June 23, 2000
Los Angeles, California

Dear Readers,

Today’s letter is by Marc Herman, an American journalist who these days is reporting from South and Central America.

The reporting of his that I’ve liked the most, recently, has been published onTimothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, for which Marc has been covering the American Presidential election, from Chile. You can (and should) read his dispatches, which you can find here,here, here, and here (in chronological order). Open Letters is proud to name Marc as our first official correspondent for mines and fisheries. Mostly mines.

McSweeney’s, I should say, especially the online version, has published some remarkable letters and letter-like dispatches, which have served simultaneously as a continuing inspiration for this project and a source of intense jealousy that we didn’t get to publish them first. I’d recommend especially this letter and this one, by Glasgow Phillips; and this one and this other one, by Catherine Zymet, who writes books about the popular bands of the day.

In other news: the coincidences continue to roll in.

An Open Letters subscriber named Stephanie, from New York, writes:

Just an hour before reading “A Billion to One,” several coworkers and I were discussing “The Real Thing,” as two of us saw it over the weekend and the other saw it a few weeks ago. Then we started talking about Tom Stoppard, and then Rosencrantz and Gildenstern… came up. Then I went to check my e-mail, which included a posting from mediabistro which is promoting your site. Since mediabistro also put me on todailycandy.com, I figured I’d check out openletters.net. And what did I find but your musings on The Real Thing, Tom Stoppard, and coincidences.

Since the letter was all about coincindences, I thought you would want to hear how your piece figured into yet another coincidence. I’m not sure if this will convince you to believe you are part of something “big and significant and magical,” but isn’t life more interesting if you do?

Regards,
Stephanie

Another correspondent, from Manitoba, writes:

I do believe in signs, but whenever anybody asks me, I tend to say that I don’t because I don’t like the conversations that follow if I say that I do. I don’t know why. One time a friend of mine from Halifax was lying around in Assiniboine Park, and he looked up to the sky and saw, in the shape of a cloud, an express rat wearing shades and pointing west, according to him, and he got on a bus and went to Medicine Hat that very day where he found, in the bus depot, a message to him on the bulletin board that said, To Ken: I did not have the baby, so stop wondering. Anita.

And then there was this weird little moment: I got an email from Lynn Crosbie, she of the CuJo obsession, referring to my card trick with the four of diamonds. Lynn wrote:

The 4 of Diamonds is a very bad card, according to Cormac McCarthy, who found and buried one in the Saanich Peninsula.

The argument you present is like the *plate of shrimp* thing in *Repo Man*, isn’t it?

The mystic type tells Estevez about the cosmic chain, enmeshing all. His evidence: When you think the phrase “plate of shrimp”, he says, you invariably see the word “plate”, or a picture of a shrimp.

An idea I think about all the time.

After I read Lynn’s notes on shrimp, I checked my email again, and found I had received one new message.

The subject line? “Plate of Shrimp.”

The email was from a man named Jim Cox, who lives in Seattle. His coincidence, I have to say, might take the cake, perhaps nudging aside even the Shmelvis coincidence I quoted yesterday. As Jim explains:

I enjoyed your missive today on coincidence. Reminded me of the time I was on a plane and they were playing the movie “Honey I Blew Up the Kids”. I was listening to the Pixies on my walkman but occasionally my eyes were diverted to the screen. In one of the big payoff scenes, there’s a huge three year old — about 4-5 stories high — toddling down the strip in Las Vegas doing Godzilla-like inadvertent damage. Meanwhile the Pixies are heading into the song “Happening” (on Bossanova), about extra-terrestrials landing on the Vegas strip. Now the huge kid on the screen has picked up a car with some frightened people (his parents?) in it, and he’s kind of windmilling it way up over his head and way down near the street (still on the strip), a la Pete Townsend.

At that moment, Black Francis is shouting “They’re gonna put it down, right on the strip! They’re gonna put it down, right on the Vegas strip.” It was magic I tell you.

So there you are.

Thanks to Repo Man, we know a plate o’ shrimp when we are served one.

Jim Cox

Tomorrow will bring something new to Open Letters – the first of our weekly Conversations. Tomorrow’s conversation is with Sarah Jones, a sixth-grade student in Toronto who is, at press time, the most popular girl in her school. She discusses, with Open Letters correspondent Deirdre Dolan, the issue of popularity: how you get it, how you keep it, and how you lose it.

And then on Monday, we’ll have the first installment of a two-part letter from the Department of Lost Objects, in Jerusalem, by Samantha Shapiro.

Please stay tuned. Please send more coincidences. And please subscribe. It’s free.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough