Maybe just shaking hands?

 

Recently, in showing you a couple of my latest Clerkmanifestoland videos, I referenced all the hugging. There's more hugging here, but we start out with an enthusiastic handshake involving what might be an enthusiastic Munchkin. The hugging only comes in with a surprise special guest at the end. But because this music video clocks in at under a minute long I think it might be better served if it isn't described in detail ahead of time. Perhaps then it's a little too late for that. I guess you'll just have to go in full of knowledge about what you'll be seeing, forcing you to admire the detailed nuance, or, conversely, leaving you notice all the weird artifacts, glitches, and bizarre peculiarities of AI.

Anyway, click on the picture, and your ride begins.

More journeys down dark streets where someone you are fond of may hug you warmly

 

As promised, warned?, I am here again with picture doorways to more of my video shorts.

I think my title says a lot about the vibe I am mostly going for in these films. I guess it varies a bit more than that, but I did eventually get to the point where if I ended up with two characters in the frame I'd have them hug warmly. The AI handles hugging a good deal better than punching, and it's nicer as well.

Here are a couple of pictures for you to click on your way through the looking glass.

Wizards and Dragons

 

For my birthday, a little over a month ago, I got an unlimited month of access to one of my favorite video generators. It produces five to six seconds of video from a photograph, and though it is extremely hard to get it do what I want, every rare once in awhile it does something even better than what I hoped, which is pretty neat. Toward the end of the month I focused more on getting my finished clips complete, sewn together, and in order, and it is only since my access to this tool expired that I have been putting all my pieces together to make my 30 to 60 second music video canapes.

But this movie making part went pretty quickly, so I have quite a few Clerkmanifestoland videos posting up on YouTube over the next four or five days.

Because I feel that, above all, these video shorts belong here, actually in Clerkmanifestoland (yes, you are in clerkmanifestoland even as we speak!), I will be mainly posting up links here for the next few days.

This first one has fantasy elements to it. 

Oh, wait, they all do.

Click through the picture to enter...

Yet another work of unheralded genius on my part

 

I wandered over to my library's little bookstore to see what was up in there. A junky little book of inspirational sayings was on display, and I rolled the dice by opening it up. There was a quote by Judith Martin, also known as Miss Manners, possibly the greatest of all newspaper feature writers from the latter half of the twentieth century.

She said:

"It is far more impressive when others discover your good qualities without your help."

So If I was looking for something to scoff at by opening that book, I was out of luck.

Miss Manners is not to be scoffed at.

And, in fact, Miss Manners is also entirely correct. Surely it is indeed way more impressive when people discover your good qualities without your help.

Not that I would know. I've never had the patience.

Protecting the purity of the Internet

 

Man alive, I was really going.

I was five paragraphs in to the kind of saucy, trenchant, irreverent, inspired, and insightful essay that on special occasions takes this legendary blog, clerkmanifesto, to the next fucking level.

I was on fire. 

I had to take a moment or the keyboard would start melting!

So I read over what I had written.

Oh lord, it really was too good for the Internet!

So I deleted it and wrote this instead.

Co-worker bonanza

 

Wow did I have a lot of co-workers today!

I don't know why. All I can say is that sometimes I'm basically alone in my giant library, taking care of everything, and sometimes there are 15 other people around all ostensibly doing my exact same job.

Mysteriously the same amount of work gets done in either situation. I call that "The law of institutional averages". The larger the institution the more impervious it is to change. In a library the size of mine, this means that on a given day whether one person is working, or sixteen, it doesn't make much of a difference. It would take several days for everything to really begin falling apart.

The real impact, short term, of all these co-workers everywhere is that it is exhausting! There are so many people to talk to! And if those people want to talk to me, that is exhausting! And if those people don't want to talk to me, that is exhausting too! 

So I go upstairs to the fiction section to shelve, but there are like six co-workers up there. What are they all doing? They're not shelving. But surely they're doing something important. Maybe they've simply spread there, like water in a flood. There are so many library workers today that we are just naturally spreading out to fill out every bit of unused space in the building.

It's hard to breathe.

But I've been here before. This is temporary. Soon this fecundity of co-workers will be gone and it will be quiet and understaffed in my library once again. We will see only the marks of the receded library workers, two shelves up on the library stacks upstairs, where all the books are in order up to a level, and then a mess above that.

