Donations

 

Just beyond our entrance security gates, we have a large, canvas bin for people to put their library donations in. I like to wander over from the desk during a slow moment and see what the cat dragged in. Sometimes there is some fun stuff in there and sometimes it's just junk.

Tonight it's just junk. It is full nearly to the top with old cookbooks. None are old enough to be interesting, none are new enough to be worth looking at, and none are unique or well-made enough to defy their listless, generic, washed-out time period. 

I almost cried out "What a bunch of junk!"

But there were people around. What if one of them was the person who donated it all?

Not that they didn't know it was all the worst sort of junk, just...

those are the very people who least like to hear it.

The scale of things

In our world of so many billions of people, it is easy to misjudge the scale of things. 

I merely work at a modestly busy, near urban library of a vaguely largish American Urban area (the hundredth largest in the world actually- higher than I thought!). But people still regularly misjudge the scale of their interaction with us. Just minutes ago a man bypassed our efficient and easy to use automated return slot, and large check in machine, through which our team of people processes many many thousands of transactions of a great variety every day, all to come to manually hand me a book return at the front desk at the library. 

"I couldn't renew this." He said. "So someone is waiting for it and I wanted to get it right to them."

!

"Oh no!" I cried. "I will call them immediately! Thank you so much! This will be our highest priority! Can you just do me one favor?"

"What's that?" The patron asks suspiciously.

"Will you hang this "Library Closed" sign on our front doors so that we can focus all our attention on getting this book over to the person waiting for it?" 

Then I pull our fire alarm.

Actually, I don't do any of that. One reason is that I simply try not to be a sarcastic asshole. But more importantly, to our discussion here today, I don't do that because, statistically speaking, three institutions will have already been an asshole to that guy already today.

In the scale of things four is just too many.

In case we ever have a new reader here

 

Generally speaking, when I am at the front desk of my library and someone asks me a question, I answer it briefly and simply. Like:

"Is there a librarian in the kids' room?"

Me: "Yes."

If they want to know more, and/or have a more complex question I simply start talking.

An example of this would not be kind to your Internet pleasure.

I talk and I talk and I talk and I don't stop until they feel they have mastered the material or found what they came for.

Conceivably a library patron could have me talk endlessly, explaining a wider and wider range of library information, speculation, history, and philosophy forever. All they have to do is never stop me.

No one has yet dared.

But if you really are curious as to what that would be like...

Welcome to clerkmanifesto.

The age of wonders

 

Let me take this moment.

We are in one of the most extraordinary flourishings of technological wonders in the history of the world! 

Capabilities of magic that, if explained to someone 100 years ago, would have seemed like raving science fictional wonders, would also seem like raving science fiction wonders to, well, me, say, five years ago. 

Five years ago!

So what's the issue? Why the disdain and jaded interest from all but a coterie of fervent acolytes?

1. We are so inured to these magic tricks that though our astonishment is genuine in the first moment, we so quickly absorb the wonder that it is mundane to most of us within five minutes. Nearly everyone I shared a sophisticated, handcrafted song of my own highly personalized lyrics with, was amazed and full of questions. People wanted to know the singer. People wanted to know how on earth! People loved it!

And then, like that, it was over.

No one was particularly interested in any subsequent songs. They were done. Onto the next thing.

2. It is all going to go bad.

Controlled by greedy oligarchs, all of this brilliant collection of creative tools- pictures, video, and songs on command, talking, friendly robot all-knowing search engines, and so on, is bound inextricably to a collection of ruling powers that have, well,

FUCKING LOST THEIR MINDS

Wild with unendingly voracious obsessions with money and power, they hold these stunning little treasures in their fevered hands. 

I think we know that they are not gifts; 

they are loans.

And since we have watched wonder after wonder of our humanity arrive and go sour, we are sensible enough, and so inured, that a couple moments of being impressed will suffice before we understand that all this is going to go ugly in ways we can't quite understand.

