Cheetah and Chimp:
The Basketball Diaries as Minor Literature

By Cassie Carter Kuennen
San Diego State University, 28 March 1989

The more I read
the more I know it now, heavier each day, that I need
to write. I think of poetry and how I see it as just
a raw block of stone ready to be shaped, that way words
are never a horrible limit to me, just tools to shape.
I just get the images from the upstairs vault (it all
comes in images) and fling ’em around like bricks, sometimes
clean and smooth and then sloppy and ready to fall on
top of you later. Like this house where I got to sometimes
tear out a room and make it another size or shape so
the rest make sense . . . or no sense at all. And when
I’m done I’m stoned as on whatever you got in your pockets
right now, dig?
— Jim Carroll,
The Basketball Diaries (159)

Writing has a
double function: to translate everything into assemblages
and to dismantle the assemblages. The two are the same
thing.
— Deleuze & Guatari, Kafka (47)

While I was reading
Jim Carroll’s The Basketball Diaries for the first time,
I discovered that Carroll was scheduled to read from his work
at SDSU’s Backdoor. On the day of the show I arrived at the
Backdoor four hours early (I wanted a front-row seat) and occupied
myself during the wait with The Basketball Diaries. Completely
wrapped up in the book, I was only vaguely aware of voices nearby,
until an eerie feeling began creeping up my spine. The voices–or
one of them–somehow snuck into the text of my book. When
I couldn’t stand the strangeness any longer, I turned around
. . . and Jim Carroll himself was sitting right behind me. It
was quite a shock: I had paid to see an author stand on a stage
and read his work–you know, words on a page–and was excited
about that. But, instead, I saw a character step out
of the pages of the book I was reading. There he was, sitting
in a wire-mesh chair not more than three feet away from me,
suddenly transformed not just into a real, flesh-and-blood person,
but also the person who is the author of the character who was
sitting in that wire mesh chair.

Jim Carroll’s “character”
in The Basketball Diaries is something more than a character.
(How can I express this without trivializing the effect of my
encounter?) He is a young man “becoming more than his . . .
nominal self” (Kafka xxiii), essentially creating himself–through
writing. Jim Carroll is more than a star basketball player,
delinquent teenager, heroin addict, romantic diary-writer, lover,
poet, rock star, or a pale, thin, red-haired man sitting in
a wire-mesh chair. And Jim Carroll the writer isn’t just a guy
with a pen and some time to kill; as a writer he is working
to break down his own barriers, and those of the art world and
society, by exceeding himself through writing, by straddling
the line between the “serious” art of poetry and the “popular”
arena of rock music, by marginalizing himself to the fringes
of “respectable” society.

Because Carroll has
crossed the line between poet and rock lyricist, he blurs the
distinction between popular artist and “serious” writer; because
he can be at the same time a star basketball player, heroin
addict, and award-winning author, Carroll is both above established
norms of society and beneath them. He is within both major and
minor cultures, but also outside of them; he is somewhere in
between, on the border of each, caught in the middle, floating
above or wallowing below.

In Deleuze and Guattari’s
terms, Jim Carroll is the makings of a minor literature.
(But I think Carroll’s marginality–deterritorialization–is
something beyond that of Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka, and beyond
border writing.) Carroll actually lives on the
edge, constructing his “minor literature” from (and along with)
his life.

The 13 year old Carroll
in The Basketball Diaries seems to be recording his adventures
during time-outs; because of this, as Jamie James says,

The Basketball
Diaries . . . is a literary miracle; a description
of an artistic sensibility written by the artist, not
in retrospect, but in the process. It is a portrait
of the artist not just as a young man but as a child,
written by the child, and thus free of the mature artist’s
complicated romantic love of himself in pain.

Carroll’s writing “begins
by expressing itself and doesn’t conceptualize until afterward”
(Kafka 28). Just the fact that Carroll wrote diaries
supports Deleuze a Guattari’s belief that writing is not “a
solution to the interiorized problems of an individual psychology”
because in his diaries Carroll exposes himself on paper and
makes his life public and, because he is essentially creating
himself in a character named Jim Carroll, his act of writing

stands against
psychology, against interiority, by giving [Carroll] a
possiblity of becoming more than his . . nominal self,
of trading the insistent solidity of the family tree
for the whole field of desire and history. The romance
of individual life is exceeded, deterritorialized escaped.
(Kafka xxiii)

Still, if I may borrow
Deleuze and Guattari’s opening question in Kafka, how
can we enter into Carroll’s work? One can’t sit around “interpreting”
a person’s autobiography without trivializing life itself. And
one can’t toss The Basketball Diaries in a pile with
all the other autobiographies floating around. Carroll’s work
is different. It is a rhizome . . . but what is a rhizome
or burrow? What are territories, lines of escape, machines,
assemblages? What do Deleuze and Guattari’s terms have to do
with Jim Carroll?

