of Reverend Lee’s last words.
Oliver Harris
May 2, 2013
1. Rub Out the Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1959–1974, edited by Bill Morgan (New York: Ecco, 2012), 170. After, abbreviated to ROW.
2. Marshall McLuhan, “Notes on Burroughs,” The Nation (December 28, 1964), 517–19.
3. Undated typescript, probably 1963 (William S. Burroughs Papers, 1951–1972, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, 37.2). After, abbreviated to Berg. Mariner II is cited in Berg 11.28; Polaris in Berg 36.11; Atom bomb fallout in Berg 12.17.
4. See Dennis Redmond’s essay <http://members.efn.org/~dredmond/PP2.html>
5. The “condensed” novels of J.G. Ballard would be an obvious exception, but the British writer always insisted Burroughs was an inspiration, not an influence.
6. Typescript, dated May 20, 1960 (Berg 49.1).
7. Undated typescript (Berg 10.11).
8. Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960–1996, edited by Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e): 2000), 80.
9. Autograph, dated 1961 (Berg 62.9).
10. Peter Wollen, Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film (London: Verso, 2002), 31.
11. Burroughs, The Western Lands (New York: Viking, 1987), 252.
12. Burroughs Live, 42.
13. See “Cutting Up Politics,” in Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization (London: Pluto, 2004), edited by Davis Schneiderman and Philip Walsh, 175–200.
14. Burroughs, The Job (New York: Penguin, 1989), 27.
15. One explanation for the presence of Naked Lunch might be that Burroughs made his Cut-Up Trilogy from the leftovers of his thousand-page “Word Hoard”; but so far as Nova Express is concerned, there’s little truth in this often-repeated claim.
16. Burroughs to Rosset, May 24, 1963 (Grove Press Records, Special Collections, Syracuse University.) After, abbreviated to Syracuse.
17. Undated 2-page typescript (Berg 9.16).
18. Timothy Leary, High Priest (New York: Ronin, 1995), 225.
19. Burroughs to Gysin, August 18, 1961 (Berg 85.5).
20. Burroughs to Rosset, April 2, 1962 (Syracuse).
21. Burroughs to Wenning, September 23, 1961 (William S. Burroughs Papers, Ohio State University, SPEC.CMS.85, 1.1).
22. Burroughs to Rosset, October 2, 1962 (Syracuse).
23. Ginsberg to Kerouac, September 9, 1962, in The Letters of Allen Ginsberg, edited by Bill Morgan (New York: Da Capo, 2008), 270.
24. Burroughs also made three contributions to the German magazine Rhinozeros and contributed parts of Nova Express to The Second Coming in 1962 and Ira Cohen’s Gnaoua in 1964.
25. Burroughs to Seaver, July 21, 1964 (Berg 75.1).
26. In rough terms, a quarter of the material in chapters 1 to 4 is cut-up, compared with half of the material in chapters 5 to 7. Almost half the book’s sections combine cut-up and non-cut-up writing, and of the rest half have just one or the other.
27. Burroughs to Seaver, October 24, 1963 (Syracuse).
28. Burroughs to Seaver, July 21, 1964 and October 25, 1964 (Berg 75.1).
29. At this time, Burroughs made another collage that placed an adapted copy of the front cover of a November 30, 1962 copy of Time magazine in between his two Nova Express collages. A photograph of this collage is reproduced in The Art of William S. Burroughs: Cut-Ups, Cut-Ins, Cut-Outs, edited by Collin Fallows (Nürnberg: moderne Kunst, 2013), 61. According to Barry Miles, it was created at the Hotel Chelsea, New York, in April 1965, and Burroughs used a Spanish language newspaper brought with him from Tangier (e-mail correspondence April 30, 2013). As well as influencing numerous musicians, including an album of the same title by John Zorn (2011), and inspiring Andre Perkowski’s cinematic homage (2010), Nova Express gave its title to a newspaper in Alan Moore’s 1986 comic-book series, Watchman.
30. Burroughs, “Tangier,” Esquire 62.3 (September 1964).
31. In October 1963 Burroughs asked Seaver for two copies of the New York Times front page. The exact repetition of the line is crucial, although this feature has often been lost in translation, as in the French edition translated by Mary Beach and Claude Pélieu (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1970). This has “au-dessus de New York, le 17 septembre 1899” the first time but “17 septembre 1899, au-dessus de New York” the second time (9, 189). Unaccountably, the edition also translates the final date “21 July, 1964” as “21 janvier 1964.”
32. Folio 108 in the original catalog became Box 38 in the Berg Collection archive.
33. Burroughs, “Word,” in Interzone (New York: Viking, 1989), 184. Fats Terminal does appear in the “Gave Proof Through the Night” section, on a jukebox playing The Star-Spangled Banner.
34. Burroughs to Gysin, August 30, 1960 (Berg 86.8).
35. Undated typescript, probably late 1960 (Berg 48.22).
36. “King of the YADS,” Time (November 30, 1962), 96-97.
37. “Mr Henry Luce, Do you know what the machine is up to?” begins one typescript (Berg 7.38). A diatribe addressed to Mr Bradly Mr Martin in The Ticket That Exploded is clearly a reworking of similar material, but the only time Luce is actually named in the trilogy occurs in the 1968 edition of The Soft Machine when a character “goes into his Luce act” (106).
38. Burroughs Live, 150.
39. Draft typescript for The Ticket That Exploded (Berg 20.39). See also “The Inferential Kid,” The Burroughs File (San Francisco: City Lights, 1984), 128.
40. Burroughs to Seaver, October 10, 1963 and October 24, 1963 (Syracuse).
41. Burroughs’ clearest statement on the subject is quoted in Miles’ Introduction to Le métro blanc (Paris: Seuil, 1976), a collection of cut-up texts translated into French: “As you know my methods of writing do not allow me to correct rough copies and first drafts [. . .] It is only when I obtain the final form that I correct errors” (12; my translation).
NOVA
EXPRESS
Foreword Note
The section called “This Horrible Case” was written in collaboration with Mr. Ian Sommerville, a mathematician—Mr. Sommerville also contributed the technical notes in the section called “Chinese Laundry”—An extension of Brion Gysin’s cut-up method which I call the fold-in method has been used in this book which is consequently a composite of many writers living and dead.
Last Words
LAST WORDS
Listen to my last words anywhere. Listen to my last words any world. Listen all you boards syndicates and governments of the earth. And you powers behind what filth deals consummated in what lavatory to take what is not yours. To sell the ground from unborn feet forever—
“Don’t let them see us. Don’t tell them what we are