And fair enough.

But let me take this moment:

I have been hunting the Internet for very particular kinds of poems to use in order to make gorgeous songs in my favorite styles. But then Meta AI shows up, and I can just ask it:

Show me a short, rhyming poem that was mildly popular in the 1920's, by a woman of color.

And I know that any sensible person knows just how broken the current Internet is, and, frankly, how broken it probably will be, but I typed that question into the a newer AI search:

Show me a short, rhyming poem that was mildly popular in the 1920's, by a woman of color.

And,

It simply did.

Poetry

 

I am no great reader of poetry. I have been touched by it here and there over the years, but rarely deeply and lastingly. So I am finding myself in both a curious project, and an illuminating one.

Having discovered a bit of new AI Technological madness call Udio, an extraordinary music generator, I have, among other things, started digging out old, mildly famous poetry, and attempting to fashion it into songs through the use of this innovation. This process, when successful, takes two or three hours steady work to get to a mostly finished song, usually a song two or three minutes long. The style of my songs so made vary from Dylanesque, to Janis Joplin, The Kinks, and Melanie, all the way to garage rock of the aughts, and the work of French Chanteuses from I'm not exactly sure when. There's even a weird bit of carnival music in there. For the poets I use, I avoid anything too modern and also anything too old, and include more famous people like Baudelaire, Rilke, and Emily Dickinson, but also Stevie Smith, William Allingham, Louise Gluck, and Sarojini Naidu- people I have either vaguely heard of or not at all.

I adore these songs I have made.

I

Absolutely

Adore

Them!

Surely it is partly the joy of having made something new. I have always experienced an unavoidable narcissism in that. But also it is in seeing the illumination of these verses I could normally not attend to. Hearing them, as I do in the process of creating these songs, which is surely as much as 30 or 40 times, is all the difference in the world to me. And the blandness I experience in my first encounter reading them is turned, by these songs, into an admiration and passionate reaction I hold for some of my favorite art.

I have one song that came out unnervingly in the style of Janis Joplin, of a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, called "Souvenir", and when I hear the verse:

I remember three or four

Things you said in spite,

And an ugly coat you wore,

Plaided black and white.

My feeling and reaction is the same as hearing some great passage from a Leonard Cohen song. The words, in all their art, are for me wholly brought to life. They utterly pierce me. 

Today I was working on another short poem/song, this by Longfellow, called "Loss and Gain". I would always have counted Longfellow as a poet with some nice musicality, but offering nothing to care about in what he said for me. His words seemed to veer too close to some kind of homily. But listening to it as an awesome rock song, and hearing it over and over? I suddenly felt his idea as it developed, and when he drove to a self defiant conclusion of:

But who shall dare

To measure loss and gain in this wise?

Defeat may be victory in disguise;

The lowest ebb is the turn of the tide.

I was struck marveled in his wisdom and in his cry for the value of things unvalued. It was awesome.

You will see here no links to any of these songs I extol, and which, in your hearing them, I feel in my heart would make my point. But I share none of these songs with you now. Possibly some of this can be accounted to the work that must be taken to turn them into videos to make them reachable for you from this place. Some of it, though, is that I simply love them too much. Seeing, after several days, what amounts to three or four views of my YouTube video of my song of a poem of Emily Dickinson is oddly horrifying. This is what happens to something I count among the best things I have ever had a hand in making?

 Although I do recognize the irony in this. The very song itself says:

How dreary to be somebody!

How public like a frog,

To tell one's name the livelong June,

To an admiring bog!

And it hardly seems likely these songs won't show up here sooner or later, if anyone cares.

But for me they are mine. 

And I listen to them with a cold private fury of delight, and find them special.

 

In which I help you with your place in this world

 

I was looking out over the Mississippi River. It is a mighty river and long. And I wondered:

How many people are looking at this river, like me, at this very moment?

And then; 

How many people have ever looked at the Mississippi River?

