ON THE ROAD
I first met Neal not long after my father died…I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about except that it really had something to do with my father’s death and my awful feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Neal there really began for me that part of my life that you could call my life on the road. Prior to that I’d always dreamed of going west, seeing the country, always vaguely planning and never specifically taking off and so on. Neal is the perfect guy for the road because he actually was born on the road, when his parents were passing through Salt Lake City in 1926, in a jaloppy, on their way to Los Angeles. First reports of Neal came to me through Hal Chase, who’d shown me a few letters from him written in a Colorado reform school. I was tremendously interested in these letters because they so naively and sweetly asked for Hal to teach him all about Nietzsche and all the wonderful intellectual things that Hal was so justly famous for. At one point Allen Ginsberg and I talked about these letters and wondered if we would ever meet the strange Neal Cassady. This is all far back, when Neal was not the way he is today, when he was a young jailkid shrouded in mystery. Then news came that Neal was out of reform school and was coming to New York for the first time; also there was talk that he had just married a 16 year old girl called Louanne. One day that I was hanging around the Columbia campus and Hal and Ed White told me Neal had just arrived and was living in a guy called Bob Malkin’s coldwater pad in East Harlem, the Spanish Harlem. Neal had arrived the night before, the first time in NY, with his beautiful little sharp chick Louanne; they got off the greyhound bus at 50 St. and cut around the corner looking for a place to eat and went right in Hector’s, and since then Hector’s cafeteria has always been a big symbol of NY for Neal. They spent money on beautiful big glazed cakes and creampuffs. All this time Neal was telling Louanne things like this, “Now darling here we are in Ny and although I haven’t quite told you everything that I was thinking about when we crossed Missouri and especially at the point when we passed the Bonneville reformatory which reminded me of my jail problem it is absolutely necessary now to postpone all
About Me
- information as material
- Simon Morris is a conceptual writer. His work appears in the form of exhibitions, publications, installations, actions and texts which all revolve around the form of the book. His investigations involve working in collaboration with many other people from art, creative technology, literature and psychoanalysis. His role as an artist is to create a theoretical space that others feel comfortable working in and to erase his own ego in order to stimulate desire in others. He works to create a space of transference where linking and connecting can take place, a shared space of encounter. Morris proposes a collaborative model as the most productive way of working. His work is often inspired by the work of others – his engagement is poetic rather than logical. It may involve a purposeful misreading of the source material or even re-writing. The methodologies he utilises include destruction, rupture, erasure, nonsense, concealment and the irrational which allow him to create a fluid space of non-meaning. By working with non-meaning, the spectator is put to work in the construction of meaning.
3 comments:
I had a sister Louanne, exact spelling too, who was hit by a car and killed when she was 6 and I 12. She'd be 38 now. Strange.
Now... I'm going to take this Kerouac ride with you from beginnning to end because it's an adequately weird idea. This beginning hits me like "everybody's got this broken feeling, like their father or their dog just died..."
Jannie Sue,
I’m very sorry to hear of your personal loss.
< I'm going to take this Kerouac ride with you from beginnning to end>
Sure hop on, ’s’room for everybody.
Re-typing one page a day and really chewing on Kerouac’s words is the most thrilling read/ride of my life.
A sunny smile from large white cornfed teeth...
Simon
ON THE ROAD
I first met Neal not long after my father died...I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about except that it really had something to do with my father's death and my awful feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Neal there really began for me that part of my life that you could call my life on the road. Prior to that I'd always dreamed of going west, seeing the country, always vaguely planning and never specifically taking off and so on. Neal is the perfect guy for the road because he actually was born on the road, when his parents were passing through Salt Lake City in 1926, in a jaloppy, on their way to Los Angeles. First reports of Neal came to me through Hal Chase, who'd shown me a few letters from him written in Colorado reform school. I was tremendously interested in these letters because they so naively and sweetly asked for Hal to teach him all about Nietzsce and all the wonderful intellectual things that Hal was so justly famous for. At one point Allen Ginsberg and I talked about these letters and wondered if we would ever meet the strange Neal Cassady. This is all far back, when Neal was not the way he is today, when he was a young jailkid shrouded in mystery. Then news came that Neal was out of reform school and was coming to New York for the first time; also there was talk that he had just married a 16 year old called Louanne. One day that I was hanging around the Columbia campus and Hal and Ed White told me Neal had just arrived the night before, the first time in NY, with his beautiful little sharp chick Louanne; they got off the greyhound bus at 50 St. and cut around the corner looking for a place to eat and went right in Hector's, and since then Hector's cafeteria had always been a big symbol of NY for Neal.They spent money on beautiful big glazed cakes and creampuffs. All this time Neal was telling Louanne things like this, "Now darling here we are in Ny and although I haven't quite told you everything that I was thinking about when we crossed Missouri and especially at the point when we passed the Bonneville reformatory which reminded me of my jail problem it is absolutely necessary now to postpone all
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