The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll – Sex and Drugs and … Basketball

The Basketball Diaries (1978) by Jim Carroll is one of those interesting little oddities that you stumble on occasionally.
Jim Carroll was a basketball player, a poet, an author, a musician… just an all around talented guy. He was also a heroin addict supporting his habit through theft and prostitution and any other available means. And the thing is, in this diary of his he describes the way he was living his life as a young tough deeply involved in the drug culture of New York. This is not exactly a bildungsroman because it doesn’t focus on the psychological and moral growth of the young protagonist.
At one point Carroll makes an offhand remark about getting things backwards. He was already smoking pot and started using heroin because he thought that was less addictive. That is certainly not something you should get mixed up, but it just goes to show that when it comes to information you should always consider the source.
What strikes me about the whole diary is the unapologetic narrative voice, the complete and total lack of apologetic excuses. Whatever the influences, whatever the choices, there seems to have been no point at which Carroll felt the need to blame society, his mother, his friends. I have to say I like that. As far as accountability goes, Carroll takes his share and seem to be smart enough to know that he has really very little to gain from telling a woeful tale. There’s a lack of sentimentality to all this that makes it interesting. He talks about the other basketball players that have gone astray in similar ways and wound up dead or in prison, but these are just tales of people he knows, people who made their own choices for whatever reasons.
The other thing about this diary that makes it interesting is the literary quality of it. For someone who scans through a lot of text it is obvious that there is real talent here, displayed at a very young age. I’ve read diaries before, some written by authors as a kind of autobiographical reconstruction of their private history and there is always pretense, a sense that much has been revised and edited, or at least cleaned up for consumption. The diary becomes a device that way, a vehicle for the author, something to perpetuate the image they want to project, constructing a persona. Of course there is no such as objective truth in a diary, either, though it is a popular conceit.
The second an author decides to let others into what should theoretically be private musings and starts thinking of a potential audience the basic premise for the text written alters. It may be self-censorship, it may be fear, but it is still a subtle tweaking of the text that can go either way. Carroll manages to sound sincere and doesn’t try to make himself look better than he is. He tells stories of theft and drug dealing, prostitution and deception as ways and means. He talks about how he and other players rob the locker rooms of the basketball teams they play and – amazingly – he writes about playing, and winning, while high on every drug known to man. That part really confounds me. We’re not talking performance enhancing drugs here, but all sorts. And they still manage to win.
It is actually even more interesting to read something like this in this day of blogging. There’s a an awful lot of private musings spread publicly these days and not a lot of it considers that you should try to entertain, if nothing else.
Carroll is interesting, entertaining and deceptively charming in all his callous revelry. That does not mean you would have wanted to live next to the guy, or that he is in any way a model citizen. The Basketball Diaries is also a document of sorts, of a specific time and a specific place, and as such it is well worth reading.

