The third great thing to feature a walrus!

 

My manufactured video of a walrus in the library is not coming out that well. Like so many of the dozens of multi-piece projects I'm working on, when one of its multi-pronged, complicated parts fails, it leaves a lot of fully articulated pieces lying around.

And there's not a good reason they can't go here.

I mean, if you're okay with that.

I usually take your silence as assent.

First, here's a little walrus picture. If you click on it absolutely nothing will happen!

Next comes the poem!

I know, exciting!

But don't worry, it's not the hard kind of poem. More the silly kind.

Although maybe that's the kind you were worrying about. In which case...

Uh oh, it's just as you feared!

The Walrus

A walrus washed up today.

And soon went to bed.

We hoped it marked good times,

Up ahead.

Treasure chests and mermaids like,

In stories we read.

But the walrus just snored.

And nothing happened,

Instead.

Clerkmanifesto and poetry

 

I've been writing a lot of verse lately, mostly as lyrics for songs for videos, but once I get going with all the doggerel, it's hard to stop. Pretty soon all the poetry kind of collects all around me like dying leaves.

They crunch when I walk.

Here's one one of these poems about writing poetry for clerkmanifesto!

Clerkmanifesto up all night,

Feeling a bit yappy,

I'm writing poetry,

Making no one happy.

The Internet only likes poetry,

When it needs a little nappy,

And the few who like verse,

Find this kind sappy.

Creative labor

 

I like to joke, probably just here, once, in an old post, that it's not the running that's against the rules at my library, it's the falling. 

This may come in handy up ahead.

Recently I posted some bit of highly manufactured AI bewitchery to the cold, cruel Internet (yes, this is the Internet here, but it's so far away from everything that you're probably safe). I think it was a cat that I posted, who was come to life in a library, and the cat was made of rainbows. I thought the rainbow people on Reddit might not be mean about it because it was all about rainbows, and they were all about rainbows, so maybe a couple of them would like it.

It reminded me of a time long ago at our local co-op when the rent-a-cop they hired to deter robberies shot a couple of teenage robbers in the back as they fled the scene. And all the peace loving gentle vegetarian hippies were like: 

"Gosh, I hope Officer Tim is okay after having to murder some people."

There are no hippies.

The rainbow is a lie.

When I posted my rainbow cat, someone wrote something like: "So you just get a machine to do all the work for you, and then you take all the credit." 

It wasn't a question. 

Then everyone in all of rainbow world downvoted me, right in the back, like a bunch of cops.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Internet, downvoting is just like upvoting, only more unjust.

But let's get back to this machine thing. 

Aren't machines supposed to do the work for you?

Like, if someone is gardening with their little gloves and their hand trowel, would it be fair to be like "Sure, your hand trowel does all the work, but you think you're the gardener?"

And out among my vast readership, a hand trowel is silently thinking: 

"Well, and why not?"

Great, now I've boxed myself in a corner.

Maybe it's my keyboard's fault.

I'm kidding. It can't be my keyboards fault. Keyboards are not sentient! 

And you know what else isn't sentient? Any of what we call AI's, despite the murkiness of their name and ability.

Only trowels are sentient, and whales, and octopus, and elephants, and PEOPLE.

So it's okay to make machines do work for you, but it's evil to make people work for you!

Which somehow brings us around to the distorted, abiding rule of the Internet:

It doesn't matter how much of the Internet is AI, just so long as no one finds out.

In which we revisit the Lorax while suffering the ravages of Covid, and experiment with super long post titles

 

I am secretly hoping that my miserable bout of Covid is turning the corner. But I'm not sure yet. Maybe at the point when I am interested in eating anything other than passionfruit sorbet we can count an improvement. 

In that case, we are not quite there.

So I could say I am not feeling well and that's why I am showing you an old post. But that's not really it. First of all, all of this that you're reading now is new. AND THIS IS QUALITY LITERATURE! I am writing this out of my own head with all the creative labor that comes with that!

I'm not sure I believe in the idea of creative labor, but let's skip over that.

And, second of all, when I went on vacation and prepared a collection of old posts combined with new video projects, I rather liked it. Though I am occasionally prone to bits of whimsy wherein the subject of my million readers comes up, I actually have, er, I don't know? Three to 27 readers? That's my best guess.

And that is a weird amount.

But whatever is weird about that amount, and I don't know why people insist on calling it weird, it does not create the kind of constituency that keeps my back catalog in high circulation, in the way that, say, people keep trying to read Northanger Abbey. So if I'm wandering around in the vast clerkmanifesto history and come upon something that seems... appropriate, I'm no longer going to be shy about offering it up. And if any of you delightful people out there happen to read one of these old posts, feel free to comment something like:

"Oh my god! I've already read this one like a MILLION times!"

At which point I'll probably be delighted, and happy to rethink my strategy.

Anyway, today's blast from the past concerns "The Lorax". And suitably enough it dovetails with one of my many ai video projects where I run little "animated" tableaus of my favorite books. So you can click on the picture, and then come back here to read, for the millionth time, the old post below.

