Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries: 1971-1973

Jim Carroll is known for his book "The Basketball Diaries." I first got into Jim by reading his visionary poetry, however, after becoming one of the biggest fans of Jim Carroll, I knew I had to have all his work. WOW! This collection of mostly short bursts of creative prose is entirely different from anything I've ever read. I mean that Jim Carroll writes and describes events, people, and actions in a way that is unequaled in the world.I wish he was still alive. Get this book!

Over the past thirty years, poet, diarist, and rock musician Jim Carroll has proven himself a multifaceted artist of many talents, and what is most remarkable is the ease with which he moves between genres; this alone makes him difficult to pin down. Yet, even though Carroll has experimented in many forms which display striking surface differences, his artistic vision has remained consistent and true. This integrity of vision is especially apparent in Fear of Dreaming: The Selected Poems of Jim Carroll, which collects in one volume the complete text of his first work of poetry, Living at the Movies (1973), selections from The Book of Nods (1986), and an assortment of previously unpublished new poems, prose pieces, and songs written between 1989 and 1993. Fear of Dreaming charts the development of Carroll's poetic sensibility from the late 1960s to the present, and in doing so reveals that the seemingly disparate branches of his oeuvre are, in fact, united by a distinct artistic vision. New York City street life forms the core of Carroll's artistic vision, and the poems in Fear of Dreaming illuminate the aesthetic underlying all of Carroll's work. Carroll animates what we might consider inanimate parts of the city--its machinery, sky scrapers, pollution, and so on--and highlights its darkest profile. The "New York City Variations" (from The Book of Nods), for example, depict the city as a living being whose danger and indifference is inseparable from its beauty: "New lampposts curve over the avenue in darkness, like chrome tears" in the first "Variation" (173), and in another, "Air-conditioned blood drips like rosaries / from glassy facades to the cosmopolitan eyes" (176). Likewise, in "Fear of Dreaming," a new piece that is the title poem of the collection, Carroll writes: "Too many teeth / In this city / Are bared." But as in his earlier poems, this dark vision is juxtaposed against the idyllic retreats afforded by imagination, dreams, and drugs: "What I want is sleep / inside a strange language, trimming / The bonsai under glass" (260). Fear of Dreaming also highlights Carroll's continuous process of self-examination and his identification with the city as intimately connected with himself (themes also foregrounded in his diaries and rock lyrics). In Carroll's earlier work, the juxtaposition of dream and reality produces poems that are simultaneously inner-directed and self-contemplative yet also "about" the city; it is as if Carroll's consciousness and that of the city are united, and this affinity places imagination and concrete reality on equal footing, producing a surreal, even hallucinatory effect. Always present is a tension between the concrete reality of city life and its psychological unreality, and always Carroll is aware that writing is a purifying force. Often his early poems express a desire to escape the city's oppressiveness, as in the prominent seashore imagery of "Blue Poles," "The Distances," and "Styro." But harsh, man-made reality always intrudes upon the idyl: in "Styro," for example, "gulls play in their crude reflection / a tanker passes to split Europe" (18). In his recent poems, however, Carroll seems to find reality so unreal that it is itself a fantasy land, and his views of politics and city life have become increasingly cynical. "Evening News" points to random tidbits of meaningless information gleaned from television news, which offers, among other things, "actual computer-enhanced photos / Of Venus / That crater down there / is called 'Eve' / That gorge to the left / is called 'Tic.'" Similarly, Carroll's earlier poems have never been so overtly critical about mainstream politics as "Inauguration Day," which highlights the circus-like media treatment of Clinton's inauguration as well as the questionable qualifications of the President and his appointed officials. Carroll hints that "we won't get fooled again" by quoting The Who's line, "Meet the new boss, / Same as the old boss" (265). Finally, perhaps most significant is his poem, "In Time, AIDS," in which he writes, " To be modern / In the city is to be a victim in time" (266). Carroll's recent poems, much less optimistic than past works in their focus on everyday realities, show a growing sense of despair. Yet in his earlier work, Carroll has used poetry to create a beautiful world in spite of the ugliness and violence the "real" world offers. As he puts it in "Love Rockets": ". . . I'm off to rescue the sky from its assassins / jogging and screaming and launching my clean mortars / into the March obscene air." Poetry is his weapon against the corruption of beauty: "I'm here. and I have something to say / as well as something to take care of. / . . . . / I like the sky (don't you) its warmth, its friendliness. / I'm not going to let all this soot taint that terrific blue" (18). Carroll's awareness of the power of writing continues through The Book of Nods section, which he concludes with the plea, "In the subscription of hearts / In the strangled teeth of work / In the judgment of each word / In the end, pretend you hear me" (239). Carroll's self-conscious reflection upon his writing process also helps to forge unity among the disparate aspects of his life and work, and in this sense his poetry bridges the apparent gaps between the cross-genre expressions of his artistic vision. In Fear of Dreaming, "Fragment: Little N.Y. Ode" (from Living at the Movies) provides an especially powerful intersection of poetry, diary, and music. In the poem, Carroll writes: "I sleep on a tar roof / scream my songs / into lazy floods of stars . . . / . . . ./ this city is on my side" (30). Likewise, in The Basketball Diaries, he describes his frequent trips up to the tar roof of his apartment building, where "It's just me and my own naked self and the stars breathing down" (43); and in the song "Jody," on Dry Dreams, he sings, "Downtown the rooftops are wide / I was sinking in the tar, I screamed / 'This city is on my side.'" Similarly, phrases from the prose works "Just Visiting," "Watching the Schoolyard," "Lenses," and "Me, Myself, and I" (from The Book of Nods) are also lyrics on the albums Catholic Boy and Dry Dreams. Several of the prose selections included in Fear of Dreaming also hint at the new directions Carroll is headed toward, depicting his movement over the past decade from autobiography toward fiction (he is currently working on two novels). A few of the prose works selected from The Book of Nods are semi-autobiographical (such as "Watching the Schoolyard" and "Me, Myself, and I"), but Carroll's main concern is to depict "nods," or drug dreams. The results are startlingly surreal--very much like Salvador Dali's paintings of melting watches. Some of the characters appearing under odd circumstances are Zeno, who "pulls up on a rocket sled and lectures me on motion" (132); Keats drinking methadone (133); Arthur Rimbaud visiting a dentist (137); and Vincent van Gogh, "wearing a cheap iridescent suit, beneath it a yellow polo shirt with the image of two small green alligators copulating sewn on above the pocket" (108). Others poems, such as "Homage to Gerard Manley Hopkins" (in which an espionage ring maintains security "in the detection of a flawed meter, and messages of coercion and betrayal are delivered in iambics" [116]), and "Days," are more "realistic" in the sense that the events described, while bizarre, seem more tied to concrete possibilities. An especially harrowing "realist" piece is "Just Visiting," in which Carroll details the obsessive last thoughts of a bank robber holding a teller hostage. Finally, two prose works highlight Carroll's increasing interest in magic, mysticism, and voodoo as sites forming an intersection between surrealism and realism, reality and imagination. In "Guitar Voodoo," from The Book of Nods, the narrator, jealous of his lover's ex-husband, takes vengeance by performing "guitar voodoo" on him: he soaks photographic slides of the man in a magic potion, then, using one of the slides as a guitar pick, murders him by running "the voodooed image across the [guitar] strings windmill style, like Pete Townsend" (120). Likewise, in "Curtis's Charm," a new autobiographical piece, Carroll's friend Curtis is convinced that "his new Caribbean mother-in

