interview with Carolyn Cassady

"Undecided" <woesong.RemoveThis@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:er7cgb0td9@enews5.newsguy.com...
>
> If you find anything more vulgar than Neal Cassady's
> own letters, I'll bet it wouldn't be in the Santa Cruz press of the
> sixties, under- or overground. In fact, Mrs Cassady
> attempted to edit those very letters in her quotes for the
> manuscript she had been working on for some time when
> I saw it in 1972. I would see a pithy expression in one of
> the letters she had copies of from the University of Texas,
> and then see how it was sanitized for her book.

That's not my experience. In compiling the volume of Neal's letters -- "Neal
Cassady: Collected Letters, 1944-1967" (Penguin, 2004) -- Carolyn Cassady
gave me complete freedom to publish all of his extant letters intact. The
only edit she requested -- and which I gladly agreed to -- was just one
sentence in one letter, and that to protect the feelings of a friend of
hers.


Dave Moore
 >> Stay informed about: interview with Carolyn Cassady 

Dave Moore wrote:

> That's not my experience. In compiling the volume of Neal's letters -- "Neal
> Cassady: Collected Letters, 1944-1967" (Penguin, 2004) -- Carolyn Cassady
> gave me complete freedom to publish all of his extant letters intact. The
> only edit she requested -- and which I gladly agreed to -- was just one
> sentence in one letter, and that to protect the feelings of a friend of
> hers.

In 1972, I think, the scholarship was not so far advanced as was later
the case. The very first Kerouac biog by Charters only came out the next
year. So, while Mrs Cassady was writing her own book, her references
were in a box of photocopies of mail to and fro all the icons and the
bit players and sent to her by the University of Texas or Texas A&M, I
forget which.

She was fastidious about her own book, so she cleaned up the quoted bits
in the Neal letters a bit. I sat down in September '72 and read through
the manuscript and the letters, page by page. I only remember one
censoring edit, but suspected it happened more than once. She had no
reason at that time to expect there would be a widespread interest in
the Beats sufficient for someone to bother comparing her quotes with the
original. Obviously that was not the case in 2004.

I'm not accusing her of doing something I wouldn't do. Had I access to
the works of a dear departed and were I assured the references were more
or less obscure, would I alter the text for style points? You bet. In
fact, I've done so plenty of times in the case of remembered conversations.

I'm going to look up that volume of Neal's letters, thanks.

--
Doubting Timus
Ubi Dubium Ibi Libertas
http://tremonius.blogspot.com/
 >> Stay informed about: interview with Carolyn Cassady 

On Feb 20, 12:12 am, Undecided <woes... RemoveThis @yahoo.com> wrote:

I have a lot of respect for Carolyn Cassady and I loved "Off the
Road", but she says so many times, this interview included, how
miserable Neal was, and repeats the 1 time that she picked him up at
that farm and how horrible he was feeling. Of course, a few days
later, Neal was back with the Pranksters.

In this interview she is putting down "Spit in the Ocean", 1 of the
beat tributes to Neal ever!

Of course, Carolyn has her opinion, but does that make the opinions
of
Babbs, Kesey, Anne Murphy, Garcia, etc totally invalid? Neal was with
them the last 5 years of his life more then he was with Carolyn.

The articles by Leon Tagori (sic?) who knew both Cassady's gives a
unique viewpoint on the subject.



> Dave Moore wrote:
> > That's not my experience. In compiling the volume of Neal's letters -- "Neal
> > Cassady: Collected Letters, 1944-1967" (Penguin, 2004) -- Carolyn Cassady
> > gave me complete freedom to publish all of his extant letters intact. The
> > only edit she requested -- and which I gladly agreed to -- was just one
> > sentence in one letter, and that to protect the feelings of a friend of
> > hers.
>
> In 1972, I think, the scholarship was not so far advanced as was later
> the case. The very first Kerouac biog by Charters only came out the next
> year. So, while Mrs Cassady was writing her own book, her references
> were in a box of photocopies of mail to and fro all the icons and the
> bit players and sent to her by the University of Texas or Texas A&M, I
> forget which.
>
> She was fastidious about her own book, so she cleaned up the quoted bits
> in the Neal letters a bit. I sat down in September '72 and read through
> the manuscript and the letters, page by page. I only remember one
> censoring edit, but suspected it happened more than once. She had no
> reason at that time to expect there would be a widespread interest in
> the Beats sufficient for someone to bother comparing her quotes with t




original. Obviously that was not the case in 2004.
>
> I'm not accusing her of doing something I wouldn't do. Had I access to
> the works of a dear departed and were I assured the references were more
> or less obscure, would I alter the text for style points? You bet. In
> fact, I've done so plenty of times in the case of remembered conversations.
>
> I'm going to look up that volume of Neal's letters, thanks.
>
> --
> Doubting Timus
> Ubi Dubium Ibi Libertashttp://tremonius.blogspot.com/
 >> Stay informed about: interview with Carolyn Cassady 

MP50.TakeThisOut@angelfire.com wrote:

> I have a lot of respect for Carolyn Cassady and I loved "Off the
> Road", but she says so many times, this interview included, how
> miserable Neal was, and repeats the 1 time that she picked him up at
> that farm and how horrible he was feeling. Of course, a few days
> later, Neal was back with the Pranksters.