Among the remarkable and prescient work of Dr. Seuss nothing is quite as immortal as his nearly biblical classic The Lorax.

Or, as a regular human might put it: 

I really like The Lorax.

And it's not just for the purity and moralism of its storyline, which reaches so far into fable and fairytale that it ventures into the best of religious literature, nor is it just its astonishing politics that more than half a century later are more flatly and desperately essential than ever, but it's also in the small sweetnesses of its sketch of a storyline, the deep truth of its themes, and even in the touch of its own self chiding awareness.

But let's pull back a little.

The Lorax is a picture book, for little kids!, about a young person in something of an environmental wasteland, who is seeking the story of what happened.

Spoiler Alert!:

What happened is that Capitalism and self-justifying greed destroyed the world. 

It's a small scale post apocalyptic tale as essential and far seeing as 1984, Brave New World, or The Handmaid's Tale. only super short and, honestly, not as unnerving, which is just as well since seven year olds, its intended audience, are no more resilient now than they were when it was written. 

Anyway, a Capitalist, called The Once-ler, comes across an unspeakably beautiful forest which he then begins to cut down in order to create (and market very effectively) a clothing product, the Thneed. He, the Once-ler, is warned about the terrible damage he's doing multiple times by a hectoring mythical figure, The Lorax, who speaks for the trees and for all the animals made homeless by the relentless environmental degradation involved in the manufacture of Thneeds.

The Once-ler does not heed these warnings. Indeed his array of arguments and dismissals of the strident complaints of the Lorax are a pitch perfect representation of contemporary corporate, Republican, and Centrist Democrat ideology. It's more or less the neo-liberal playbook:

1. The Lorax is treated as annoying, moralistic, and a downer who needs to chill out. The Lorax is an SJW!

2. The Once-ler is a job creator!

3. People are crazy for Thneeds. What could be more democratic and right than providing what the people want?!

4. Obviously there are plenty of trees to go around! They're trees, for god's sake, they're everywhere!

5. If a few fish and birds have to pack it in sometimes there's just a cost that must be paid for progress.

6. The discussion is pointless anyway. The Once-ler is doing what it's his right to do; run a successful, tax-paying, people employing business.

The Lorax "speaks" for the trees, but while the very theme of The Lorax might be that seeing and speaking the truth and caring about it, is our only hope, it might be a questionable defense against Capitalism.

The end of the world is coming.

Keep a few seeds by to restart it later.

Care.

Here are a two touches I love about The Lorax:

1. The Lorax himself is not cute or eloquent or charming or smooth or persuasive. He's just this weird, small, cranky, middle-aged or older, slightly magical but not where it's important, speaker of truth. And he is naturally apoplectic to be saying "You're killing everything!" and to have the response be:

"Don't be such a nag."

and

"You've got to go along to get along."

and

"So what? Who cares anyway?"

The Lorax is Bernie Sanders, or most Americans at this moment, voting desperately for Joe Biden, or, probably, let's face it, and don't think he didn't know it, Dr. Seuss himself.

2. The Once-ler may be the ancient mariner of our story, doomed to tell the tale of his environmental crime and devastation, but he's not really reformed. Here's the telling thing about the Once-ler that I love:

 He still charges money for the story of how he broke the world in his pursuit of money!

Ha! Think of Bill Gates here, or any titan of Capitalism who retired to the lionized work of their Foundation.

And so in conclusion,

I didn't exactly notice this before, but,

wow,

The Lorax is a terrible, depressing book.

What was I thinking?

Jesus!

Terrible, terrible, bleak, miserable, depressing book.

But I guess it's good preparation for the reality of life in America. Go to it kids.

Covid's ugly head

 

I have covid

SO STAND BACK FROM YOUR SCREEN!

Okay.

So today we'll just do a little follow up to yesterday's magnum opus animals in the library video. The good thing about todays video is that it rather expresses my feelings. So click through the picture and you're off...

The Animals in your library

 

Perhaps it was all building up to this. But with the aid of the holiday I was able to complete my tour de force "Animals in the Library" music video. It is three minutes long, has a song according to my lyrics and the work of my robot friends, and features 20 to 30 different animals, though I am now thinking I forgot to put in the Mastodon.

Ah well, it's too late now. It belongs to the world now...

As ever, click the picture to the video, though this is not a precise comes alive match up today.

Now with music

 

I have now discovered putting music to my little animal clips. As ever, when I add a new layer of complexity to whatever projects I'm working on, I feel a pull to go back and update every single thing I have done in the past so that it meets my new standard. Once I just had pictures. Then they all had to have animals, and suchlike, magicked into them. Then they had to be able to become realistic live video footage. And now they have to have their own song to go with it.

I enjoy doing it, but going back and updating past clips to my newer standard may or may not happen. There are so many things I am interested in making right now that it's an issue of time. It doesn't take me very long to write a short bit of lyrics. And generating a song is frankly all too easy. All the time cost comes in choosing between the smorgasbord of delightful 30 second songs. Do I choose the one that sounds like Ella Fitzgerald, or the one that sounds like Tom Waits? Whatever I don't choose will never ever ever see the light of day.

