Year: 2001

At the big bookstore chain, I look for Running After Antelope by Scott Carrier in the Essays section and then in the New Releases area. It’s not there, so I go to the information desk. The only person at the information desk is another customer waiting anxiously for someone to stop by and help him. I walk over to the checkout desk and find an idle cashier. The other customer follows me and waits timidly for the other cashier to become available.

“Can I help you?” the cashier asks me.

“I’m looking for a book called Running After Antelope. Can you tell me if it’s out yet?”

My cashier passes behind the other cashier, to a different computer. “Running After Antelope, I like the sound of that title.” He types in the query and says, “We have four copies.” His coworker finishes her transaction. He turns to her and asks, “It says, ‘Biography C’. What does that mean?”

She responds: “It must be ‘C’ as in ‘center’ – between the escalators.”

He turns to me and says, “Alright, let’s go find it.”

He leads me to the biography section and starts skimming the titles. I wait for a few moments. His confident posture degrades into a confused stare, and it becomes apparent that his efforts have bourn no fruit. I get my bearings, and notice that we’re looking at books on Rimbaud, Rockefeller, and Roosevelt. I start walking beside the shelf, backward through the alphabet. My cashier follows, eyeing the books suspiciously. When I get to the beginning of the shelves, but not the beginning of the alphabet, I turn the corner and pace up the other side of the shelves. I slow down as I find Camus, Carter, and (between them) Carrier. I reach up and touch the spine, “Here it is.”

The cashier’s confused expression perks up. “Good eye,” he says.

“Thanks,” I answer. He returns to the checkout counter, having satisfied another customer.

Ingredients for Rebecca and Matt’s Special Glue:
Water, Soap, Spit

Disclaimer: Rebecca and Matt’s Special Glue only works with paper (& it tends to make it wet too).

The other day I went to see Pleasures of Urban Decay, a film about Ben Katchor, at the Seattle Jewish Film Festival. The shots of New York were really nice – rainy & kind of grayed-out, like the shots of New York in Katchor’s strip.

Anyway, since then I’ve been going through the Julius Knipl books & they’re so good. The stories are all mood & environment.

Seeing him draw was pretty amazing. He draws & fills in the washes really quickly, like someone writing.

The cardboard sign that the man on the corner outside Pacific Place is holding repeats the key points of the manifesto written on the back of his jacket in magic marker: “Frye Art Museum and Seattle Police are commies! You are a liar!”

[Correction 5/19/01: The man’s jacket and sign actually refer to “Fry Apt” not “Fry Art Museum”.]

Scrolling through Jorge Columbo’s Dailies project is hypnotic. Here’s the essay he wrote about it for Open Letters.

I really like this guy.

A little more digging reveals that Hiroyuki Nishigaki, author of the previously mentioned How to Good-Bye Depression: If You Constrict Anus 100 Times Everyday. Malarkey? or Effective Way?, has a bit of a web presence. Regarding American politics: First he describes George W. Bush as a “young charming giant brown bear who has not grown strong and sharp claws yet” (this theory is supported by the dreams of a woman from Palm Beach by the way). On a radio talk show, he prescribes his butt clenching excercises to Hilary Clinton.

This stuff is amazing. His loose & lazy grasp of the English language is augmented seriously kooky ideas, frenetic stream-of-consciousness, & Burroughs-style cutup writing.

I recommend that you start here & then review his recent usenet postings.

List-making & Negative space.

“The moment comes when a yawn, a buzzing fly, an itch seem the only treasure there is, precisely because completely unusable, occurring once and for all and then promptly forgotten, spared the monotonous destiny of being stored in the world memory. Who could rule out the possibility that the universe consists of the discontinuous network of moments that cannot be recorded, and that our organization does nothing but establish their negative image, a frame around emptiness and meaninglessness.”
-Italo Calvino, World Memory

I lied when I said that books and things aren’t as inspiring or revelatory at 5².

The nature of revelations is contrary to the nature of list making. And besides, the list of revelations gets too long to remember. They’ve become just another routine event – like shaving, having an earthquake, Halley’s comet, falling on your head, explaining the latest developments on Friends to a Dutch teenager while walking through a wheat field to the smallest commercial distillery in Scotland, or eating ice cream.

Slug that I am, I was just waking up when the earthquake hit.

I didn’t feel the first earthquake that I was in, I felt the next one – 1996 or so in my second floor Capitol Hill apartment. I was sitting in a chair reading. My thought at the time was that it was very strange to feel things shaking, but not have some stable reference point (ie: the ground) to refer to. Not exactly revelatory.

The second was a year or two later, I was reading a book in Elliot Bay Books’ basement cafe & I suddenly felt a little disoriented – kind of wobbly. At first I thought one of my chair legs was shorter than the others, no. I looked around & noticed someone else was eyeing the room confused & I heard the word “earthquake” amongst the cafe chatter. Most of the people in the cafe didn’t seem to notice & for those who did, it only caused a brief blip in their conversations.

Today’s earthquake certainly felt stronger than those past ones, but I wasn’t really scared like some other people seemed to have been. This is no indication that I’m particularly solid or level-headed – as indicated by this gem, pulled from the wreckage of my old geocities site.

Somehow One-Armed Carl isn’t as satisfying as the long lost, super-configurable Jim’s Journal Jenerator.

There’s still a more conventional Jim’s Journal page up & here’s some hate mail.

The friendly Australian entrepreneur says he has it on good authority that Fidel Castro is in poor health & isn’t expected to live through the year. Said Australian insists he’s poised to corner the market on U.S.-to-Cuba tourism.