Back in No Time
The Brion Gysin Reader
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- US$23.99
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- US$23.99
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Brion Gysin (1916–1986) was a visual artist, historian, novelist, and an experimental poet credited with the discovery of the ‘cut-up’ technique -- a collage of texts, not pictures -- which his longtime collaborator William S. Burroughs put to more extensive use. He is also considered one of the early innovators of sound poetry, which he defines as ‘getting poetry back off the page and into performance.’ Back in No Time gathers materials from the entire Gysin oeuvre: scholarly historical study, baroque fiction, permutated and cut-up poetry, unsettling memoir, selections from The Process and The Last Museum, and his unproduced screenplay of Burroughs’ novel Naked Lunch. In addition, the Reader contains complete texts of several Gysin pieces that are difficult to find, including “Poem of Poems,” “The Pipes of Pan,” and “A Quick Trip to Alamut.”
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Though often associated with the Beats, Gysin, English by birth and Canadian by upbringing, was an idiosyncratic and restless spiritual wanderer, a jack-of-all trades who made innovative contributions to poetry, prose and the visual arts with his inventions such as the cut-up (employed most famously by William Burroughs) and the "Dreammachine," the first art work that one viewed with the eyes closed. (Though it never caught on, Kurt Cobain, among other celebrities, owned one.) But Gysin was never one to exploit his works for prestige or financial gain, and he took such pains with projects like his second, and last, novel, a chronicling of the Beat Hotel (the Paris flophouse they frequented) called The Last Museum, generously excerpted here, that it only appeared posthumously in 1986. This volume contains poems, songs (many have been set to music by saxophonist Steve Lacy), Gysin's screenplay based on Naked Lunch, incidental pieces like his introduction to a cookbook by the Moroccan painter Hamri, aesthetic statements, 18 illustrations, and short stories about his life in Morocco that are rendered piquant by the tones of intrigue and the comfortable proximity Gysin had to Morocco's Muslim culture, back before it became a rite of passage for Beatnik wannabes. This is a valuable book that makes accessible an artist too long considered a cult-eccentric, arguing for an engagement with life in which one grasps constantly for the spiritual in art in a time when frontiers in time, space, and formal experiment lured with their promise of adventure.