Let’s say that Carroll’s
rhizome is New York. His territory is New York, his lines of
escape are New York, his machines and assemblages are New York,
his Diaries are New York, Jim Carroll is New York:

Now I got these
diaries that have the greatest hero a writer needs,
this crazy fucking New York. Soon I’m gonna wake a lot
of dudes off their asses and let them know what’s really
going down in the blind alley out there in the pretty
streets with double garages. I got a tap on all your
wires, folks. I’m just really a wise ass kid getting
wiser, and I’m going to get even for your dumb hatreds
and all them war baby dreams you left in my scarred
bed with dreams of bombs falling above that cliff I’m
hanging steady to. Maybe someday just an eight-page
book, that’s all, and each time a page gets turned a
section of the Pentagon goes blast up in smoke. Solid.
(BBD 159-60)

And if Jim Carroll and
his diaries are New York, then Jim Carroll and his diaries are
also machines and assemblages, lines of escape, territories:

A writer isn’t
a writer-man; he is a machine-man, and an experimental
man (who thereby ceases to be a man in order to become
an ape or a beetle, or a dog, or a mouse, [or a heroin
addict, or a hustler,] or a becoming-inhuman, since
it is actually through voice and through sound and through
a style that one becomes an animal, and certainly through
the force of sobriety). (Kafka 7)

One diary entry written
by a 15 year old boy links “New York,” the diary, the diary-writer,
the rhizome, territory, line of escape, machine, assemblage,
becoming-inhuman: the whole of Deleuze and Guattari’s model.
We can say that the Diaries are constructed by a minority
within a majority: Carroll is an adolescent (not your average
author), a heroin addict (not the majority in American culture–especially
today when everyone is expected to “Just Say No”), and one might
say his language is that of a minority (fucking this, fucking
that; the lingo of the drug culture). Also, Carroll and his
diaries are “affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization”:
although he identifies with New York, and is using it as an
extension of himself (as a weapon) and as a paradigm of “America”
(Carroll being both a “New Yorker” and an “American”), it is
also something “other”–he is using New York as a weapon against
the Pentagon, against society, against itself. And everything
in Diaries is political: one does innocently not aim
an eight page book at the Pentagon (Kafka 16-17).

The “politics” in
Carroll’s case have to do with “baring it all.” He’s going to
show all us “dudes” what’s really going down in our “respectable
society.” As Perry says, “Carroll . . . tells a mean story both
of a young punk searching for a pure high, and of a young man
searching for a pure reality” (Perry E6). That “purity” Carroll
searches for, I think, is his lost territory–the territory
that was lost even before we meet young Jim on page one, the
territory a corrupt society stole from him. “Purity” might be
his “innocence,” as he calls it–but I don’t think Carroll really
knows what that innocence is. Perhaps he never had it. The territory
might be New York, which Carroll names as the hero of his book,
that he is simultaneously part of but separate from. It might
be freedom fom drugs–but then drugs are also a line of escape.
It might be his writing . . . Or it might be the act of deterritorialization
itself, where “I guess deep down I think they have the right
to boss me around. I’ve got to break loose” (BBD 26). But in
any case, Carroll’s individual concern–with writing, drugs,
purity–is idespensible, magnified, and political, “because
a whole other story is vibrating within it” (Kafka 17).
Carroll shows, through his own corruption (the fact that he
can’t find purity), the dirty underbelly of society.
In other words,

what in great
literature goes on down below, constituting a not indespensable
cellar of the structure, here [in The Basketball_Diaries] takes place in the full light of day, what is there
a matter of passing interest for a few, here absorbs
everyone no less than a matter of life and death. (Kafka
17)

Carroll’s relationships,
trials, pleasures, pain, connect with the concerns of the entire
society, from the family to government to religion to sex. What
he says “already constitutes a common action” and “is political,
even if others aren’t in agreement” (Kafka 17):