As the book says, it's a sensational sequel to Jim Carroll's first book of diaries, "The Basketball Diaries." I personally loved this book for irrelevant reasons. First, the last reviewer as stated that he/she didn't like this book because it jut told about his sex life and all that. What she wanted was for him doing drugs and stealing and stuff because he/she might have thought that that type of stuff was cool. This isn't how you should look at Forced Entries and especially The Basketball Diaries. In Forced Entires, Jim Carroll seaches his way to be pure (get off of drugs) through facing unknown challenges and taking the hard way down the road. He meets celebrities like Andy Warhol, he flees to Californai to cure the heroin addiction. You have to see Forced Entries in the litural sense and that Jim Carroll created himself out of literature. At the end he pours the sin of his bodily remains out of him and faces the more pure life, where he reaches the spot he was looking for in The Basketball Diaries and Forced Entries. "I can feel the window light hurting my eyes I just want to be pure..." - the last page of The Basketball Diaries

It’s the book I wanted.

I am almost at the end and thought this is an outstanding portrait of Jim's reality of NYC in the 1970s. I have not read the Basketball Diaries yet, saw the movie long time ago, so I didn't have any expectations. Knowing NYC in the 80s and 90s, this work paints a vivid picture of life in the art and music scene mainly set in the fringe areas of Manhattan. Jim Carroll pops up in the key texts of NYC underground culture and it was time for me to read his work. While dope is ever present theme, the people and the places and the feel of 70s NY is well accounted for in Jim's writing. Great view of NYC grit and seediness

Yes, you must read "basketball Diaries" first. But, in this second book you really can feel Jim. And it's amazing. Love his writing, the way he words things. Love how his personality just flows onto the page and you feel like your actually there, hanging out with him.

Superb 2nd volume of diaries. Captures NYC & N. Cal, '71 thru '73 with humour & depth of feeling. Great cast of characters & priceless insight & wit from the Catholic Boy. The book will be a good wake-up call to a new generation of heroin users. He does not glamorize hiss addiction; it must be overcome before he can resume his career as a poet. It had already cost him his basketball career, as outlined in his first, & more famous, book, "The Basketball Diaries. Payback is a mofo with Heroin. Jim lived the life & paid the price.

This is a must for any Jim Carrol fan. He transports you into the inner belly of the chelsea hotel and Warhols factory world. I was very excited, that I received a signed copy, it was a used steal for $4.00.

This is a great extension to 'The Basketball Diaries'. Here is the harsh, eloquent writing from a New York City street junkie/poet. If you know about Jim Carroll, you will enjoy this revealing book.

I loved this novel but not as much as his poetry. You must read it for sure but be aware that this book deals with grounds somehow special ;)

Hes a great writer some of his explanations are very deep, I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes non-fiction.

this and Basketball Diaries are ESSENTIAL Carroll. My first copy fell to pieces after being read to death, and it was also signed by Jim from his show in Toronto back in the 90's. Can never have too much Carroll.

The book was in pristine condition when I got it.