Library card aversion

 

I don't particularly like making library cards for people. There's certainly nothing terrible about it all that I can point to. When I'm doing it it's not like I'm screaming in my head "This is agony!" But the whole thing is procedural, repetitive and consumes an above average amount of time for any desk interaction at my library. So I don't like it. In fact, if someone were to come up to me at the desk right now, interrupting my beautiful essay writing, I probably would scream in my head: "This is agony!" But I would only do that at the moment of interruption, at the dawning realization. Once we were on to the registering I might go on to have a perfectly nice time making the library card for our hopeful new library user. Maybe it's like that scene in the beautiful movie "About Time" where the main character brings his (future) wife to his parents' enchanting home on a cliff over a beach. In preparation for the day he tells his future wife not to agree to tea, but then his mom offers the inevitable tea and his future wife agrees, and our main character says something like "Christ, there's the whole day then."

At which point this bunch of delightful people all sit around on the beach all afternoon having tea and crumpets.

Like what else were you planning to do?

But now I may have gone too far here having analogized my getting a library card for a library patron to having tea and crumpets on a gorgeous private beach with lovely people.

I have become reasonably convinced that everyone in my professional position dislikes getting people library cards as well. It's the little signs that give it away: when people happen to walk away from the desk to take care of something else, or the stories patrons tell me about why someone wouldn't get them a library card somewhere else. There are always tells about the jobs that people don't like in a work environment like mine; things that mysteriously don't get done at every possible opportunity.

Because I don't like creating library cards I have become acutely sensitive to reading whether a person is coming to the desk to ask to get a library card. Often I can spot these people clear across the library, reading subtle tells of their body language. Most people don't even need to speak to me for me to know that they are going to want a library card. But people are strange, and sometimes I let down my guard.

For instance earlier today someone came to me at the desk and said "I just have a super quick question."

I love super quick questions!

I am phenomenal at super quick questions!

"Can I get a library card?" He asked.

Arrrrrggghhhhhhhhh! Agony!

 

Clerkmanifestoland visited yet again

 

As far as I'm concerned this video today is fairly bananas.

I was going to say there aren't any bananas in it, but actually there's a fruit market in it, so there might be bananas. Keep an eye out.

There are cats, and math, hats, wings like bats. It all comes into the song and video.

Sometimes I have a clear idea of what I'm putting together, but this one strung together one continuous shot, made 5 seconds at a time, into a string of opportunities. 

Maybe just chalk it up to:

Clerkmanifestoland 

As ever, click through the picture:

Christmastime

 

I am here to announce that it is now officially Christmas Season.

How do I know it's started?

You can tell by the kind of animals that start showing up on my motion activated nature camera that I have set up on Shadow Falls Creek to film footage of everything that passes by. Usually I just get squirrel and robins, but I pick out the best bits and show them to you here. But lately what I've been picking up on my camera is considerably more... seasonal.

You'll see what I mean if you click through the photo below.

You have seen this photo below before as my music video gateway. But this will probably be the last, or almost last of the nature camera videos for awhile, which, if you're tired of them, will be excellent news. 

But if you loved them, well, if you loved them, if you love my nature camera videos, I, um, gosh, I'm actually too excited that someone loved them to continue my train of thought. 

I'm overcome with emotion. 

I need to go have a lie down for a bit.

Chestnuts

 

Here's a chestnut for you:

There used to be four billion chestnut trees in my country. But then the chestnut blight, or ink disease, came along in the early 1900's and wiped most of them out. But don't worry, counting just mature chestnut trees there are still like a hundred chestnut trees now in the U.S.A.

That's a lot!

If I had a hundred readers of clerkmanifesto I'd be sitting pretty!

But I'll grant you that it's not quite four billion.

Tonight my darling wife and I had some roasted chestnuts. They were probably imported. So they're kind of a metaphorical nut for... every single thing about America in every way possible. 

These chestnuts were quite tasty, but I didn't like cutting X's into their tough shells to roast them. And there was some peeling that was challenging too, and had to be done to get rid of a kind of inner skin that was inedible. I saw a recipe that told me how to roast easy peel chestnuts. The recipe said it was a 30 minute recipe, but it involved soaking the chestnuts overnight. 

This sounded more like a 12 hour recipe to me.

I didn't have 12 hours. We needed to eat some chestnuts in a hurry!

In Rome (and probably loads of other places in Europe), people roast chestnuts on street corners in charcoal braziers, and they sell them in paper cones. They are very fun to buy and to eat and they make you think:

Maybe when all the Chestnut Trees died something in America died too.

Actually, I don't think those street chestnuts make very many people think that.

And that concludes everything I know about chestnuts.

I would, at this point, refer you several excellent chestnut blogs, but there aren't any!

Did you know that there used to be four billion blogs on the Internet?

Now there are barely one hundred!

I am one of them.

It's a lot of responsibility. 

