reverse!

Phone call this morning.

From the moving company.

It turns out that my stuff was probably in a warehouse that was completely trashed. There is a small chance, but honestly, if it got wet... it's books. It's books. It's pretty much nothing but books in there. Some furniture, two boxes of CDs that're mostly on my hard drive in my bag anyway (frozen as lossy MP3s and AACs). Clothes I mostly don't wear' cause they're old boy stuff. The bug-girl costume. A few boxes of miscellaneous toys and detritus. My computer. But mostly books.

Mostly mass-market paperback stuff, about 20-30% I was probably going to gleefully dispose of once it got here. But... My shalf-complete run of Post Bros. and Savage Henry*. A hardback copy of the Steadman Alice**. Little Nemo collections - the Fantagraphics tomes with the whole run, the near-tabloid-sized Nostalgia Press volume that introduced me to it. The battered copy of Mice and Magic that was a seed of my fascination with animation. The World of the Dark Crystal. All three Amphigoreys***. Books I haven't thought of yet that I read time and time again because they were just fun.

ten years of sketchbooks. images i wanted to scan and finish someday. stuff i never posted because i liked it but it was too half-baked or a fragment of something i wasn't ready to show, so there isn't even a screen-res scan.

gone to mold after all.

We don't know FOR SURE yet but it sounds like they're pretty sure my stuff is fucked. Minor default insurance: about $1200 per container. I could put that with what I'm not spending on shipping after all and buy a nice new laptop if I want to. I can never replace those sketchbooks.

* $300 direct from Matt for all of PB, haven't counted up SH. Of course the out-of-print issues are ones I had.
** $50-80 on Amazon for used copies of the complete edition. is the recent paperback reprint just Wonderland, or also Looking-glass and Snark?
*** amazon reveals there's a fourth posthumous one on the way

Meanwhile...

On the other hand, my mother just called. She got into her apartment. Aside from a powered-off fridge full of food left alone for a month, there was no damage at all. So what I brought with me is safe, and what had never left New Orleans is fine. And her stuff is all okay. I'm glad for her.

Really, it's ten years of sketchbooks that're the worst loss, if my stuff's gone. Everything else... Eh.

koot hoomi

So I'm sitting here reading Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati in the same bemused suspension of disbelief I seem to bring to all of his books. Since about halfway in I've been faintly wondering why Nuit is arching over every single illustration in the thing; I'm not feeling Mystickq enough to guess what the Significance of that might be without having him spell it out at some point.

Then I come across a passage that makes me start giggling.

Dr. Baker represents the Theosophical Society, founded by Madame H.P. Blavatsky, based on alleged transmissions from a Secret Chief named Hoot Koomi.

Hoot Koomi. Hoot Koomi.

I'm not laughing because it's a funny-sounding name (though it is). I'm laughing because I've run across the name before. I'm pretty sure Hoot Koomi showed up in one of Daniel M. Pinkwater's books.

A lot of my first contact with Weird Stuff like that was Pinkwater's books, to be honest- though I never knew it until twenty years or so later, when I ran across the same things in other contexts. and I didn't figure it out until I re-read his stuff as an adult and realized, hey, wait a second, this guy in Alan Mendhelsson, the Boy from Mars is a parody of L. Ron Hubbard, and all the gurus listed in The Last Guru were parodies of real gurus who found fame and fortune in the sixties, and...

Of course, I could be wrong: Googling for "Hoot Koomi" turns up a reference to Terry Pratchett's Pyramids as the first result that doesn't refer to the real Koomi.

Oh! Or perhaps the familiarity with the name is Tim Powers' Expiration Date, which centers around a boy named after Koomi. Who is posessed by the ghost of Thomas Edison - it's complicated. So maybe I'm misremembering Pinkwater. But I wouldn't be surprised if he, too, borrowed the name.

Because. Who could resist a name like that for comedic, mystic fiction?

Koot Hoomi.

And hey, postrodent and I had a discussion of how mind-meltingly cool Pinkwater's books were to our pre-adolescent selves, and how different they are when revisited as adults - maybe better, maybe not, I really can't decide. And I got to describe the wonderful author photo that graced a lot of my copies of his books: Pinkwater mid-leap, a delighted smile on his face, finger raised in a sort of 'aha!' moment, seemingly levitating.

PS. I got my boobie pills today. Hooray!