The Basketball Diaries: The Classic about Growing Up Hip on New York's Mean Streets

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He is excited by "the possibility of being caught in a situation where there is no possibility of explaining yourself. Even though this sounds dismissive, I don't want to give ol' Jim too much of a hard time because there are moments of beauty too and it is understandable Carroll became a poet and sought the beautiful in the murk for the rest of his troubled life.

When Jim earns a scholarship to a Catholic school in a wealthy neighborhood, he fails to disconnect from the drug culture and street life of the lower east side. Below this, Carroll provides a quote attributed to the quasi-mystical medieval Persian war leader Hassan (-i) Sabbah which is also a key favorite of WSB: "Nothing is true; Everything is permitted. The feeling isn’t movement anyway, but rather being suspended in front of the sheer cliff, mid-air, with the waters rising up sharp and fast at you.The Book of Nods has worn less well - but the ambition to reach for the stars while lying in the gutter, to think you are Rimbaud when you sniff Carbona on the Staten Island Ferry, and to struggle to come off heroin before going back to High School all place him firmly in the midst of the Lower East Side nogoodniks who gave birth to punk rock. Isn't it funny how uncool drugs start to seem when you get a bit older and actually see them devastate people's lives?

My two sets of gimmicks right along side me in the slightly bloody water in the plastic cup on the crusty linoleum, probably used by every case of hepatitis in upper Manhattan by now. Up 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 1/2 million toilets empty their goods daily. Carroll, like many other members of the counterculture—a group of people who rebelled against the U. Did he know that his life was only going to get darker and decide that the reader was no longer invited on his journey?That was what really made the jump worthwhile, with all the lame couples like old tourists from Ohio, and nuns, and Japanese executives and other odd N. Though that info is not there, this perfect moment that I think of often is: The journalist and Uzi are beachcombing in Oahu. This continual redescription of his experience, in person and on the page, seems to reflect a lasting passion for being on earth. Well, Danny was the first, Johnny and I peering over the edge as he made it clear over the first and only obstacle, a small tree that shot out of the rock about five feet below, then straight ahead, hands close at sides, body stiff, and feet locked tightly, hitting the surface missile-like. States had been supporting South Vietnam for decades in its conflict against Ho Chi Minh's communist forces in North Vietnam.