Either a lot!

Or none.

Do you believe in other people?

This is a more important question than one might think!

You may think you dispensed with such a question at age 15. 

No one has fully dispensed with this question!

So, do you believe in other people?

You should!

Or at the very least, me. You should believe in me.

Because I could swear I was looking at the Mississippi River!

And I suspect there were others as well.

Our millionth subscriber

 

At 2:11 a.m., on Tuesday morning, clerkmanifesto welcomed its one millionth subscriber. I got the Google Blogger Plaque just this afternoon and have hung it in a place of honor in my library. Having a million subscribers reading clerkmanifesto is a great honor, and, as promised, I will be donating $100,000 to the home for forgotten bloggers.

As few as 17 years ago, blogging was the second biggest money maker in the entertainment industry, and thousands of talented writers, eschewing their best novel writing years, made ample incomes writing personal columns on an Internet oozing with personality.

Now, sadly, those days are long gone, and famous bloggers that were veritable household names, like Neal the Pat Peterson, The Divine Doreen, and Let's talk Pickles, are all but forgotten.

What do you mean you've never heard of The Divine Doreen?

Whatever.

I'm not bitter.

I just want you to know that if my $100,000 can pay for just one, vintage, lower east side pickle barrel to remind Let's Talk Pickles of his glory days, then all my work here will have been worth it.

Yes of course he still loves all things pickles.

Lord, the Internet is fickle!

For instance, my subscriber count that just a few days ago hit one million, has now dropped back down to four!

I hope I can keep my plaque.

Temptation song, the lyrics

It's late at night as I write now. 

Earlier, while sitting at the front desk of my library, 

I wrote a post for you, 

But compelled by mysterious forces, 

I set my words into verse.

Not so unlike this now.

Since we don't much truck with poetry around here,

At clerkmanifesto 

(at least, not with my own), 

there was only one thing left to do:

I got together with my robot friends, 

and made it into a song.

(This one below isn't it. It's actually a song version of the above!)

The real song is called "The Temptation Song".

Horribly, this platform won't let me just make an audio post, at least, not in any way I understand. So I have to make it into a video. And then I have to post it to YouTube, embed it here, and hope you can watch it.

This video is not as fancy as the Emily Dickinson one, mostly because I want to go to bed before midnight. So it's just a few still pictures. 

But it's good enough to let you hear the song.

Art

 

While this show of my photographs of library workers with their spirit animals is up at my library, and meeting with a strong interest from the general community, I am occasionally encountering a curious question. It goes something like this:

"If you can make art like this, why didn't you do that for a living all these years?"

There are a lot of answers to this question! 

Many of them don't go together. 

How does one answer a question that has many clashing answers?

With art!

Clerkmanifesto, the video version

It's all in the video today:

The clerkmanifesto song

  

Clerkmanifesto has a song now.

It's called "Dead Things Float"

Here is the music video link, but I've also tried embedding just the song without the video version.

To watch on YouTube

Or try here:

Or with this:

I mean, one of these methods is bound to work.

Lyrics:

I've been staying up too late,

telling you my stories

Obscure clerk manifesto,

Home of all my glories

(Refrain)

Clerk Manifesto

Clerk Manifesto

The cream rises to the top

Clerk Manifesto

Clerk Manifesto

Dead things float

Come hear my song

Singing ten years now

It's getting pretty long,

It's everything I wrote.

I know you know it's dreaming,

Not everything can float.

(Refrain)

Clerk Manifesto,

Clerk Manifesto,

The cream rises to the top,

I'm the least successful goat,

Clerk Manifesto,

I cannot help but gloat,

and,

Dead things,

Dead things,

Dead things float.

Yeah,

Dead things float.

I'm the least successful goat

I may be con deluded,

Bout everything I spoke,

I know just what the clue is,

Not everything's a joke,

Come here to the manifesto,

Dead things float.

Dead things float.

