In October 1959, Brion Gysin pressed a Stanley blade through mount board in his room at the Beat Hotel in Paris. Layers of old newspaper lined the table beneath his work, shielding the wood from the blade. The blade cut too deep. It sliced through the mount board, through the newspaper, and left behind fragments of sentences that fell together in arrangements no writer had ever composed.
Gysin picked up the fragments. Rearranged them. Read what emerged.
William Burroughs walked into the room, saw the scattered strips, and within weeks both men were deliberately cutting newspapers apart and reassembling them. They published their findings in Minutes to Go the following year. The cut-up technique went on to shape David Bowie’s songwriting from 1974 onward, Kurt Cobain’s lyrics for Nirvana, Thom Yorke’s approach to Radiohead’s Kid A. Burroughs built some of the most significant experimental literature of the twentieth century from a method born of protecting furniture.
