{"id":3974,"date":"2022-01-10T22:17:46","date_gmt":"2022-01-10T22:17:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8000\/?page_id=3974"},"modified":"2025-07-06T02:45:14","modified_gmt":"2025-07-06T09:45:14","slug":"about-the-webmaster","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.catholicboy.com\/WP\/questions-and-answers\/about-the-webmaster\/","title":{"rendered":"About the Webmaster"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Greetings! My name is Cassie Carter, and I am the scholar, designer, coder … everything behind Catholicboy.com<\/em>. I have been a Jim Carroll fan since I first heard of him in 1987, and a Jim Carroll scholar since 1989.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After 20 years in New York City, I am now back in California, where I work as a user experience (UX) designer; my portfolio is at CassieCarter.com<\/a>. How I got where I am now is a long story, but no matter how disjointed my biography may seem, Jim Carroll always fits in there somehow, and Jim remains as essential to me today as he was when I first “discovered” him back in 1987.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I began developing websites when I created the Jim Carroll Website at the tail end of 1995, while I was finishing the coursework for my PhD in English. I developed what is now CatholicBoy.com after I contacted the webmaster of Literary Kicks<\/a>, a site devoted to Beat Writers, about expanding his section on Jim Carroll. He suggested to me that a Jim Carroll website might be cool. I thought that was a novel idea . . . so I started learning HTML by viewing the HTML sources of my favorite websites (I started with Babelogue<\/a>, the Patti Smith website — and as of 2025 it still looks pretty much as it did in 1995!<\/em>) and talking to colleagues who were experimenting with the web. For more information about the development of the website, please check out the About this Website<\/a> page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I completed the first “draft” of the website while enjoying a “non-service” fellowship at Bowling Green State University. “Non-service” means that I was being paid to work on my dissertation and wasn’t teaching any classes. I was completing the research and notes for my PhD dissertation<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After completing my doctorate and a two-year term as full-time visiting assistant professor in Michigan State University<\/a>‘s department of American Thought and Language (which no longer exists<\/em>), I moved to New York City in July 1998 to get in on the gold rush that was the internet in those days. You can read about my other career on my professional website<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It all makes perfect sense, right? My doctoral specializations are in contemporary American fiction and drama, women’s writing, and culture studies. My dissertation<\/a>, entitled “‘Woman, Red in Tooth and Claw’: Angry Essentialism, Abjection, and Visionary Liberation in Women’s Performances,” examines the performance art of Karen Finley and Holly Hughes in order to define “Angry Essentialism.” I coined the term “Angry Essentialism” to describe a movement in feminism that champions the “bad girl” side of the Woman\/Nature equation as a site constituting power for women. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hey, web development was a logical career choice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That was irony, in case you missed it . . .<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But back to Jim Carroll.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first time I ever heard of Jim Carroll was in a “rock poetry” course at San Diego State University. (Remember that I ended up at Bowling Green State University, home of the popular culture movement, and now you know why.) My professor, Larry McCaffery<\/a>, offhandedly mentioned some guy named “Jim Carol” (as I wrote in my notes) and his album Catholic Boy<\/em>. I made a note of it, spelling Carroll <\/em>incorrectly, of course. But I didn’t follow up on this lead until a year later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I became interested in Jim Carroll in 1987 when I was taking another course with Larry McCaffery a year later. This was a course in contemporary American literature at San Diego State University. I had just completed my BA in psychology (with an English minor) in May, but I found myself just as interested in literature as I was in psychology. I was at a turning point, when I could have gone either way. I was taking courses in American literature in the English department, and statistics in the psychology department, when my literature professor, Larry McCaffery<\/a>, told me about The Basketball Diaries<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At this stage, I read anything Professor McCaffery<\/a> suggested, and I picked up The Basketball Diaries<\/em> thinking, oh, god, I can’t handle sports<\/em>. I thought it would be a book about basketball. (McCaffery also had me read The Universal Baseball Association<\/a> by Robert Coover — Oh my god! . . . . It turned out that everything by Robert Coover was freakin’ GOLD, as was absolutely everything Larry McCaffery recommended.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was about 50 pages into The Basketball Diaries<\/em> when I saw a flyer announcing that Jim Carroll would be coming to SDSU’s BackDoor club for a reading; I immediately bought a ticket (I think it was $4).