I'm trying to get around to every possible subject, but it takes awhile. 

Thank you for your patience.

 

In which we promote what you're already here for

A few short paragraphs about working in a library.

Some observations on culture.

A picture of a cartoon character in the woods.

Every once in awhile the trickle of a third of a novel, or a hundredth of one.

A reflection on love, an old friend, the nature of turkeys, automated check in machines, or how to cook a baked potato.

Clerkmanifesto.

Each day here is a tiny step.

Maybe even most people who have come here, and taken a few steps, or a few dozen, or even a few hundred, and have tired of the small distance they cover, and they wandered away.

But each day another step is here nevertheless, with a view just enough different from anything else ever.

And day by day, every day, over the course of 12, 13, 14 years, all these tiny steps...

And suddenly you look around and...

Clerkmanifestoland.

(Please do click through the picture):

 

Cold and sweet

 

I have a cold. And outside of the times where I feel terribly tired, or when a persistent itch of a cough keeps me awake for hours, or when my nose won't stop running, I am really not minding the whole thing too much. It's such an understandable illness. I understand it will go away. I am confident it won't be killing me. And I feel like it might lead to less colds in the near future rather than more.

This is not like most other infirmities I find myself facing, the mercurial back pain of my adulthood, for instance, or the weird intensities of Covid from a few months ago, and so I'll take my wins where I can get them. 

So here I am, taking my win, blowing my nose, which has become a bit sore from all the wiping, and drinking peppermint tea with lots of honey.

I go at sore throats and coughs and colds with Ricola, honey, and sorbets. 

A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, sure, but what if sugar is the medicine? 

No, I understand that sugar is a bit of a poison, but isn't that the trick then? The cold virus flees in terror from all the sweetness?

No?

Well, if I have to spend an extra day sneezing so be it.

Things that set off the motion camera I have set up at the Shadow Falls Bridge

 

For my 4,375th clerkmanifesto post I have another collection of...

Things that set off the motion camera I have set up at the Shadow Falls Bridge!

I might even have two collections of them- the full cut of a shorter film that you might have previously seen, and a brand new 58 second film, set to an old Hank Williams tune! 

I mean, it's not really a Hank Williams tune.

But then it's not really a motion camera.

The bridge is usually real though.

But I simply have to say, since we're talking about numbers here, who would have guessed back in post number, I don't know, 2,114, that I would be showing links to my AI video work in this space?

Oh, yes, besides you Doris.

Back at post 2,114 I still held a fairly strict view that clerkmanifesto would be exclusively a work of text. But once I started to roll all my hobbies and work into this one single place, I suppose the mishmash was inevitable. 

Anyway, here are two copies of the same picture, but clicking on them will bring you to two different videos that start the same way.

The dynamic duo

 

Among the all-time great creative pairings, up there with the likes of Lennon-McCartney, or Frodo and Sam, must surely be the lesser-known Rylant-Howard. This is the author-illustrator team behind the Mr. Putter and Tabby children's chapter book series of stories. Because the genius and perfection of these books are so unlikely, I have a tendency to repeatedly forget about them. But fortunately I work at a library, so no sooner do I forget them than a copy of, say, Mr. Putter Pours the Tea falls into my hands, and, struck by the charming look of it, I read it yet again.

And I remember.

How a writer and illustrator made flawlessly charming masterpieces out of stories for young children about an old man with an old cat is a thing of wonder. And yet there it is. Every color picture is loose and clear and delightful to look at, engaging in its warmth in a way that oddly reminds me of the feeling in the drawings in "Winnie the Pooh". Mr. Putter's world is at once almost intensely mundane, but the color, character, and simplicity gives it a coziness that's wonderfully powerful.

 In the first book of the series an old man is lonely and has no one to have tea with or to tell his stories to. And, as the author tells us, he has good stories! So the old man decides to get a cat. At the pet store, to the old man's disappointment, they just have kittens for sale. He wants an old cat, old like him, so he gets sent to an animal shelter where he finds himself a proper old cat. 

And they are happy together.

And that's the whole story! That' it!

But then, what about this:

A woman sits quietly in a nice simple dress. It's hard to tell whether she is happy or sad. You can see the pretty countryside behind her.

That's The Mona Lisa, and though I have heard many people complain it is not nearly as good as it's cracked up to be, they are wrong.

I know I have shown you a lot of pictures of Mr. Putter and Tabby in my library, as above at the start of this missive, but I was curious if maybe I have already told you about how great these books are. So I keyword searched all of clerkmanifesto with the word "Putter", and I came up with the almost embarrassing 10 times I have shown some variation of the picture above. Then there was a post or two involving some kind of "puttering" on my part. There was a golf post that included a putter. And there were several posts in which I used some variation on the word "sputter". 