Hey, little Brittany newly bald is daily bouncing like a rubber ball
between rehab and drugs, so I'm not sure returning to one or the other
is an endorsement of either.

Neal Cassady was, in my own amateur opinion, a text-book if very
interesting and amusing case of bipolar disorder. How else to explain
his huddling in his car with a loaded pistol contemplating blowing his
brains out one day, and then on another drawing out all the family
savings, leaving Carolyn and the kiddies for another frenetic jaunt
across the land seeking personal kicks?

The adulation of Cassady reminds me of the audience which developed for
Howard Beale in Network. Here too you have a mental case who
contemplates suicide yet finds an audience and becomes a celebrity. He
had everyone behaving as irrationally as himself; throwing open windows
to scream in the night they weren't going to take it anymore, and none
of them stopping to analyze just what they were so mad about.

I know what I was so mad about. I'm living right now two thousand miles
from the small town in Texas where I first read On the Road, and I'm
here more or less as a direct result of that reading, plus Carolyn
Cassady responding to my own letters that summer of '72.



--
Doubting Timus
Ubi Dubium Ibi Libertas
http://tremonius.blogspot.com/
 >> Stay informed about: interview with Carolyn Cassady 

On Feb 22, 12:37 pm, Undecided <woes....DeleteThis@yahoo.com> wrote:
> M....DeleteThis@angelfire.com wrote:
> > I have a lot of respect for Carolyn Cassady and I loved "Off the
> > Road", but she says so many times, this interview included, how
> > miserable Neal was, and repeats the 1 time that she picked him up at
> > that farm and how horrible he was feeling. Of course, a few days
> > later, Neal was back with the Pranksters.
>
> Hey, little Brittany newly bald is daily bouncing like a rubber ball
> between rehab and drugs, so I'm not sure returning to one or the other
> is an endorsement of either.
>
> Neal Cassady was, in my own amateur opinion, a text-book if very
> interesting and amusing case of bipolar disorder. How else to explain
> his huddling in his car with a loaded pistol contemplating blowing his
> brains out one day, and then on another drawing out all the family
> savings, leaving Carolyn and the kiddies for another frenetic jaunt
> across the land seeking personal kicks?
>
> The adulation of Cassady reminds me of the audience which developed for
> Howard Beale in Network. Here too you have a mental case who
> contemplates suicide yet finds an audience and becomes a celebrity. He
> had everyone behaving as irrationally as himself; throwing open windows
> to scream in the night they weren't going to take it anymore, and none
> of them stopping to analyze just what they were so mad about.
>
> I know what I was so mad about. I'm living right now two thousand miles
> from the small town in Texas where I first read On the Road, and I'm
> here more or less as a direct result of that reading, plus Carolyn
> Cassady responding to my own letters that summer of '72.
>
> --
> Doubting Timus
> Ubi Dubium Ibi Libertashttp://tremonius.blogspot.com/

Undecided,

Do you mean that if someone is diagnosed with biopolar disorder then
automatically they don't have attributes that would make people admire
them?
 >> Stay informed about: interview with Carolyn Cassady 

MP50 DeleteThis @angelfire.com wrote:

> Undecided,
>
> Do you mean that if someone is diagnosed with biopolar disorder then
> automatically they don't have attributes that would make people admire
> them?

Oh, hey, not a bit of it! Shoot, when I was fourteen, the year On the
Road came out, I was elated. Freedom, boy, that's what it's all about,
it says all that brooding burden of worklife drudge was unnecessary! We
could blow it all away and remain forever young, like Peter Pan.

Then came Dharma Bums, and here's K, hitching a ride with a sorrowful
trucker, who compares his own sad chain to the get-spend cycle to the
wild and free road, says, "Who's smart, you or me?"

Boy, we knew the answer to that one. If you are exuberant, burning like
a roman candle, never yawn nor utter commonplaces, you don't have to
stop and think -

Kerouac in the truck was going home to memere; he never actually left
home without her. He was only able to travel down that road due to and
as a direct consequence of the kindness of the trucker, who was making
available to him free of charge the investment in capital of his
employer, who was paying the freight. Every step On the Road was paid
for by a willing stranger, and somebody had to foot the bill.

Man, oh, man, what kicks. Here's Dean, on the way late in the Road back
across the country. He's three times married, twice divorced, and going
back to live with his second wife, where he has three kids brewing, and
he's left one on the way with #3. It helps not to concentrate on them as
was left Off the Road.

And funny! Like W C Fields with his balloon thumb. Hip, cool, beat, and
frantic, as the cover copy says. How'd he hurt that thumb anyway?

But that man could talk! Carry on seven conversations, lasting for days,
and make everybody feel like they were the most important audience on
the planet. You think that ain't admirable?





--
Doubting Timus
Ubi Dubium Ibi Libertas
http://tremonius.blogspot.com/
 >> Stay informed about: interview with Carolyn Cassady