Oh no…

James Capozzola, 1962-2007

My friend Jim died this evening.

Jim, one of the founders of the political blogosphere, started the Rittenhouse Review a week or two before Duncan Black started Eschaton.

He was my fairy blogfather. He showed me how to install a sitemeter, he gave me tips for building readership, and advised me to “pick a fight with a blogger who’s much better known – you can’t believe how well it works.” (I never took his advice, though.) He even paid to have the ugly banner ad removed from the top of my first site.

More than that, Jim was extraordinarily generous. A master networker, he insisted on introducing all of his friends to each other and they, in turn, became friends. “See?” he’d say. “I told you you’d hit it off.” In turn, I introduced him to the sweet potato fries and the chocolate bread pudding at Silk City.

Rittenhouse Review was one of the first progressive blogs I started reading regularly.  Through his blog Jim introduced me to many others in the progressive blog sphere who I now regard as daily necessities.  Atrios, and Fred Clark’s Slacktivist to name two.  Jim was kind enough to put my little blog on his blogroll one day, and he emailed me some questions about why I was blogging, and would I mind being put on his blogger mailing list.  I was just thrilled to have the attention.  I quickly began to thoroughly enjoy Jim’s online company.  Jim was a really good hearted man, and he had a curious, restless, hungry mind.  His blog posts, which ranged far and wide across any topic that interested him only gave you a hint of it.  I remember one day Jim emailed me out of the blue and asked if I could take some photos of a couple specific Christian Scientist temples in the Washington Baltimore area.  He said he was doing research for a book on their architectural styles.  Susie notes in her blog post…

Jim spoke God knows how many languages. I once met him for lunch when he walked in wearing a Walkman. This intrigued me, because he never, ever listened to popular music. “What are you listening to?” I said, pulling at the headphones.

“I’m teaching myself Dutch,” he said, almost apologetically.

Then one day, just as Susie mentions in the post above, Jim invited me to Philadelphia to meet his other blogger friends.  That was when I got to meet Duncan Black (Atrios) and Fred Clark, and many other really nice folks…and of course Jim himself.  It was a treat.  You hear it over and over again how some people are much quieter and more soft spoken in person then they are online.  That was true to a degree with Jim, but also he was if anything, more intense in person then you saw on his blog.  You really saw that restless curiosity about…well…everything…when you met him in person.  It was wonderful for an evening, just to behold it.

So we’ve lost another good person in the blog world this summer and I am heartbroken.  I hadn’t heard from Jim in ages and I just assumed he’d lost interest in blogging because that hungry mind of his had wandered elsewhere.  I had no idea he was sick.  I should have pinged him a time or two this past year and I didn’t, and now I can’t.