Not that I couldn't have told you about Mr. Putter again, if I had to. I am also surprised that these books have not yet been listed on my greatest books of all time list, in the options to your right here in the Internet. I will now duly add them in, and I hope you will join me in welcoming them to our honor roll.

Sike and lubscribe

 

I have a little bit of cold or something coming on slowly or relentlessly, and so I sat down early to write a nice brief post for you. 

But I am easily led astray. And so I spent some time trying to get these lyrics into a song instead:

Sometimes its just a bird,

Or even a fly flying by,

And it cant be heard,

no matter how we try.

And though we strain and reach,

It's heedless to our cry

(Chorus)

But sometimes my eyes open

My heart is thrown wide,

And I am like the ocean,

And you are like the tide.

This bridge has felt the foot,

Of every wild thing,

Buried like a root,

Resplendent as a king,

But its plain as the dirt on the ground

And depends upon our dreams.

(Chorus)

Oh sometimes my eyes open

My heart is thrown wide,

And I am like the ocean,

And you are like the tide

.

This bridge is just the future,

Of everything you chose,

You're led by something putrid,

A king without his clothes,

But you're greater than all of that,

If you'll just give up your pose.

(Chorus)

Yes sometimes my eyes open

My heart is thrown wide,

And I am like the ocean,

And you are like the tide.

I know these will be for another of my "nature camera at the bridge" movies that I spend a lot of time working on lately. The movies using this song might have more sign pictures if I can ever get any of the pieces involved to work how I want. 

The sign pictures look like this, though of course, they are animated when they are finished:

And if this ruins the surprise, so be it.

Ignorance and bliss

 

And then I like to tell myself, in my rage and disappointment: All these stupid people who supported or failed to prevent a horrific disaster are going to suffer terribly from the fruits of the seeds they planted!

But that's just my futile longing for justice, and my hopeless dream that people be better. In truth they won't meaningfully suffer their sins. 

After all, the problem with being stupid is that though many people pay for their stupidity, very few of them understand that they are.

More not discussing politics

 

In the aftermath of certain profoundly unwholesome events I decided to take a sabbatical from politics a couple weeks ago. Maybe it is best to know the details of the horrors we live under and tacitly support, maybe it affects something, but after many years of paying so much detailed, precise attention perhaps I have enough credits saved up to help myself for awhile at least.

But it does leak out the edges nevertheless. Politics always leaks out the edges. And sometimes my thoughts drift to how badly we have failed here. And when I say "We", I mean, of course, everyone other than me and you. But even removing us from the equation, that still leads to a profound number of people who fucked up so badly that great masses of people are going to fucking suffer and die.

How many?

I don't know. I don't follow politics.

Live humor straight from the front desk of the library

 

A moment ago a man came up to me at the front desk of the library. "Is there a meeting here tonight for the fungi club?" He asked.

I checked the schedule. "Are you a group of guys that are great to be around, or is it the mushrooms?" I asked.

"Mushrooms." He said.

Not that it can't be both.

The journey on the bridge

 

When I first started making cut and paste images of unlikely things in likely places, I had some success, among me and myself at least, with using the location of a plain little wooden bridge over Shadow Falls Creek, just above Shadow Falls. And over the years, as the technology has gained greatly in capability and complexity, and my facility has grown... a little bit, I have always returned to this bridge. It's a lovely spot at the Y junction of trails, in one of the more secret nature parts of the city, but it is more importantly a wonderful focus point to put whatever I want. So I have probably photographed this same bridge hundreds of times now, placing everyone from Eeyore to wild beasts to Uncle Fester on it.

Here then is my latest tribute to this bridge, presented in the fashion of a motion activated Trail Cam compilation, showing the best of the animals (and other things) that have been spotted at this wildlife juncture. The accompanying song provides the thematic resonance to my shenanigans.

As ever, click through the photo below.

Blinded by the light

Having followed politics intensively for 50 years or so I find myself suddenly resisting the impulse. I am finding it all a bit too much to handle, like following a sports team that somehow manages to lose year after year, telling myself it will be all the sweeter when, after 50 years of utter failure, my team triumphs.

My team hasn't triumphed.

My actual team has never triumphed.

Indeed, my team lost and all my favorite players are being taken out into a field to be beaten with baseball bats by the local townsfolk.

You know, all those salt of the earth townsfolks the news reporters kept interviewing at diners?

I think what I'm saying is that when my team wins, the joy of it will already be more than I can handle.