Getting Inside Simon Morris’ Head
Joe Hale
Edited by Jamie Ley with an introductory essay by Kenneth Goldsmith
Price £8.99+pp
ISBN 978-1-907468-21-6
Year 2014
Edition 500
Pages 324
Binding perfect bound; full colour illustrated cover; text only inside
Getting Inside Simon Morris’ Head is a performative retyping of Simon Morris’ conceptual bookwork
Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head (also published by information as material, 2010, ISBN 978-1-
907468-02-5). Like Morris’ original performance of retyping the scroll edition of Jack Kerouac’s On the
Road, Joe Hale’s project first appeared as a blog. At the rate of one page per day, like Morris retyping
Kerouac before him, Hale retyped Morris’ entire book and in doing so re-retraces Kerouac’s famous
adventure. Morris gave us all of Kerouac’s pages in reverse order: each blog post presented one page
and the default settings of the blog platform organised his posts in reverse order, from the newest to the
oldest. Now inverted again, as a double negative, Hale has restored the direction of travel to the story
and produced a wholly (un)original new text. This first printed edition takes the imitative gesture to a
new extreme. It features an introductory essay by poet Kenneth Goldsmith and reuses Morris’ paratext.
From the cover design to the choice of paper, Hale tests the limits of conceptual extension.
“If the nascent internet gave conceptual writing its database logic, and the browser-based ’90s offered
a model of wholesale appropriation, the relay mode of Web 2.0 – retweeting, reblogging, forwarding,
embedding, etcetera – opens a new horizon. Realizing the potential of the platform that supported its
source, Getting Inside Simon Morris’ Head is conceptual writing for the age of social media.”
– Craig Dworkin, poet and Professor, University of Utah
“Someone retypes a text that already exists in millions of copies, and he retypes it day by day, word for
word, not by simply copying & pasting the ‘original’. This action sounds odd, even anachronistic, like
a throwback to medieval times. But in fact Joe Hale’s act of copying is at the cutting edge of literature
and has unsettling implications: Once, in the medieval ages, the copyist remained anonymous; now he
claims authorship. Once copying was an act of reproduction; now it is nominated as an act of creation.
Once the copies, no matter how textually erratic, were considered to undoubtedly be instantiations of
the pre-existing work; now they are proposed as distinct works, no matter how similar to their source
they might be. The distinguishing qualities of a work of literature no longer depend, necessarily, on ‘the
work’s’ textual distinctiveness. This challenging idea is directly opened out by this book. Consequently,
Hale’s contribution to our understanding of literature is significant .”
– Annette Gilbert, Professor, Freie Universität Berlin
Getting Inside Simon Morris’ Head
- Categories →
- Publications
Portfolio
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13 March 1911
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Def.
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Weaving Language
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Catch-words
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On the Literary Means of Representing the Powerful as Powerless
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Perfect Love
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Last Words
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Reading Matters
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Eulogy for David Antin in English English
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Calvariae Disjecta: The many hauntings of Burton Agnes Hall
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Reading as Art
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Twelve Erroneous Displacements and a Fact
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Cartography for Girls
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Correcciones
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Magritte for Cheerleaders
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(Expanded Second Edition)
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Nothing: A User’s Manual
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Getting Inside Simon Morris’ Head
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Spanish Do or DIY translation
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German Do or DIY translation
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The Nabokov Paper
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I, Sparkie
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Dis Manibus: A Taxonomy of Ghosts from Popular Forms
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Learn to Read Differently
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Of the Subcontract, Or Principles of Poetic Right
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Page 141 2
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Jaap Blonk, Poet-in-Residence at Shandy Hall
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Garry Neill Kennedy, Artist-in-Residence at Shandy Hall
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Freud on Holiday: Appendices III and IV, plus full wrapped set
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Pigeon Reader
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Enchiridion: three manoeuvres by Tim Brennan in NE Scotland
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Do or DIY – exhibition 2
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Do or DIY – pocketbook
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Do or DIY – exhibition 1
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Sucking on Words poetry readings
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The Man Booker Shortlist Quiz!
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Reisen II
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Exercise in Pathetic Criticism
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The Persons
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Freud’s Weather
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Howl #16
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Have a Peck at Perec, tote bag
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Frued’s Dining
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Bibliomancy: Lotsa Fun For All The Family
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The Forgetting of a Proper Name
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Summer School for Literary Perverts
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Poetry Readings in Leeds
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Instruction Manual
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information as material residency
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Re-Writing Freud app
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Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head
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Making Nothing Happen DVD
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The Perverse Library
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The Perverse Library exhibition
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Robert Fitterman & Kim Rosenfield Residency
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Freud and the Gift of Flowers
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Reisen I
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THE IDEOLOGY OF DAVID CAMERON’S PARTY
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Marie-Josée Jean & Klaus Scherübel Residency
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THE DIE IS CAST
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He
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Historico-naturalis et Archaeologica ex Dale Street
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Craig Dworkin Residency
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The Voice and Nothing More: an academic mash up
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Spinning Vol. II: De-Centering the Self
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A Perverse Library
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An Agent of the Estate
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A Disturbance of Memory
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Iam Survey Exhibition
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A One Day Bookshop for Experimental Literature
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Kenneth Goldsmith Residency
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sucking on words DVD
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Historia Abscondita (An Index of Joy)
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L’esprit d’escalier
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We Report Here
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Deciphering Human Chromosone 16: Index to the Report
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Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
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Reading the Remove of Literature
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Thesaurus Scienta Lancastriae
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Freud Dreams of Rome
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Re-Writing Freud
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The Answer to the Question
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Royal Road to the Unconscious
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bibliomania 2000-2001
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Interpretation vol.I
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Interpretation vol. II
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bibliomania 1998-1999