Rating: 
Summary: Remind you of something?
Review: I don't have much to add to the other reviews, except to note that one of the techniques of the Nova Mob is to provoke conflict by playing back the worst things opposing groups have to say to each other in a positive feedback loop. I started to think about this when tracking the Clinton sex scandal and impeachment on the Web, and have had cause to think of it since....
Rating: 
Summary: Word falling --- photo falling --- breakthrough in Grey Room
Review: I read this book cover to cover when I was 17, something I felt to be an accomplishment. There's a narrative (sometimes) and striking, vivid language that you won't find anywhere else, but at times the fold-in method of writing, a technique designed to subvert the rational process of thought, yields paragraphs that are not merely irrational but garbled. They're just clumps of words pasted together at random (as far as I can tell). This is not a novel in any sense of the term, nor it is a story, but there are themes and images that perhaps could not be conveyed in a conventional framework. Nova Express was extremely influential for me and has stayed with me for the last 30 years. I don't pretend to understand everything that Burroughs was trying to accomplish with this kind of writing, but if affected me in ways that are hard to explain. If you are interested in experimental writing, surrealism, or non-linear narrative, you may want to give Burroughs a try. However if you're looking for a good, comfortable read, this isn't the place to get it.
Rating:
Summary: Word falling --- photo falling --- breakthrough in Grey Room
Review: I read this book cover to cover when I was 17, something I felt to be an accomplishment. There's a narrative (sometimes) and striking, vivid language that you won't find anywhere else, but at times the fold-in method of writing, a technique designed to subvert the rational process of thought, yields paragraphs that are not merely irrational but garbled. They're just clumps of words pasted together at random (as far as I can tell). This is not a novel in any sense of the term, nor it is a story, but there are themes and images that perhaps could not be conveyed in a conventional framework. Nova Express was extremely influential for me and has stayed with me for the last 30 years. I don't pretend to understand everything that Burroughs was trying to accomplish with this kind of writing, but if affected me in ways that are hard to explain. If you are interested in experimental writing, surrealism, or non-linear narrative, you may want to give Burroughs a try. However if you're looking for a good, comfortable read, this isn't the place to get it.
Rating:
Summary: "Give me that kimono!"-The Captain
Review: I won't be as vivid and descriptive as an eel in hot pursuit over gravy, er, I won't be as evil and malignant as Cortez babies, er, want I....EGAD! Start over... I won't be as descriptive and detailed (there we go) on this review as on THE Wild Boys. This too is a good book, but my least favorite of my collection. It also seems to be the shortest, and less memorable. Parts of it seem to be more preachy than other releases, opening with Agent Lee talking about how the mass media is controlled by psuedo-punk poseurs addicted to controlling the brainwashed populace. From what I remember, Burroughs seems to make fun of these individuals (who have such elaborate names as Jimmy The Butcher, Jackie Blue Note, etc.) who are portrayed as racist punks fooling everyone with actually being the enemy of true revolutionaries. The plans they hatch up to keep the world controlled are amusing. Aside from this most coherent of writing, the rest is pure Burroughs insanity...classics include the section "Twilight's Last Gleeming", in which a ship is going down and all hell is breaking loose (the immortal line quoted above is said by the drag-wearing captain of that ship). This may come as a shock, but some of the sections actuall bored me...mainly the more scientific information packed parts like the relationship between parasites and hosts, other easily forgettable things. But look past this, and Burroughs knows what he's talking about. As before, there are some downright beauties and truths around...this may have been from one of the other books since they all seem to flow together as a whole, but I remember a story about a house shifting over a dsert plain and the tenants trying to socialize with lonely lemurs hanging in a tree. There's a great peice of poetry existing right around there. about angry warriors waitng around with their arrows loking for someone to shoot. It just proves that WSB would've been good at straitforward poetry, possibly better than Allen Ginsburg. He actually tried it with Tom Waits on The Black Rider album, remind myself I gotta get that. Wancha all stripped down, all stripped down....wrong album. Point blank, this book is just as worthy/signifigant/brown propeller on a fasion moon as any of his others. Dig? Flat, baby. Flatfooted and pure goulash on my headset tonight. Burroughs, my man...you know it...you... Fadeout in classic form.