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That evening, November 13, 1987, changed my life<\/a>. To make a long story short, seeing Carroll in person showed me the power of words, and particularly the power of spoken word. Watching Jim on stage, I saw him metamorphose: he was a tall, pale, thin man with long red hair and his shoes untied; he was a 13 year old street punk shooting hoops on the Lower East Side; he was a rock star on stage; he was a poet handling words like explosives. He was mesmerizing. Suddenly I realized that here is a man who has literally created himself through writing<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was hooked<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Seeing Jim clinched my decision. Because I hadn’t majored in English, I consulted with the graduate advisor in SDSU’s English program to see what I needed to do, then I took more literature courses so that I could enter SDSU’s MA program in English in August 1988.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was awarded a graduate assistantship (I was thrown into the classroom as a teacher with NO training in teaching). I taught four sections each of beginning and intermediate composition and attempted to work the bugs out of my teaching methods as I went along. Meanwhile, I continued working with Dr. McCaffery<\/a>, who became my mentor and role model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like Larry, I specialized in contemporary American literature. In this field, during my first semester, I began working with Dr. Dorothea Kehler<\/a> on an annotated primary and secondary bibliography of Jim, which I published in Bulletin of Bibliography<\/em> in 1990. I am eternally grateful to Dr. Kehler for her enthusiastic support of my work! Dorothea Kehler, like Larry McCaffery, is one professor and influence I wouldn’t trade for the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I spent two years researching my bibliography of Jim Carroll (under Dr. Kehler’s guidance), and in the process I received help and advice from many people, including Jim’s ex-wife, Rosemary Carroll, and her assistant, Karen Pals; Janet Kraybill at Viking Penguin; Matthew Bailer at the William Morris Agency; Anne Corrigan at New World Video; Joe Selby at BAM<\/em>, and, most importantly, from Jim himself–he gave me the specifics no one else could have provided.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although I had attended three of Jim’s readings before in 1987 and 1988 (at one of which I actually<\/em> had enough courage to shake the man’s hand and, with glazed-over eyes, tell him: “I think you are a genius”), I talked with Jim for the first time on July 7, 1989, at the Spirit club in San Diego. He was there for a reading, and Rosemary had arranged for me to talk with him. After the show, I made my way back to the green room, where Jim was signing autographs for adoring fans. I introduced myself and started asking him questions–like where I could get his first book, Organic Trains<\/a>. He pulled out a copy of the book and gave it to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Only about 500 copies of Organic Trains<\/em> were printed, and about half of them were “lost” by the publisher. This copy of Organic Trains,<\/em> which Jim gave to me, is one of my most prized possessions. If there was a fire, I’d grab my birds and this book. I have a lot of other neat goodies I’d want to throw into the rescue bag, but this copy of Organic Trains<\/em> is priceless to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In any case, at the time of this first meeting, I was teaching freshman writing courses at San Diego State University, and my students (who were required to keep journals), having read The Basketball Diaries<\/em>, had composed questions about the book. Now, I had prepared a set of interview questions for Jim, and I had put them in another folder. But when I got to the greenroom at the Spirit Club, I discovered I’d brought the wrong <\/em>folder to the reading. I had brought the folder containing my students’ questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I realized what I had done, I showed Jim some of the questions. He thought they were funny until he got to one asking, “How could Jim stoop to hustling? Is he a flaming homosexual?” He was keenly insulted by this, and I swear he hasn’t returned to San Diego for a reading since. In any case, a Canadian friend on my mailing list sent me an article from the March 19, 1992, issue of Eye Weekly<\/em> in which Jim actually talks about this experience<\/a> (ouch!<\/em>). (Jim insists<\/em> that he didn’t mean to cut me down. That makes me feel a little better.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So anyway, eventually, to make a long story a little shorter, Jim bummed a ride off me<\/a> back to his motel, so I had the chance to talk with him for about an hour. Many of the magazine publications listed in my Bulletin of Bibliograpy<\/em> article<\/a> are there thanks to Jim’s help, because I wouldn’t have found them without his assistance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After I completed the bibliography, I finished my 200-page master’s thesis<\/a> on The Basketball Diaries<\/em> and Forced Entries<\/em>, completing my master’s degree in December of 1990 under the guidance of Larry McCaffery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While I was working on the bibliography and thesis, I had one of the most vivid dreams of my life, and it was about Jim Carroll and my work about him. Here’s my description of this dream<\/a>–straight from my diary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have written and published quite a bit on Jim Carroll over the years, including:<\/p>\n\n\n\n