When they dropped
them A-bombs on Japsville I wasn’t even an idea, but
I paid for it anyhow all through growing up and I’m
still paying. The “war baby” gig ain’t no smartass headshrinker’s
dumb theory, and all the people who grew up when I did
can tell you that . . . . The worst is the old buggers
can’t believe it’s real, that it could ever happen to
us. Now there’s a big peace move growing in this country
and my old man and the rest are calling me a creep and
saying it’s all some commie who brainwashed us all,
it’s them fucking commies, that’s all. Shit I don’t
give a royal screw what a commie is. It’s just the dreams
we remember that make us want to end your nuclear games.
I think more about a fire truck passing late at night
than I do about Karl Marx when I’m out yelling for them
to fuck your wars, I don’t pay no dues to no commies,
that’s some dream you dreamed up to take the rap for
you. The Russians a re drags too, you’re all old men
drags, scheming governments of death and blinding white
hair. (BBD 127)

Even describing a
simple jump in the Harlem river, Carroll’s story takes on the
quality of a “collective assemblage of enunciation” (Kafka
17); an amusing anecdote envelopes concerns an entire population
is afraid to express:

Every crowd of
young guys has its little games to prove if you’re punk
or not . . . . Here in upper Manhattan, guys jump off
cliffs into the Harlem River, where the water is literally
shitty because right nearby are the giant sewer deposits
where about half a million toilets empty their goods
daily. You had to time each jump, in fact, with the
“shit lines” as they flowed by. That is, there were
these lines of water crammed with shit along the surface
about five feet long that would come by once every forty
seconds. So you had to time your jump in between the
lines just like those jitterbugs down in Acapulco got
to time their jumps so they hit the water just as the
wave is beginning to break. (BBD 47)

This comes up again later
in a larger context (regarding Carroll’s drug addiction) in
an encounter with a therapist:

Like just what
is guilty of who is guilty for fuck sake? Big business
dudes make billions come out of their ass and they ain’t
shelling out a reefer’s worth of tax. Kids walk throiugh
some jungle I don’t know how far away and shoot people,
and white haired old men in smoking jacket armchairs
make laws to keep it all going smoothly. I swim in the
river and have to duck huge amounts of shit and grease
and “newly discovered miracle fibers” every five feet
because these smokestack companies don’t give a flying
fuck . . . Shit my man, it’s so all there
that no one’s seeing it anymore. And it’s dumb ass of
me to bring it up even now because it’s all so much
bull-pap corn and I cut out of that a long time ago,
so maybe that’s why I don’t feel too guilty right now
. . . come back later, prof. (BBD 199)

Throughout The
Basketball Diaries, Carroll becomes more and more aware
of the corruption surrounding him. Even in the first entry,
he makes the biddy league basketball team (12 years and under)
by means of a fake birth certificate his coach procured for
him (also, Carroll suspects the coach is homosexual). Thus Carroll’s
search for purity is also his desire to “be” something, to do
something, almost in spite of the world around him; it is an
urgency pushing him to get the system before it gets him, a
desire that is part of and is always blocked by the “machine”
he is trapped inside of, as in Deleuze and Guattari’s notion
that:

the machine is
desire–but not because desire is desire of the machine
but because desire never stops making a machine in the
machine and creates a new gear alongside the preceding
gear, indefinately, even if the gears seem to be in
opposition or seem to be functioning in a discordant
fashion. That which makes a machine, to be precise,
are connections, all the connections that operate the
disassembly. (Kafka 82)

With Carroll,

anything that
was worth looking ahead to, well, that’s when it always
seemed the sirens were gonna start the death chant.
But it’s not all just something that’s past and solved.
Not at all. It’s just that I can see it a little clearer
now, that fear is their tool . . . and it works very
well . . and they use it very well. And I am still using
it to measure my time, only I don’t give a screw about
trips to camp anymore, or basketball games two weeks
from now. It’s just gotten bigger now . . . will I have
time to finish the poems breaking loose in my head?
Time to find out if I’m the writer I know I can be?
How about these diaries? Because it’s poetry now . .
. and the button is still there, waiting . . . (BBD
151)

Carroll is actually
trapped in several machines, all of which make up one gigantic
life-threatening machine (perhaps the smaller machines are gears?).
On the one hand, Carroll is part of a supposedly respectable
machine of society (which is merely one small part of the Big
Society machine–the one that incompasses the Pentagon, A-bombs,
Big Buisiness, etc.): he has the potential of becoming a
star basketball player via his association with a posh private
school, as well as the growing potential of a writing career–in
many ways he wants to be part of this society machine.
On the other hand, on the sidelines of this promising career,
is the life Carroll highlights in The Basketball Diaries,
the life Carroll “has” to live to separate himself from the
society machine.