Mule

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (2008) written by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs was actually written in 1945 before the authors even became famous as Beat Generation writers.
The novel is a dramatization of the events in 1944 when Lucien Carr stabbed David Kammerer twice in the heart with his boy scout knife. The murder is fictionalized and all the characters are given aliases, but at its core that’s what this somewhat peculiarly named novel is about.
The narrative voices alternate chapter by chapter between Will Dennison (Burroughs) and Mike Ryko (Kerouac). The style is mostly descriptive, and it keeps a certain distance to the persons and events in a classic hard-boiled tradition. It is interesting to see that the oddities in both authors individual styles are not all the way developed yet, but the embryos are there.
The two voices dovetail nicely, which means they also describe each other and give variations on the same events from two distinctly different perspectives. Other than that there’s plenty of the Beat Generation staples, drugs and alcohol and promiscuity (sometimes with a twist) and literature, talk of literature, art and philosophy. There’s also the distinct feeling that these young bucks were travelling in packs, moving in a little society their own. Money is always tight and nobody seems to have any kind of stable income.
The complicated relationship between Phillip Tourian and Ramsay Allen is given a lot of play. Tourian (Carr’s alter ego) is described by Dennison like this:
“This Phillip is the kind of boy literary fags write sonnets to, which start out, ‘O raven-haired Grecian lad…’“(p. 3) whereas Allen “is an impressive-looking gray-haired man of forty or so, tall and a little flabby. He looks like a down-at-the-heels actor, or someone who used to be somebody.” (p.3).
The thing is that Tourian is still a young man in his later teens when this takes place, and Allen was his teacher at some point. There’s a weird echo of Rimbaud and Verlaine about them, literary pursuits aside. Tourian is aware of Allen’s attraction and in this narrative he doesn’t return any of Allen’s affections, though in real life they probably had a slightly less PG 13 interaction. Tourian plans on leaving the city and Allen’s increasingly stifling attentions by taking hire on a ship headed for France along with Mike Ryko, who has worked on a ship before.
If you know a little about the Beat Generation you will have come across this story before. It influenced everyone connected to it. Burroughs is rumoured to have drifted into morphine addiction because of it, and Lucien Carr himself did his time (two years for first-degree manslaughter) and then went on to have a successful career as an editor for UPI. Carr was also instrumental in introducing Allen Ginsberg to Burroughs and Kammerer, so he was a force at the nexus of the Beats.
This novel, apart from being an interesting read with a lot of sex, drugs and rock’n'roll, or poetry as the case might be, is also one of those hard-boiled murder stories that get undermined by the fact that there is some kind of reality at the base of it. The bohemian lifestyle of the protagonists in World War II New York is depicted with a surprising lack of sentimentality.
It took sixty years between the writing and the publishing of this novel and that means that in the meanwhile the Beats became famous, infamous and some even posthumous. The modern reader comes to this story knowing them and knowing about their literary production. That adds another layer to this, creating a kind of liquid modernity drop-off point where you can’t help asking what is real in any of this. At the end of the day we have Carr’s description of what happened, the way it was presented at court and then the literary variations of the same event. It’s fascinating for more reasons than just the sensationalism of the murder itself or as a curio involving two writers who were on the verge of becoming seminal voices of their generation.

Every Last Drop – Charlie Huston and Joe Pitt

Every Last Drop (2008) by Charlie Huston is the fourth book  in the Joe Pitt series.

I’ve reviewed a few of Huston’s books before and I stand by what I’ve said before. This is Marlowe-Noir with vampires and ghouls set in an extremely territorialized New York.

At the start of the novel Joe Pitt is living, uh, un-living… eh, residing in the outskirts having been ostracised for basically pissing off the leaders of all the different clans in the city. So, he’s on the fringe of the outskirts here and that’s generally not a good place to find yourself.

This is one of the things I like about this series. Actions have consequences. Joe Pitt meddled with some very important and powerful people and now he is paying the prize. This goes for his physical state as well.

You have to think about the plot devices for this kind of narrative differently than you would a regular detective story. What does someone who has seen more than a hundred years want? What matters? How do you react to things you’ve seen a thousand times? Where do you expend your energy? A lot of vampire stories fail at that because you are either coming in to the story in the beginning or near the very end.

Huston’s stories take place in the middle of a longer narrative scope. This guy, this Joe Pitt, he’s been around for a while. His aim is to stick around for a while longer. So – again – what do you want when you’ve been hanging around for a longer than average lifetime? Well, it turns out it’s the same old story, in some ways at least. There’s a girl.

Now, that’s pretty formulaic and trite, you might say to yourself. Of course there’s a girl. There’s always a girl. But … it’s not like that. Not at all. And that’s what I like.

The main players are the same as in the previous stories, there’s Terry Bird of The Society in his John Lennon glasses, there’s Dexter Predo of The Coalition with his sharp suits and lack of a moral compass. There’s also Skag Baron Menace, a new acquaintance from Queens. In the previous novels there’s been interaction between all the main players, all of which is remembered and referenced here, like real live relationships.

Past hurts are not forgotten, and neither are the favours that have been done and the weight of some of the conversations seems to come from all this history. I like that. I like the idea that there’s a point where all history just becomes more weighted for all the years amassed there and that’s hard to get across, considering how little that experience can really be understood.

