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community weblog

Despite his diminishing vision, he remained a prolific writer

As bilious, cutting and unsentimental as Jim's writing could be, he was at his core a terribly kind, generous and gentle soul. His final column, sent out from his Patreon on Sept. 27 — four decades after the first "Slackjaw" — was a Shepard-esque love letter to 1970s Green Bay, specifically about being an adolescent and discovering Henry Miller's "Black Spring" in the musty stacks of the town's lone used book store. The column was meant to be the first of a two-parter. The second part never arrived.
posted by chavenet on Oct 23, 2026 at 1:32 AM

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He never liked gardening, playing cards or fishing, and his "bright smile" was neither "contagious" nor did it ever "light up the room." Despite those deliberating character flaws, looking back he summed it up this way: A thousand regrets, failures, mistakes, traumas, tragedies, bad decisions and humiliations, but no complaints.
— obituary.
posted by scruss at 4:12 AM

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(also note: Jim's Patreon has been removed, so no-one's reading that love letter to 1970s Green Bay, no matter how Shepard-esque it may have been.)
posted by scruss at 4:14 AM

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I had to look up exactly where I remembered him from, but I vividly remember the when. I moved to New York City in 1995 after college. The late nineties in NYC included a battle between free alternative weekly newspapers, the longstanding Village Voice and the upstart New York Press. Knipfel was a mainstay of the Press, both as a columnist and critic. It was a time when young white men were speaking loudly, if slouchily. Dave Eggers, Jonathan Ames, Matt Taibbi. Knipfel took a similar grouchy-old-man-before-his-time stance but informed it with an advocacy for vision impaired people that never felt like complaining but made me feel like he had more of a right to be grouchy than a lot of other folks. I miss having a vibrant print media landscape.
posted by rikschell at 4:31 AM

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1. I think he would have gotten a kick out of seeing himself described as a "blind, dyspeptic memoirist."
2. Not mentioned in his obituary is an obituary he wrote for The Big Guy, his alt-weekly-famous cat, that all but made me sob, and I'm not a crier. (Sample pull quote: "This cat got mail.")
3. I once saw him lurking in a Sixth Avenue doorway under his fedora, and "lurking" is absolutely le mot juste.
4. And of course,

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posted by scratch at 5:08 AM

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I was a book seller when his "Slackjaw" came out. Wonderful book.
posted by djseafood at 8:04 AM

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I was an avid reader from the NY Press days in the late 90s, the golden years of free alt weeklies in NYC.
posted by fingers_of_fire at 8:08 AM

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I loved reading him in the NY Press so much. Never knew how to pronounce his name, but I got to fangirl out when he called in to make a donation at a place I was volunteering at (and spelled the name out for me)...

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posted by armacy at 9:49 AM

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posted by mneekadon at 3:10 PM

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Thanks for this post, which has sent me down a rabbit hole of reading his 90s columns and thinking about the vibes of a bygone alt-weekly era.
posted by johngoren at 2:27 AM

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I miss the old late 90s New York Press. Most of their columnists and critics in that were great writers, even if I didn't agree with their viewpoints and general worldviews. Knipfel was my favorite to read; outside of his disability awareness campaign, he didn't have some grand intellectual dream that he was pitching in his writing

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posted by KingEdRa at 9:59 AM

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