Thursday, July 8, 2010

Aram Saroyan on Jim Carroll

from the article “Blue Galahad,” at Jacket Magazine

“Jim lent me a manuscript copy of The Basketball Diaries, which was still unpublished, albeit now legendary. The strongest impression I took away from that first reading was that in a certain light his heroin use was like the flipside of the strenuous physical and psychic demands of his life as a basketball scholarship boy. Near the end f the book there was a sequence about a Greenwich Village romance that seemed full of a quieter, richer light. When I read the book again nearly a decade later when it was finally published, I asked Jim about this missing part and he responded casually that it had been cut.”

Aram Saroyan is the author of the Black Sparrow Books title Door to the River: Essays & Reviews from the 1960s into the Digital Age

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