As Bart Platenga
puts it, “The Diaries are a real Jekyll & Hyde affair.
Has his public life of ‘great potential’ he’s college material
by day but lowlifer by night. Loves basketball for its grace,
finesse, and sweat, plus all the girls he meets through his
playing . . . Basketball and heroin serve as ways IN as well
as a way OUT.” To the public, Carroll is a promising basketball
star, but behind the scenes he describes his growing heroin
addiction, experimentation with LSD, his adventures hustling
gay men and mugging passers-by in Central Park. Carroll’s machines
are connections–they all go together, they rub against each
other; they can all be lines of escape, or suicide machines,
or both.

Society and the private
school (Trinity) offer respectability, but the options are impossible.
Even though “Being a big time basketball star and all around
hip motherfucker at a private school, I get to meet a lot of
out of sight private school chicks, all of them action and plenty
rich to boot” (138), Carroll feels “like farting and blowing
up the 257 years of fine tradition of this place” (65). After
all, this private school, though it lends him an air of prestige,
is hypocrisy made concrete:

Today at school
we had our annual Thanksgiving fast for the benefit
of the poor and hungry blacks we hear of scattered throughout
the South . . . I’m sure it interests a starving black
in Mississippi that I am not eating my lunch today .
. . Symbolic gestures are certainly self-satisfying
but they are not too nourishing for anyone anywhere.
Somebody is conning everyone else and themselves with
plain dumb ideas as performed here today. What happens
to the food prepared today? All that turkey and mashed
potatoes would probably seem pretty dried out if we
shipped it down South, even by air mail. It would have
been interesting to point out that there are a lot of
hungry dudes walking down Columbus Ave. that could have
dug a free meal. But some of them might be drug addicts
and shit and they’d no doubt make a big mess of the
lunch room that all the black cleaning women would have
a hard time cleaning up. I suggest that tomorrow somebody
symbolically stick a stale drum stick of today’s lunch
up the ass of whoever was humane enough to organize
this farce. (BBD 71)

When forced to go to
confession (it’s a Catholic school), Carroll refuses, but:

No good, the
dumb bastard don’t even listen and at that moment let
me tell you I hated that fucking school and that whole
religion worse than anything before with their tiny
dark boxes you enter like they were phone booths to
God. They should gun off the whole bunch, they’re fucking
up minds they do not own. (BBD 25)

Even basketball, the
one territory Carroll feels he can claim as his own, marginalized
him, or else Carroll deterritorializes himself:

We’re waiting
for the birdie to click when the photog calls over the
SUGAR BOWL coach and whispers something to him who then
walks over to me and mumbles, “Dig, my man, don’t know
how to say this but for, well, . . .” I cut him short
and told him I got the message and stepped out of the
pix. I guess I would have messed up the texture of the
shot or something. Or maybe they didn’t want to let
the readers get to see that the high scorer was a fucking
white boy. (BBD 117)

It is common
knowledge around the entire school that Marc Clutcher,
Anton Neutron and myself are fucking up our basketball
team by taking every drug we can get our hands on before
games. It’s common knowledge to the rest of the teams
in the league too, mainly because we wear our hair about
ten time the normal length . . . (BBD 163)

Still, “If a writer
is in the margins or completely outside his or her fragile community,
he or she has all the more possibility to express another possible
community and forge the means for another consciousness and
another sensibility” (Kafka 17). As Carroll says, “People
are always branding junkies the slob wastes of society. Not
so, chumps. The real junkies should be raised up for saying
fuck you to all this shit city jive, for going on with all the
risks and hassles and con, willing to face the rap”(BBD 189).
If Carroll has some control over his own deterritorialization,
over his lines of escape, then he can use his decadence to rise
above the corruption of society, to take his mind, and himself
“somewhere all you bald headed generals and wheelchair senators
could never imagine” (BBD 197). If it’s true that, for Carroll,

If you never
do anything to make yourself seen . . . like really
seen, the type that makes people point, then you don’t
deserve to be seen at all. That’s my theory, and not
only on a basketball court, to look good while you’re
doing it is just as important as doing it good, and
combine both and you’ve got it made. Presence is where
it’s at, but not the going out of your way to be noticed
presence, but sneaky, shy presence (though it’s all
a part, you’re still always aware). Presence like a
cheetah rather than a chimp. They’ve both got it, but
chimpy gotta jump his nuts around all day to get it,
shy cheetah just sits in total nonchalance or moves
a sec or two in his sexy strut. (BBD 89)

then he has a choice
between being a cheetah or a chimp. One possibility is to be
a willing victim:

It’s always been
the same, growing up in Manhattan, especially when I
was a little younger, the idea of living within a giant
archers target . . . for use by the bad Russia bowman
with the atomic arrows. Today I was hustling around
Times Sq. and thought about it and got a strange rush
of unknown sex giddiness off the idea of leaning here
and now against a wall in leather pants throwing pouting
eyes at customers strolling by dead in the center of
the target . . . ground zero in one beg fireball Island.
I thought of the explosion’s eye as one giant plutonium
red cunt that would suck me up and in and just totally
devour and melt me into its raw wet walls of white heat
in pure orgasm . . . I think by now I’d feel very left
out if they dropped the bomb and it didn’t get me. (BBD
114)

Or he can become part
of the victimizing machine:

But, bullshit
aside, some weird sensation did shoot a blood
rocket up my zone as an incredible rush of power shook
me with all those faces staring at my body fucking a
mouth on its knees . . . Hordes of different faces,
I scan each. Some so nasty, some total femmes in drag,
S&M freaks with their hard butch crewcut stares
. . . then there’s the inevitable old grey genial chaps,
no other sex for them anymore but to look on and remember
. . . I’ve seen then all & I see them now, slobbering
fat heroes . . . some jacking off right open, others
just clutching it inside, sometimes swapping feels
off each other. I begin to fantasize on each as I start
getting hotter and hotter: I see all the teachers I’ve
ever had, fat principals, basketball coaches, an old
superintendent from 6th Street age seven, famous poets
from all times down . . . a giggling drag queen unshaven
in the corner, he’s all the girls I’ve ever fucked;
I see cops who busted me, judges, oh yes, all
the judges, drooling . . . (BBS 189)

He can just give up:

I just refuse
to give the slightest fuck anymore and o.k. if I’m all fucked
up and, yes, every other race, creed & color sucks
and the war in Nam is sanctioned by the Pope who is
flawless of course and if I could just bend in half
I could suck myself off all day and load up on some
good scag and live in a closet because you can’t beat
them but you can ignore and induce ulcers and heart
pangs and give them grey hair so to drive them stone
bust on beauty parlor tint-up jobs and then you begin
to cry in the closet because your veins are sore and
you can’t get over the fact that you love them somehow
more or at least always. (BBD 145)

Or revolt:

I think today
was about the last peace march I’m gonna make, fucking
things are just one big bore. Like they got these “Marshalls”
telling you how you gotta keep in straight lines and
all and that’s the shit that we’re marching against
in the first place. Who needs leaders? Leaders should
be kicked in the ass and packaged airmail to some confield
in Kansas . . . they are not needed. If I’m not on my
own in something I’m doing, it’s time to split. Have
a goof on these marches says me, grab an ass or rollerskate
or piss on Macy’s corner stone. All this serious rap,
stone faces and crap are a drag. Most of the cats marching
are only there to get laid anyway, and nobody in that
fucking Pentagon is getting the hint, so maybe it’s
time to fling a few bricks around instead of boring
speeches, we need more street people kicking and biting
instead of a bunch of walking boots. Time to change
the way of getting the message across, it’s all such
a drag anyway. (BBD 145-46)

Each of these actions,
if only in Carroll’s writing them down, allow him to exceed
the romance of individual life. Whether he becomes a cheetah
or a chimp, however, kind of leads to the same effect. Carroll
can never escape “the machine”–whether it’s society’s machine,
or the machine he’s made for himself through writing, basketball,
sex, addiction, hustling. As with Deleuze and Guattari’s idea
that writing/speaking and eating are incompatible (Kafka
19-20), so are Carroll’s lines of escape. Although Carroll uses
everything he does–basketball, drugs, hustling, etc.–as
“ways IN as well as ways OUT,” in the end he can’t juggle all
of these things at once:

“It’s been hard, the
writing, lately. Just all comes in beautiful fragments, like
nods now . . . so high . . .guess I’d rather sleep forever this
sleep and forget . . . but the gnats, they keep buzzing in my
ear and the heat and the dreams . . .” (BBD 162).

