Back in No Time: The Brion Gysin Reader - Softcover

"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 . . . This release fills a crucial gap in the historical record."--Publishers Weekly"When all the secret histories of the last century are finally told, Brion Gysin's pivotal role as cultural border-crosser, psychic adventurer and aesthetic provocateur will have to be acknowledged, but Jason Weiss's Back in No Time provides all the evidence anyone should need right now. Back in No Time makes the best case I have ever seen for Gysin's importance as a writer and theorist continually perched on the razor's edge of innovation."--Timothy S. Murphy, author of Wising up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs

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."