Back in No Time: The Brion Gysin Reader

Brion Gyson

Wesleyan University Press, May 15, 2015 - Literary Collections - 400 pages

The first anthology of writings by the brilliant avant-gardist: "A valuable book that makes accessible an artist too long considered a cult-eccentric." — Publishers Weekly
Born in 1916, Brion Gysin was a visual artist, historian, novelist, and 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 defined 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, this 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."

Contents

• That Secret Look: 1
• From a Lost Novel: 3
• To MasterA Long Goodnight excerpts: 16
• Potiphars Wife: 60
• Early CutUp Experiments: 69
• Permutation Poems: 79
• Brion Gysin Let the Mice In: 95
• The Poem of Poems: 102
• Dreamachine: 113
• Unpublished Notes on Painting: 117
• The Pipes of Pan: 122
• About the CutUps: 125
• Am I the One?: 136
• Janicot: 141
• The Process excerpts: 144
• The Naked Lunch Screenplay excerpts: 190
• A Quick Trip to Alamut: 218
• Words by DayImages by Night: 240
• Psacré Psilocybin and Magic Mushrooms: 257
• Not by Me: 261
• Songs: 266
• Hamris Hands: 279
• Snapshots from the Family Album excerpts: 282
• An Encomium for Allen Ginsberg: 287
• Calligraffiti of Fire: 289
• The Sculpted Line: 291
• The Last Museum: 292
• Bibliography: 349
• Discography: 351
• Permissions: 353

About the author

One of the first Fulbright Fellows, BRION GYSIN was recognized for his book, To Master – a Long Goodnight, with its substantial appendix, A History of Slavery in Canada. His career as a visual artist began before the age of 20; he was part of the famous 1935 Surrealist Drawings show in Paris, though at the orders of André; Breton his work was taken down. His paintings are owned by MOMA, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and Paris's Pompidou Center.
Jason Weiss is a New York-based writer and author of Writing at Risk: Interviews in Paris with Uncommon Writers (1991).

Bibliographic information

• Title: Back in No Time: The Brion Gysin Reader
• Author: Brion Gyson
• Editor: Jason Weiss
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press, 2015
• ISBN: 0819576166, 9780819576163
• Length: 400 pages
• Subjects: Art / Individual Artists / General; Literary Collections / Canadian