Writer and counterculture legend Brion Gysin was born in 1916 in a Canadian military hospital in England, to Canadian parents; he later attended an Anglican boarding school in Edmonton—either of these facts would make him at the very least an honorary Canadian. Gysin was a fascinating character, described by William S. Burroughs as “the only man I ever respected.” Gysin is often credited, inaccurately, as being the first to stumble on the “cut-up” technique for writing: in 1958, in room 15 of the Beat Hotel in Paris (the technique had already been described by Dadaists in the 1920s). Gysin had sliced through stacks of newspapers while cutting a mount for a drawing and noticed that, by rearranging these random fragments of text, he’d created a new text which (he felt) revealed the true meaning of the original. He and Burroughs experimented extensively with cut-up, Burroughs even suggesting that “When you cut into the present the future leaks out.” There’s an excellent biography of Gysin: Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted (2005); now we have Brion Gysin: His Name Was Master (Trapart Books), a collection of transcribed conversations between Gysin and Genesis P-Orridge (another fascinating figure from the avant-garde; check them out on Wikipedia). The conversations took place in Gysin’s Paris apartment in the spring and fall of 1980. They are gossipy; they are scatological; they are philosophical; they are mundane. The topics covered range from matters literary and artistic (the Surrealists; the Beats in Paris; William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch) to matters magickal (P-Orridge’s preferred spelling of the term). Gysin goes into detail on the origins of his famous Dreamachine, a mechanical means for inducing a dream state, and thereby accessing the unconscious. Brion Gysin: His Name Was Master will never be a bestseller; it is a labour of love for Trapart Books, a one-man independent publisher based in Sweden. It gives hope to all those who still recall the days before publishing became a business dominated by multinational conglomerates, whose primary concern is, and always will be, the bottom line.
