Burroughs, November 21, 1966 (Berg 85.12).
41. Gysin to Burroughs, December 14, 1966 (Berg 85.12).
42. If the article belonged anywhere it was with Nova Express, where apomorphine is referred to three-dozen times, and Burroughs had indeed twice tried to interest Grove in adding an earlier version of the article to that text when submitting his first and revised manuscripts in spring and fall 1962.
43. Burroughs, Junky: the definitive text of “Junk” (New York: Grove, 2012), 36.
THE SOFT MACHINE
Dead On Arrival
I was working The Hole with The Sailor and we did not bad. Fifteen cents on an average night boosting the afternoons and short-timing the dawn we made out from The Land Of The Free. But I was running out of veins. I went over to the counter for another cup of coffee. . . in Joe’s Lunch Room drinking coffee with a napkin under the cup which is said to be the mark of someone who does a lot of sitting in cafeterias and lunchrooms. . . Waiting on The Man. . . “What can we do?” Nick said to me once in his dead junky whisper. “They know we’ll wait. . .” Yes, they know we’ll wait. . .
There is a boy sitting at the counter thin-faced kid his eyes all pupil. I see he is hooked and sick. Familiar face maybe from the pool hall where I scored for tea sometime. Somewhere in grey strata of subways all-night cafeterias rooming house flesh. His eyes flickered the question. I nodded toward my booth. He carried his coffee over and sat down opposite me.
The croaker lives out Long Island. . . Light Yen sleep waking up for stops. Change. Start. Everything sharp and clear. Antennae of TV suck the sky.
