Mind) that includes his earlier title for Nova Express constructed as a cut-up of words in two different typefaces: a Gothic “The” followed by “NOVA EXPRESS” in white Sans serif capitals against a black background. The title acts as a caption to the picture above it of a train wreck, while the words “By train” appear prominently nearby. The composition also includes typewritten text by Burroughs in two columns (beginning, “you are reading the future”), a photograph of him making tea, and the Spanish word “Sucesos,” identifying the train crash as an item in the sección de sucesos, the newspaper section dealing with crimes and disasters. In 1966, Jonathan Cape used parts of this collage for the cover of the British edition of Nova Express, omitting the Gothic article “The” and adding pictures of locomotive wheels to emphasize the obvious: Nova Express names the onrushing apocalyptic train crash of history, the railroad of time, “the total disaster now on tracks.”
However, to read the title in this way is to risk missing the point Burroughs was making in both book and collage, and indeed in the cut-up project as a whole: what mattered most was not the apparent referential content but the form, the message in the medium itself. The importance of form is precisely established in the Nova Express collage by the way it is reproduced in The Third Mind, where in miniature it is juxtaposed alongside another Nova Express collage. This collage makes two changes to the book’s title, omitting the article “The” and, after the same white-on-black capitalized “NOVA,” has the word “EXPRESS” in a different typeface. To British readers, the font and spacing of the letters in “EXPRESS” are unmistakable: it is from the masthead of the Daily Express. The other semantic content of the word “express”—referring to not trains but newspapers—is activated formally by the typography of the word and by the broadsheet page layout of the collage.29 The term nova may refer to a nuclear explosion in white dwarf stars, but Burroughs was well enough versed in astronomy as well as in Latin to know this was an abbreviation of stella nova (“new star”), and that nova also designates what is new or news: it was in this double sense that he originally titled his novel The Novia Express.
A year before making these two collages, in spring 1964 as he waited to receive the Nova Express galleys, Burroughs had been building filing systems modeled on newspaper archives: “Your reporter selects a clipping from the file labelled Daily Express, Saturday, April 25, 1964 (London).”30 In July, as he corrected the galleys, he physically framed his book in terms of newspapers by inserting the same phrase to give a new final line to both the first and last sections of the text: “September 17, 1899 over New York.”31 Burroughs became obsessed with this date, using it in many texts, but its significance lies in its provenance in a newspaper. In February 1964 he wrote Gysin of his discovery: “The New York Times for September 17, 1899 came through a few days ago. I saw at once that the message was not of content but format. Newspapers are cut up by format […] This is the secret of their power to mould thought feeling and subsequent events” (ROW, 139). Restating what he had already made explicit in Nova Express in terms of “Juxtaposition Formulae” (“Our technicians learn to read newspapers and magazines for juxtaposition statements rather than alleged content”), Burroughs was inspired to produce his own newspaper format pieces using three columns, and during 1964 and 1965 he made many such texts. Although these have always been seen as entirely separate from his book-length cut-up work, the ending of Nova Express insists otherwise: “Well that’s about the closest way I know to tell you and papers rustling across city desks . . . fresh southerly winds a long time ago.” Those “city desks” of newspaper offices parallel the sección de sucesos in his Nova Express collage and were a clear reflection of Burroughs’ vision in February 1964: “Why not write a novel as if you were sitting at the city desk?” (ROW, 143). And those “fresh southerly winds” would be associated with newspapers in the archives Burroughs later assembled for sale; Folio 108, which he titled “Fresh Southerly Winds Stir Papers On The City Desk,” gathers together a dozen mid-1960s newspaper-format publications, from “The Daily Tape Worm” to one called “The Nova Express.”32
Burroughs may not have had in mind his late-1950s character “Fats” Terminal, who “edits a newspaper known as the Underground Express,”33 but Nova Express was definitely “underground.” Not quite, perhaps, like the underground press of little magazines to which Burroughs contributed—since a publishing house like Grove was “alternative” but still commercial, not aligned with the self-publishing networks that sprang up in the 1960s. Rather, it was underground in its aim to serve a resistance movement against an occupying power, its cut-up methods intended to sabotage an essentially fascist aboveground world. Nova Express is “about” the Nova Mob, but from the start Burroughs saw it as opposed to and directed against what in 1960 he called “the Beaverbrook Mob,” referring to the Anglo-Canadian owner of the Daily Express, and fascist sympathizer, Lord Beaverbrook.34 In fact, Beaverbrook was one of a trio of press barons in Burroughs’ sights, alongside Henry Luce (Time, Life, Fortune) and William Randolph Hearst (from the San Francisco Examiner to New York’s Daily Mirror). Many early drafts of what became “Last Words,” were addressed directly to all three: “PAY IT ALL PAY IT ALL PAY IT ALL BACK. PLAY IT ALL PLAY IT ALL PLAY IT ALL BACK. RIGHT HERE RIGHT NOW FOR ALL TO SEE. MR LUCE BEAVERBROOK HURST TIME SMASH YOUR MACHINE.”35 Dating from as early as May 1960, this and other “Last Words” drafts were written over a year before Burroughs began work on Nova Express, but he never used any such material for The Soft Machine and would make relatively few references to the press in The Ticket That Exploded. However, he saw Nova Express in terms of newspapers from first to last.
The most striking instance of how early and how emphatically Burroughs associated the book’s original title with newspapers appears in a long canceled passage from the section “Too Far Down The Road.” Probably composed in late 1961, the typescript repeats the phrase “To readers of The Daily Express” twice in order to frame a reference to “The Novia Express,” and also cites the title of one of Luce’s magazines (“Looking through Time”). Readers of “The Novia Express” would have got the point, and this material stayed in until the galley stage in July 1964. Burroughs didn’t simply cut it, however: he transferred it from one medium to another, in April 1965 recording “Are You Tracking Me,” a sonic experiment that includes the key phrase “To readers of The Daily Express.”
In August 1961 the first chapter heading of the manuscript in its earliest draft had carried the original title of the book as a whole, “THE NOVIA EXPRESS.” Here, the “one hope left in the universe” is to “wise up the marks”: “Show them the rigged wheel of Life-Time-Fortune. Storm The Reality Studio.” The book therefore opened with not only the clearest possible assault on the fraudulent “reality” projected by Luce’s newsmagazine empire; in the context of references to Life, Time, and Fortune, the section and book title “The Novia Express” also identified Burroughs’ text as alternative reportage, “news” of a different reality. But it’s significant that the book uses words cut from newspapers quite recognizably in just three specific sections (“Extremely Small Particles,” “There’s A Lot Ended,” “Are These Experiments Necessary?”), and that these are all introduced by dates: from “Dec. 17, 1961—Past Time” to “March 17, 1962, Present Time Of Knowledge.” Attacking the temporality and referentiality standardized by Time magazine, Nova Express mainly uses cut-up news items that were of passing, topical interest in December 1961 and March 1962 (crime reports, celebrity events), and renders them deliberately obscure. For Burroughs, “Present Time” was not determined by public events or the official historical record but was a point of personal intersection, and from many pages of cut-up newspaper source material he chose to keep few fragments of “historical” significance for use in Nova Express.
Burroughs’