Rating:
Summary: the ultimate use of language - useless fight with word virus
Review: it's not an easy book, it's work of dark but extremely vivid imagination, a perfectly targeted description of counciousness-reality relation - a letter from the other side of language
Rating:
Summary: the cut-up trilogy
Review: my god, man! Burroughs is a sheer genius. I read the trilogy as well as Naked lunch and the Wild Boys (also cut-ups) three years agoo. This is the one I remember most. I took awhile to read it, and I tried to compete in an interpretive speech with it, but ended up using a piece from The Ticket that Exploded. Every one of these books fascinates me. I also highly reccomend the Soft machine. This got me hooked. I also read Junky, Place of Dead Roads and Queer last year. I am now currently reading Western Lands!!! The man's resume is endless. His genius continues to influence in many deconstructionists today. Look at Radiohead, Andy Kaufman, David Lynch, all of those abstract thinking break down the cell wall artists. They are of a special breed. and this is a special writer!
Rating:
Summary: thirty-six years old and still ahead of its time
Review: Oh, this book is superb; thrilling. Burroughs' critique of media/information culture has never been more relevant (he even predicts, in 1964, the emergence of something that sounds very much like the Web - "more and more images in less space pounded down under the sex acts and torture ever took place anywhere"). Great chunks of the book function practically as a Machiavellian instruction manual on how those in power might use a stream of words and images to generate fear, passivity, and conflict in a human population. Some of Burroughs' incisiveness may derive from his usage of the famous cut-up and fold-in techniques (using passages plagiarized / "sampled" from other texts, including psychology journals, newspapers, pulp science fiction and true crime texts, and literary sources like T. S. Eliot and Rimbaud) - when he uses these, he gets at a radical (if illogical) analysis of the source texts. The illogical / nonlinear structure that results might throw some, but to my mind, this fits in perfectly with the book's overall critique - if you believe that certain forms of language (and thought) are politically corrupted, as Burroughs does, then the answer may be to compose a text that exists outside of those structures. The result feels vital and exciting - it is practically a new way of thinking on the page - and Burroughs' ideas on how to resist and defeat "the machine" and the nova process are similarly thought-provoking and unexpected (they bring to light a spiritual (monastic) side of Burroughs that I hadn't been previously familiar with).
Rating:
Summary: Naked Lunch++
Review: Society, consciousness, language--Religion, time space--Nova Express takes us for a ride through the very roots of these imposed structures. For a more detailed description of what this book is all about I'll simply refer you here:
But be warned, this book is not a casual read, I found this book very difficult to penetrate. One of the things I had to learn was to focus all my attention, and I mean ever scrap of mental energy, because there's no way of getting anything out of the book otherwise. And then there's the slight matter of exterminating self imposed rational constraints. But once I did this Nova Express was like stepping through Blake's doors of perception.
Rating:
Summary: Notes From The Grey Room
Review: This installation into the Nova series helps establish the reality of Interzone, first introduced in Naked Lunch. The Nova Police are the only thing keeping the Nova gangsters from harboring the monopoly on the universe's only source for Apomorphine. Burroughs appears in the novel as Agent Lee, the primary factor for the Nova Police. From incidious mass-poisonings to wild goose-chases across Interzone, Nova Express is an essential bridge between Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine. In my mind, one cant/shouldn't read either of the other two without having read Nova Express as well.
Rating:
Summary: Notes From The Grey Room
Review: This installation into the Nova series helps establish the reality of Interzone, first introduced in Naked Lunch. The Nova Police are the only thing keeping the Nova gangsters from harboring the monopoly on the universe's only source for Apomorphine. Burroughs appears in the novel as Agent Lee, the primary factor for the Nova Police. From incidious mass-poisonings to wild goose-chases across Interzone, Nova Express is an essential bridge between Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine. In my mind, one cant/shouldn't read either of the other two without having read Nova Express as well.
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