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Nothing Is True Everything Is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin By John Geiger. The Disinformation Company, 336 pages, $27.95 hardcover Two decades after Brion Gysin's death, the obscure Beat buddy of William Burroughs gets the biography he has long deserved. Gysin, a fellow cosmic traveler whose oeuvre was overshadowed by the likes of Paul and Jane Bowles and Allen Ginsberg, wrote compelling poetry and two challenging novels, but to mixed reviews. He was a visionary multimedia artist, but with few shows and slow sales. He came up with the "cut-up" method of automatic writing, but others made it famous. He conceived the Dream Machine, a flickering-light device that induced altered states of consciousness, but was never able to market it. He even contributed the hash brownie recipe for Alice B. Toklas' infamous cookbook, but Toklas got the credit. Although Gysin is the Beat most people never heard of, Geiger's brisk, thorough biography more than makes the case that he was among the most influential cultural figures of the 20th century - as Geiger notes, the likes of David Bowie, Patti Smith, Michael Stipe, and the late Keith Haring were all inspired in their art by Gysin's life and work.