Huston deals with it by cutting back Joe’s inner monologue and outer dialogue to the bare bones, as you would assume someone could do with all that experience. It’s actually really tricky. It makes his books a blisteringly sharp read in some ways and you have to pay attention. I like Joe’s voice, the terseness of it. Here’s an example:

“There comes a time when you think there are no new territories of pain. After a certain number of stabbings, shootings, clubbings, whippings, beatings, thrashings, cuttings, slashings and eviscerations, you begin to assume that you’ve had the worst of it and nothing of that nature can really surprise you very much.
And then someone comes along to show you that you were wrong.” (Huston, p. 44).

That is what Joe says about having someone take his eye out – with their teeth.

Also, the horror in this one stems from vampires being basically human, in all the worst ways. It’s a cynics view of the world, someone in it for the even longer haul. It’s dark and gritty and funny and sharp. And it’s a lot less cheesy than most of it’s brethren in the genre. If you like that sort of thing, this is the vampire story for you.

Mule.

Palahniuk “Stranger than Fiction: True Stories”

Chuck Palahniuk’s Stranger than Fiction: True Stories (Non-Fiction) from 2004 is a collection of short articles and non fiction essay-type things with titles like “Where Meat Comes From”, “My Life as a Dog”, “Confessions in Stone”, “In Her Own Words” and “The Lip Enhancer”.

I’m a fan.

That probably skews my perspective somewhat, but hey, at least I am honest about it.

In general, and on principal, I find that most authors, actors, sculptors and musicians should stay well clear of trying to talk about themselves and their works. Ninety-nine percent of them should just stick to doing what they do well, which is to say write fiction, play music and sculpt, doing what they do best so that the reader, viewer, listener doesn’t have to be subjected to the invariably pompous and self-centred prattle that is only of interest to sycophants and those that can’t escape, i.e. friends and family.

Sometimes, though, you actually get an author, sculptor or musician that understands that if you are going to talk in front of the whole class you should make sure that you have something to say that is of interest to the audience as a whole. Palahniuk is one of them.

It probably has something to do with this understanding of what the written word is for, and what it does. Palahniuk tells stories even when he tries to be non fictional. He talks of his inspiration for Fight Club. He talks about his own personal and individual tragedies, the violence that seems to have followed his family around. He talks about shaving his head and not following the instructions on his hair removal crème.

And all this is interesting and riveting and funny and tragic and comical and not the least bit self-serving or pompous.

It’s not confessional literature, either, even though there’s a piece about using steroids and another about Palahniuk and a friend renting costumes (he’s in a spotted, smiling Dalmatian costume) and just walking around seeing what kind of reactions they get. Palahniuk talks about writing too, and about what kinds of reactions he’s gotten over Fight Club and everything that entails.

There are also interviews with Marilyn Manson, Juliette Lewis and The Rocket Guy, as well as an open letter to Ira Levin and a sort of review of Amy Hempel’s “The Harvest” as a minimalist masterpiece.

All these things, all these observations and highly personal information are given in the prose style that makes me a fan, so of course I am going to enjoy it, even if it still gives you those drop off points that make it feel like the cable just snapped in the elevator you’re riding. You know what I mean, that sudden drop in your stomach. It feels personal, even when it’s not. And it takes your thinking in different directions than you expect when you start a new essay, so that even if you’re reading about Marilyn Manson you will wind up thinking about the Columbine massacre.

At one point Palahniuk says:

“That’s why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. And writing makes you look back. Because since you can’t control life, at least you can control your version.” (p. 205).

I think there are plenty of more reasons given within this text, and that’s just one of them. To me there’s a difference between writing because you have the need, being a manqué soul like that, and writing because you’ve fallen in love with the idea of being an Author (capitol A and arrogant accent to it, too).

This is funny, tragic and thought provoking and a lot of other things besides. You get glimpses of a lot of interesting individual lives, like the guys that build castles in America, or the people that celebrate the Rock Creek Lodge Testicle Festival. It’s part freak show, part life being stranger than fiction, and that’s pretty much where I live anyway.

What can I say? Chuck’s my man.

Mule