i picked this up randomly, though i should have learned by now that picking up poetry in that manner isn’t the best approach for me. Jim Carroll also wrote The Basketball Diaries, an autobiographical coming of age/drug addiction story that was later turned into a movie starring Leonard DiCaprio. i never read the book, but i do remember seeing the movie and probably the book is much better.

this collection of poetry spans from Carroll’s first “aboveground” book, Living at the Movies, to “newer works” (from 1989-1993). the poems of the first book were by far the ones that caught me the most; something about them seems more sincere or maybe it’s the more obvious backdrop of new york city that caught me. i had to skip most of the poems from The Book of Nods, as it read pretty much like a recounting of several months of dreams—i like writing down dreams and reading them later and occasionally i like reading other people’s dreams, but i think only in small quantities. the “New York City Variations” felt a little too amorphous and not enough new york. i started into “Poems 1973–1985” and just wasn’t interested enough to keep going. somehow even when he’s trying to be dirty, it just comes off as kind of lame.

a review says that “Living at the Movies” is reminiscent of Rimbaud, so maybe i will just read Rimbaud.

kind of a fictional memoir of a middle-aged woman as she reminisces to herself about her best friend at fifteen. the familiar tone enriches the story, and the recounting of returning to her hometown after a long absence rang especially true. though the frog theme stuck into my subconscious in a bizarre way.

Later she drove me around the village, to show me it again. The yards seemed emptier and larger than I remembered, the houses further apart and glum, though pretty … The roads were country roads, still wooded and full of longing and despair and that search for something, anything going on; they were roads of rumor—curvy, restless roads that seemed for moments to stretch forward but then just turned back in on themselves, like snakes snacking on their own tails.

i kept noticing people reading this on the train and then laura was reading it when i visited her in montreal. it turns out it’s an Oprah book, which is probably why so many people were reading this.

i like epics lately—this one takes place in india following a widow struggling to maintain her independence, a college student who rents a room in her flat, and two tailors she hires. Om and Ishvar, the tailors, feel like the center of the book to me. they are the sole survivors of their family due to caste violence in their village and especially seem to fall prey to realizations of the student Maneck’s pessimistic theory that everything goes bad in the end.

in some ways it gets to be like a Dickens tragedy, but comes across far less melodramatic. the characters collect between them most of the sadnesses of the world and for all the hope that they can surpass it together, in the end Maneck’s pessimism seems well-founded. the book ends pretty sad, i have to say. laura finished this right before i started it and it seems that it’s much better going into this knowing that from the start.

some of the metaphors (namely the sewing and chess related ones) border on overwrought, but there is a sincere truth to them at the same time.

… our lives are but a sequence of accidents—a clanking chain of chance events. A string of voices, casual or deliberate, which add up to that one big calamity we call life.

i tend to like books written as letters or diaries, as i tend to have a harder time reminding myself it’s not real. the concept of anonymous letters from a freshman in high school written to a mysterious older person he doesn’t actually know somehow emphasizes that, even with the few awkward parts that struggle to maintain the weird circumstances (like forced explanations of how letters got mailed).

there’s a surprising amount of depth in the story though, and there’s a point where it was just impossible to stop reading. i wouldn’t have thought that something that could vividly recall many aspects of my experience of high school would avoid the common phony nostalgia—remembering an uncomfortable time like it was so much fun while it was happening. but somehow it does.