An attraction unto myself

 

The library was a little bit wild during the day today. School was out and the weather was fine and this place was hopping. People were everywhere, phones were ringing, and the library cards were flying.

Oh man, they were flyin'!

Until five o'clock, when, seemingly all at once, it got deadly quiet in here.

Maybe everyone had had enough library for the day? 

But not me. My work was not done. We go to eight around here. So I went out to the front desk of my library for an hour and tried to look approachable.

I didn't register a single card. I didn't help anyone find anything. And I didn't provide a single direction to anywhere in the library.

For the whole of the hour I answered four questions.

They were all about me.

Reminiscences of the great eclipse

 

I try to keep clerkmanifesto topical. And though this daily column is an intensely personal expression, it also marks out the great events of our lives. I have covered in this space the world-turning election of Donald Trump, the shock of the pandemic, and the little-noticed replacement of our Universe with an alternate one that is in every way identical to ours with the odd exception of not including closs.

I don't exactly miss closs, but I sometimes wonder what it was.

And so I didn't want to let the eclipse pass by without reflection here. After all, clerkmanifesto is a lot like a solar eclipse- it may not be safe to look directly at it.

Last night, as I was falling asleep, to my great fortune, I thought of a beautiful post to write about the solar eclipse. I almost got out of bed to write it, only to see the moon slowly pass between me and it until it was wholly obscured in darkness. When I could see again it was morning, and it was gone.

On the day of the eclipse, a pair of solar eclipse safety glasses fell into my hands. But clouds ruined the event for everyone in Minnesota and I never used the glasses at all. Today, though, I occasionally nostalgically put them on. People laugh at them and then ask me why I'm wearing them all these days later.

"That eclipse was so great," I say. "That I'm having trouble letting go."

Our new library project is finally completed!

 

My library has finally done it! After three years of work, and over 14 million dollars, we have finally converted our collection.

It is now made out of blocks of wood!

Every single book in our collection is now a hand carved facsimile of an actual book! The process has been amazing, and the result looks fantastic. 

We started by requisitioning nearly half a million custom processed blocks of wood:

These were prepped and packaged overseas:

In our onsite workshop local craftspeople hand carved the blocks of wood into rough facsimiles of actual books.

From there, finishing details were hand painted by the brush staff to give the blocks of wood, or "Bookdummies" as we have come to call them, an authentic look.

Sometimes multi-book "dummies" were created, according to careful specs, for the higher shelves.

Here is a picture of the shelving when we were staging the pre finished books:

And here is a picture of the nearly finished project on the main floor:

It has been a huge project, and one with considerable expense, but the long term benefits to our library aesthetics and future acquisitions budget are incalculable. 

We open this new collection to the public in just under a week, and we are so excited for the library patrons to finally see what we've been working on!

Gandhi autograph

 

A children's librarian was going through our book donations and found an easy picture book about Gandhi, called I Am Gandhi. There was a sticker on the cover that said "Autographed Copy!" This caused a bit of a double-take when one looked at it. But of course the book was written only seven years ago, and the author was Brad Melzer, not Gandhi.

So no Gandhi autograph, alas.

The librarian started to walk away with the book, but I stopped them and asked for it. I signed the inside cover, "Gandhi", with a bit of slapdash flourish, right next to what I took to be a genuine Brad Melzer signature.

No point in disappointing anyone else.

I wrote a hit play!

 

Ever since my project of portraits of my co-workers, posing with their spirit animals, got off the ground and elicited interest and enthusiasm, a scene from a movie started repeatedly running through my head. I always meant to write a post about this scene, but I wasn't sure how I would articulate the way in which the scene expressed my feelings.

So I waited.

