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RIP Jim Carroll
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The summer of death has claimed another one. Jim Carroll can add himself to the list of 'People Who Died', because the groundbreaking poet and musician has passed away at 60. His former wife, Rosemary Carroll, confirmed that he had a heart attack Friday and passed.
Carroll is best known for his journals chronicling his days as a hustler and heroin addict in The Basketball Diaries, which was adapted in a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio. He was one of the founding fathers of the New York City seventies alternative literary scene. Along with sometime-lover Patti Smith, Carroll challenged conventional poetry and created some of the best work in the past forty years. His humor in the face of a bleak and hostile pre-Disney New York granted his admirers an inside peak into a world normally difficult to properly articulate. Only Carroll could turn a story about catching crabs into the hilarious anecdote A Day At The Races.
In 1980, he experienced some cross-over commercial success with his musical album Catholic Boy, featuring the popular single People Who Died, a profound achievement in itself because it managed to turn the endless list of tragic and untimely deaths he'd experienced into a blurring, endless mass where after a while, it just becomes one-liners and brief memories. That was his strength as a writer: to express the nihilistic attitude about the horrors one encounters in life, and how the nihilism is actually a survival mechanism.
It's unclear when his latest novel, The Petting Zoo, will be released. He was a great talent and will be missed.
I'll live for your sins if you'll die for mine.
--Fear of Dreaming
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