1. The film version of Jim Carroll’s ‘Basketball Diaries’ is out, and I would definitely say this classifies as Beat News. Jim Carroll is from a later era than the Beats, but Kerouac praised his writing when Carroll first got published (as a teenager), and his sensibility is Beat without a doubt. However, I recently heard that the film wasn’t that great. They made it take place in the 90’s instead of the 60’s, for one thing.

If it turns out that this film sucks (which is what I’m hearing so far), there’s also ‘Crumb,’ a documentary about the legendary underground comic artist Robert Crumb. Crumb belongs to the hippie era more than the beat era, but he’s great, and at least these filmmakers didn’t change the 60’s to the 90’s.

2. Allen Ginsberg’s journals from the 50’s have just been published. I’ll read them after I read the new volume of Kerouac’s letters.