ee" laugh. Throughout the rest of his years at in high school, Jim maintained a consistent 88.32 grade average with only minimal effort, twice being named to the honor roll, his IQ was 149. In the college boards, he scored above average. "But Statistics tell so little. The books Jim read reveal more," comments editor of the Rolling Stone, Jerry Hopkins.Jim was greatly inspired by the writings of great philosophers and poets. "He devoured Friedrich Nietzsche, the poetic German philosopher, whose views on aesthetics, morality, and the Apollonian-Dionysian duality would appear again and again in Jim's conversation, poetry, songs, and life." He read “Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks”, became captivated with Alexander the Great, admiring his intellectual and physical accomplishments. Jim adopted some of the look of Alexander, the leaning of his head a little on one side towards his left shoulder. He read the great French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, whose style would later influence the form of Jim's short prose poems. "He read everything Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Patchen, Michael McClure, Gregory Corso, and all the other beat writers published." Jim's English teacher comments, "I felt that Jim was the only one in the class who read Ulysses, and understood it." Balzac, Cocteau, and Moliere were also familiars, along with most of the French existentialist philosophers. Jim's senior-year English teacher still talks about his reading habits: "Jim read as much and probably more than any student in class, but everything he read was so offbeat I had another teacher, who was going to the Library of Congress, check to see if the books Jim was reporting on actually existed. I suspected he was making them up, as they were English books on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century demonology. I'd never heard of them, but they existed, and I'm convinced from the paper he wrote that he read them, and the Library o...
