BRION GYSIN LET THE MICE IN

Oh, and let's not forget this, with thanks to Hammond Guthrie for the reminder: "Cut and paste," which appeared while we were in Dell meltdown mode. I'm especially fond of the conclusion:

When Burroughs died, JG Ballard lamented his passing by saying that he was the most important and original writer since the second world war. "Now," he mourned, "we are left with the career novelists."


BRION GYSIN LET THE MICE IN.jpg Which also reminds me: Once upon a time, Brion Gysin let the mice in. That was way back in 1960. It became the title of a book published in 1973 by Something Else Press, which traced the origin of "cut-ups" as a technique applied to writing by Gysin and William Burroughs, a literary "method," if you will, that gained notoriety following the publication of Burroughs's partially cut-up "Naked Lunch."

In an editor's note to "Brion Gysin Let the Mice In," I pointed out that their first cut-ups were published in "Minutes to Go" and "The Exterminator," to which "Mice" was intended as a companion. I also noted that the title came via Gregory Corso. Gysin wrote me from Tangier:

The original text included the words "said Gregory Corso in 1960," and they consequently appeared in the cut up text, also. Gregory disassociated himself from the whole idea so thoroughly that I agreed with Bill Levy of Insect Trust Gazette that he should be edited out and, now, I rather regret it but there was Gregory's voice in there, squalling away to be let out of there, so we took the scissors to him.

"Those first cut-ups tested the potency of words. Further investigations tested the influence of other sensory input," I wrote somewhat tendentiously. "Ian Sommerville and Brion Gysin designed a dream machine on which a patent was granted in 1961. William Burroughs explored a vast subject throughout the Sixties. He formulated, described, and applied to his literary work certain discoveries about Control -- of consciousness and society -- through sound & image. Certainly, it is difficult to think of any writer of fiction who paid so much attention to theorizing the discrete psychoactive suggestiveness of words."

A final sidenote, with thanks to Arts & Letters Daily for the tip: My favorite romantic, Michel Houellebecq, is back! He's made a career all right, but not with the usual material.

August 30, 2005 9:35 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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