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 | Here To Go: Planet R101 Brion Gysin 1982 b/w illustrated 224mm x 137mm 212mm x 140mm Hard/Soft covers First publication Published by RE/Search Publications 282pp ISBN 0 940642 04 02 (Hard) ISBN 0 940642 03 4 (Soft) | |
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 | Another title lost to Savoy amidst the police raids and collapse of Savoy Books Ltd in 1981. Conceived, commissioned (down to the William Burroughs introduction) and co-edited by Michael Butterworth, who nevertheless is uncredited by Terry Wilson. A first interview was commissioned for Butterworth's small press magazine, Wordworks. Other interviews followed after Butterworth formed the idea of producing a book-length exploration and documentation of Gysin's life and ideas, which was to be modelled along the lines of The Third Mind (The Viking Press, 1978) Gysin's and William Burroughs' illustrated book about their cut-up methods and synergistic modes of writing. Our book was eventually acquired by Genesis P Orridge for RE/Search, who did a great job in the design and presentation. At least it found a good home. Cover design by Stan Bingo and Peter Christopherson. |
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| "In the wake of the Final Academy come two oral autobiographies of Burroughs and Gysin, his master-technician and inventor of the 'cut-up'. Both are shaped by the demands, or peculiarities, of the interviewer, and naturally share a common if often divergent history. Cutting between the two (mainly because I got bored by the Bockris book), you'll get versions of the famous Stanley Knife scene—Burroughs finding Gysin improvising new meaning from newspapers, he'd inadvertently sliced up, and adapting it to his own work; mirror staring (the first step in personality-switching); drugs, sex, days in Tangier and Morocco, and brewing up the universe marked out by Control, Hassan I Sabbah, transcendentalism, viruses, the machineries of joy and pain and space travel without rockets. Thanks to Wilson and, naturally, Gysin, Here to Go is worlds apart from Bockris' gatecrashing antics. The style and sensitivity of Wilson's book, aided tremendously by a highly visual design, makes A Report From the Bunker look even more like idle tittle-tattle. Burroughs has proclaimed as much loudly, so it's no backlash, but from Wilson's interviews Gysin emerges as the puckish magician to the court at which Burroughs is detained as a rather fractious troubadour. Sly, charming, humorous, arch, dangerous, Gysin is almost a modern-day Rimbaud, alive for the adventure of it all ('Here to Go' being the meaning of it all; mankind is here to go—into space), a volatile force in any media and responsible for more of Burroughs' ideas than just the cut-up. Unlike what one sometimes suspects of the court chronicler, Gysin seems to have lived it, and gloriously so. And where Bockris offers no more than a gossipy gloss, Wilson engages and spars with his subject, has been there and brought back evidence. He may be partisan, but that penetration is necessary. And anyway, isn't the impossibility of ever really knowing the best bit of all, paranoia theory?" JOHN GILL, Time Out |
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