Brion Gysin (1916-1986) is a difficult figure to classify. The son of a British father and a Canadian mother, he was born in England, raised in Alberta, and lived nearly his entire adult life abroad (mostly in Paris, Tangier, and New York). In collaboration with William Burroughs, he developed the “cut-up method” of writing. He also wrote several novels and a substantial corpus of “long and short fiction, historical narrative, poems, song lyrics, travel pieces, memoirs, experimental forms and more” (Gysin 2001: ix), yet he is not primarily a writer
per se. Gysin painted incessantly, sometimes with groundbreaking results that incorporated grid-like patterns overlaid with Eastern calligraphic scripts to form hallucinatory mathematical landscapes. His association with Morocco’s…
1580 words
Citation: Fazzino, Jimmy. "Brion Gysin". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 18 January 2012 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12979, accessed 21 November 2024.]