He can’t escape the
fact that, “You just got to see that junk is just another nine
to five gig in the end, only the hours are a bit more inclined
toward shadows” (199). Drugs slowly tighten their grip as,

I’m gonna be
fifteen soon and the summer’s “Pepsi’Cola” heroin habit
is tightening more and more around me. I’m getting that
feeling for the first time since I lost my virgin veins
at thirteen that I gotta start getting my ass together
’cause schools’s coming mighty quick and no way of doing
that scene with a habit . . . . And I used to laugh
at the corny monkey phrase too, I had it under “control”
all the way to sitting and sneezing a lot on this fucking
lice sofa wanting to scream my balls off. (BBD 121-122)

What were once pleasant
escapes, dreamy nods, transform into nightmares:

End of L.S.D.
era last night . . . very bad scene, like getting gulped
up in a dream. Gulped by the big city. Ate my blue
tab in the “A” train but, on arrival, none of the Friday
night prep school acid eaters’ club to be seen in the
aprk. “Fuck ’em,” say I, “I’ll go solo,” and I popped
another tab. And I went so, so low. Reach the Museum
of Modern Art and I began to feel my oats. Those flowers
they leap right off that canvas at me. Thsoe flowers,
they choke. And it is right then that I realize something
is happening that has never happened before: I AM ALONE
. . . and not just me doctor, WE’RE alone. Alone forever
and who’s at the end of that forever tunnel I run through
up Fifth with wallpaper of skyscrapers? And I’m thinking,
after all those beautiful trips, that this is one of
those bad ones . . . and, shit, they are bad
indeed. Alone. (BBD 185)

until eventually he winds
up as chimpy jumping his nuts around all day:

Yep, I’m good
and sick without that fix now and my rap of being the
one who can keep it all under control is in that breeze
cluttered with the same raps a million times run down
by a million other genius wise ass cats walking like
each other’s ghosts around these same sick streets in
my same sick shoes . . . . So after two or three years
of control, I wind up . . . strung out and nothing to
do but spend all day chasing dope. (BBD 187-190)

But as Deleuze and Guattari
say,

The problem is
not that of being free but of finding a way out, or
even a way in, another side, a hallway, an adjacency.
Maybe there are several factors that we must take into
account: the purely superficial unity of the machine,
the position of desire (man or animal) in relation to
the machine . . . . the machine seems to have a strong
degree of unity and the man enters completely into it.
Maybe this is what leads to the final explosion and
the crumbling of the machine. (Kafka 7-8)

When we find Carroll
at the end of The Basketball Diaries curled up in the
fetal position, near death from heroin withdrawals, he has exploded
the machine:

I can feel the
window light hurting my eyes: it’s like shooting pickle
juice. What does that mean? Nice June day out today,
lots of people probably graduating. I can see the Cloisters
with its million in medieval art out the bedroom window.
I got to go in and puke. I just want to be pure . .
. (BBD 210)

In his total entry into
the hustling scene, into drugs, into writing–though each action
may defeat the other–he breaks down one aspect of the machine
at a time until nothing is left; he even approaches destroying
himself while doing it. But still, just in time, he escapes.
He pulls himself out of his self-made reality of drugs, hustling,
and the rest, to look out again at the real world. He escapes
from the book in this way, opening up a whole new series of
“ways in” and “ways out” simply by leaving us with, “I just
want to be pure.”

All along the way Carroll
has been blowing up machines; indeed, I think his book of diaries
is a pretty fair shot at the Pentagon. As Platenga reminds us,

Here’s a guy
barely in his teens getting right to the heart of the
matter . . . It’s a truly anarchistic view stated in
a clear non-euphemistic and uncompromising way . . .
. His is a world of action. Bragging about action. Action
becomes epiphany .. . To see clearly one has to DO.
The only way to DO is to SEE clearly . . . His irreverent
veracity cuts right to the smegmatized genitals of the
whole adult technocratic dildo. Genuine contempt for
real world recruitment–the college-suburb route. Their
version just won’t do.”

The desire is still–always–there,
he still hasn’t found “purity,” and there are many other sides,
hallways, and adjacencies left for him to explore.

Works
Cited

Carroll, Jim. The
Basketball Diaries. 1978. New York: Penguin, 1987.

Deleuze, Gilles,
and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature.
Trans. Dana Polan. Theory and History of Literature 30.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.

James, Jamie. Rev.
of The Basketball Diaries. American Book Review
2.3 (1980): 9.

Perry, Tony. “2 Sets
of ‘Diaries’ Show Off New York City’s Seediness.” (Harrisburg,
Pennsylvania) Patriot 26 July 1987. Newsbank, Literature
Index, 1987, fiche 15, grid E5-6.

Platenga, Bart. “Jim
Carroll’s Basketball Diaries: Street Cool Huck Finn
Dope Diary.” Overthrow 14.2 (1980): 19.