Author: Jeff

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.

Mainly I was thinking of first-person-narrative-type travel comics. Justin came up with F. Andrew Taylor’s On the Bus, Joe Sacco’s Palestine & Safe Area Gorazde, & Tom Hart’s Ramadan. I dusted off Goff, Nieves, & Hayden’s Tales From the Heart and Rich Tommaso’s Let’s Hit the Road. I guess I don’t really mean to be compiling a list, I was just kind of feeling like reading some more comics along those lines. There’s always Paul Theroux I suppose.

Here’s a bunch of email from my Europe trip. I’m still cleaning it up a bit & reformatting.

I picked up a neat comic called Marco Solo #2 today. It’s about the author, Shannon Brady, traveling in Thailand. It starts out with a nice series of anecdotes where he’s heading around Bangkok with a friendly & occasionally trustworthy local; near the end the story gets a more grounded and he kind of sets things up for the next issue. I like the artwork – a little cartoony, busy (but not over-crowded compositions), and a nice clean Chester Brown-ish line.

His webpage.

Other good travel comics: Josh Neufeld’s travel stories in Keyhole, Justin’s unpublished Russia notebook, Peter Kuper’s cheesily named ComicsTrips. Tell me if you know of any others.

There’s no way I was the first person to think of this: What would happen if I T-inated my site, then Jesusified the results.

The blind cod (see 1/30) is alive but not well.