And now that every day I watch crowds of people (well, several toddlers at least) pour over my display of artwork, the scene from this movie comes to me more than ever. It is towards the end of the movie, and the movie is called Rushmore. In it, a precocious teenager who just wrote, directed, and starred in a High School play about the Vietnam War, is, in his moment of triumph, finding that everything he wanted is slipping away from him. Inappropriately plied with alcohol by Bill Murray's character, he throws a bit of a fit that breaks the patina of his composure and reveals the strain of his adolescent development. "I wrote a hit play! I wrote a hit play!" He insists, as if having created something popular, or of power, should come with special rewards, respect, license, and love.

And so it is for six months, in the shadow of my popular and much discussed photography series, and as my work world remains nevertheless the same, filled with its constant small indignities, irritations, and lack of special dispensations, there is, sounding like a bell in my head (albeit with a touch of humorous irony) "BUT I WROTE A HIT PLAY!!!!!".

I am not sixteen though. So I try to keep it to myself.

Origin story

 

For a little while in the 1950's in California, famous musical artists Nat King Cole and Cole Porter lived next door to each other. And as they both liked to garden they formed a friendship over their shared backyard fence.

One late Summer they both found themselves with bumper crops of cabbages coming in. They liked to tease each other about whose cabbages were biggest and who could grow the most cabbages. Indeed, they argued about everything regarding those cabbages- when to water, the best fertilizer, and how to control the pests that would try to feast on their harvest. But there was one thing they absolutely agreed upon, and that was just what a person should do with cabbage once it was picked. 

Cole Porter and Nat King Cole both strongly felt that cabbage, all cabbage, should be shredded raw, and then tossed liberally with mayonnaise, cider vinegar, and a bit of mustard.

They felt this so fanatically that it became known all around town as "Coles' Law".

So you wanna see my snails???

 

In my slight, but wildly entertaining column yesterday, I mentioned my hours of labor on photographic projects that came to absolutely nothing, nothing, that is, outside of my slight, but wildly entertaining column.

But did I give up?

Nooooo!

I spent many more hours working on snail pictures.

Did I get there? Did I finally crack the code? Did my perseverance pay off?

I don't know.

What's with all the hard questions? 

Here the fruit of my labors!

 

It was my day off!

I leapt out of bed, ran to the computer, and started weaving my magic.

Working with a series of pictures I recently took of graffiti on a long walk by abandoned railway tracks, carefully edited, and then a series of meticulously AI generated snails removed from their backgrounds and subtly altered, I managed, after five hours, to produce this!

No, I mean this. 

These comments. 

The pictures didn't turn out.

My audience

 

I have been perhaps a little too negative about having my show of my photos of co-workers and their spirit animals up at the library. First, right after the show started, it seemed like everyone was just walking by all the pictures without even glancing their way. Then, on the second day, some anonymous co-worker concern trolled my show by expressing their concern to a manager that some of the people who willingly took part in posing for the show might not want to be in it, theoretically. So that kind of bummed me out for a bit.

But the truth is that lots of people look at my pictures. Some of them even for more than ten seconds! Some of them even...no.... yes, I have to say it... with enthusiasm! And it's very nice.

And watching all of this I have learned more about my constituency. My very biggest fans are...

Toddlers!

Toddlers love my pictures!

Only, so many of the photos are hung so high up on these metal display racks that these little wee children can mostly only see one low-placed one on the way to the kids' room, the one with a seal. The tiny kids point at it and thrust their hand into it in a fit of artistic appreciation.

I thought "These toddlers really love my work. I've got to put more pictures down near the floor where they can see them!

So this very evening I went out to the racks and did a little rearranging. I moved three more pictures to the lower part of the panel where the toddlers always stop to admire on the way to the children's room. These are now too low for adults to see, but perfect for three-year-old's. And sure enough, as I was filling in some holes in the display I'd caused when I moved things around, a toddler wandered by. He halted his whole family and thrust his arm into one of my newly accessible pictures. He seized one frame briefly in his tiny fists. He pushed his smeary little hand into another. And then he started freely babbling, in a delightful tone (to me, at least):

"wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!"