Letter from Brion Gysin to Roger Knoebber, 27 May, 1982

Paris, France: Brion Gysin (letter), 1982.
letter: 11.75" x 8.25", single sheet, recto only.
envelope: 4.5" x 6.375".
RK19820527_LBG1_1

A letter from Brion Gysin at 135 rue St. Martin, Paris, France to Roger Knoebber in Berkeley, California.

This reads:

Paris
27 May 82

Dear Roger

Sorry about that. I did not write in time to tell you that the blurry copy of P of P came forthwith. I spoke to David only hours before it slipped under my door.

How groovy that sounds, to have bemused Moroccans in your patio. I’d give a lot for a patio. The weather here has been dismal until yesterday and I am still dismal… My best to Mohamed Larbi Scally.

Your news is intriguing: your youngest of 13 and all that. How many spots of sperm did you scatter in that direction? It serves you bi-sexuals right. I made only one bad move in that direction and never took responsibility for this poor Athenian rich boy whom the City took to be mine. Ask his momma. He came to her only lately with a loaded revolver and blew his own heart out instead of hers, silly boy, at the age of 45, it must be. I never laid eyes on him.

I am off to Basel tonight where a gallery is trying to repatriate me with a big show soon. Dreamachines, too, are said to be about to whirl again in Basel. Is it never too late? What a bore it all is.

I signed my first contract in 1968 for a book about the hotel which is just beginning to take shape again after having garnered publishers’ advances and a Menrill [sic] Fellowship, all spent long ago before I left Morocco just in time to have my cancer here in the land of Social Sec. Was it worth it? To be here is better than to not be here, apparently. There are days and months and years that I am not entirely convinced of this but I’m always wrong about everything, so I stick to it.

I really hope you cats can scare up something in the way of gigs over there from October on and hand over the chores to William’s James to take care of. No klunts on the same bill, please.

I’d really like to see you again. It might be very funny. By all means, do send me some seeds of the seedless. It’s like seedless raisins, how do they propagate? A lesson might be learned from them.

Love always
Brion

Notes:

"the blurry copy of P of P": The Poem of Poems, as published in Jason Weiss’ Back In No Time: The Brion Gysin Reader.

"I spoke to David only hours before": Very likely David Wolkowski, art patron and common friend.

"My best to Mohamed Larbi Scally": Former lover of Brion Gysin, a Moroccan native living in California at that time.

"I never laid eyes on him": Rarely mentioned, this is the brief story of the son of Brion Gysin, who Brion never met.

"to repatriate me with a big show soon": Carl Laszlo, at Galerie von Bertha.

"I signed my first contract for a book...": This specific book was published in 1986 as The Last Museum by Grove Press (in the US) and by Faber and Faber (in the UK)

"William's James": James Grauerholz, former secretary to William S. Burroughs and current estate owner.