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Poet, author, punk rocker Jim Carroll dead at 60

9:55 PM Sun, Sep 13, 2009 |
By Sheila Lennon    Email this author |   Email this entry


Jim Carroll Band- People Who Died:


Jim Carroll, poet, author of The Basketball Diaries, has now joined the ranks of people who died, according to the Times: Jim Carroll, Poet and Punk Rocker, Is Dead at 60:

Jim Carroll, the poet and punk rocker in the outlaw tradition of Rimbaud and Burroughs who chronicled his wild youth in "The Basketball Diaries," died on Friday at his home in Manhattan....


Carroll's 8 Fragments For Kurt Cobain begins,

Genius is not a generous thing
In return it charges more interest than any amount of royalties can cover
And it resents fame
With bitter vengeance

Pills and powdres only placate it awhile
Then it puts you in a place where the planet's poles reverse
Where the currents of electricity shift

Your Body becomes a magnet and pulls to it despair and rotten teeth,
Cheese whiz and guns

Whose triggers are shaped tenderly into a false lust
In timeless illusion


jim_carroll.jpg
Photo/ Ray Lego, Cut the Fat films
Jim Carroll, author of The Basketball Diaries, in 1998. He gave a spoken-word performance at AS220 in Providence in 2001.


Cassie Carter, whose site, catholicboy.com celebrates Carroll's other hit, wrote her master's thesis on Carroll, and About Jim Carroll there is informative and linkful.

Carroll wasn't someone you'd expect to live into old age. He looked pretty awful in this 2007 photo of Jim Carroll by David Shankbone.

"I was a Catholic boy, redeemed through pain, not through joy..." -- Jim Carroll

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