Anyway, here are some of my first "Talkies", so to speak. They are all new and not retrofitted. As ever, click the picture for it to come to life, but they have sound too, if you are interested in putting in your headphone, or turning on the volume, or whatever.

Childish humor

 

A small child was walking by the front desk of the library. She was very small. And she was very excited about her new book of jokes.

"What do you call a unicorn with a cold?" She asked theatrically to no one in particular.

I could relate.

But I couldn't figure out a way that the answer could be funny.

Then, as she headed to the exit, I was afraid I wouldn't hear the answer.

"ATCHOO-nicorn!" She cried with gusto in the distance.

She'll get there.

Comedy is hard.

Wild tales of library prognostication among the British peoples

 

Dealing with another episode of being short-staffed at my library, I was taking care of something in the back room and dashing out to the front desk where two people were awaiting help.

"How can I help you?" I asked in a British accent.

They were a couple dealing with a power outage from our recent storms and wanted to know where they could work on their computers.

And they were both British!

I mentioned that it was funny that I spoke to them in an English accent before I even heard them speak.

They didn't care.

Which is the kind of thing one would expect from the sort of people who only visit the library when their power is down.

My rainbow animals

 

You have seen a couple of them now, in the vast repertoire of my all consuming AI library short films: Rainbow animals!

You take an animal. You make the animal rainbow colored. You put the rainbow colored animal into my library. And after 75 attempts, prompts, nudges, and so on, you get a great 15 or 20 second clip all together of a real life rainbow animal alive in the world.

It's super exciting!

I showed you here one of the cats I made a few days ago. It was a rainbow cat!

They have a Reddit devoted to all things rainbow. I very rarely post to Reddit because, well, people are too mean. But the rainbow subreddit is all about rainbows! And it's all about not being mean. And it's very clear how they welcome everything rainbow no matter what.

So I thought "I'll show them my cat."

And they all yelled at me.

Not everyone likes AI!

So I went away and breathed and, after just a little bit, I was okay. 

And then I went and I made this rainbow animal to express my feelings. 

Our bathroom is in need of serious help

 

The first person I talked to when I came to the front desk of the library this afternoon was a very large man who told me "Your bathroom is in serious need of help." Then he added "Your bathroom upstairs is also in serious need of help."

I told him I would pursue the matter. 

I wasn't excited about it, but the fact that he said both bathrooms were in need of serious help suggested a higher possibility that neither were in serious need of help. This is like if someone tells me one of our DVD's won't play, I'm pretty sure that the DVD has problems, but if they tell me that none of our DVD's will play, it's usually the person telling me about them that has the problem.

Not that I'm not sympathetic.

And either way, I had a bathroom to check out.

On the way to the bathroom, in the Friends' Bookstore, I found a whole bunch of footprints in brownish red. I started to get very nervous. But then the footprints did not continue to the bathroom and I was relieved.

I looked in the bathroom, holding my breath. 

I didn't minutely examine the bathroom. I merely gave it a look. Everything appeared basically white, well, whitish, and the debris level was... average. So I think it maybe wasn't in serious need of help.

But I scrubbed it all down with a tile brush and bleach just to be sure.

The Scholomance School

 

Every three or four years, over the past, er, 50 years or so, I suddenly get the idea that it would be fun to make some t-shirts expressing the cultural icons of interest to me. In the mid seventies I painted Rod Carew on a t-shirt in acrylics, but the image tragically melted in the dryer. In 1981 I drew up, with fabric markers, a Grateful Dead shirt which I sold at a Grateful Dead concert for, holy mother of god, $10, an outrageous sum of money that was not a harbinger of my future in the arts, or maybe was, seeing as it was just one shirt. Twenty years ago I handmade shirts for myself to wear celebrating the work of authors Daniel Pinkwater, Janet Evanovich, and Jasper Fforde. I later met Jasper Fforde and he hand-signed my shirt and took a picture of it! This too was and wasn't a harbinger of things to come. For instance, the Newberry winning author of The One and Only Ivan came to my library this past year and liked one of my pictures so much I had to sign it for her!

I don't know what any of this means, except, I like to make t-shirts. And so with the best new ai photo generator there is, I thought I'd take a stab at some new t-shirt designs that until recently have been a bit beyond me and my technology. Since I am rereading one of my favorite trilogies ever, The Scholomance Trilogy, by Naomi Novak, I though it might be nice to make a kind of Scholomance School logo.

Boy oh boy did it come out well.

Or I should say, five or ten designs out of a hundred came out really well! I'll probably make one into a t-shirt pretty soon. And I might make many other designs of other books as well. It is fun and rewarding!

I might even get ten dollars somewhere from it.

But mostly, as you know, what I've been working on is my short ai movies. These have an even lower rate of things turning out well, but I find that process irresistible to tinker with, perhaps because the pay off is even greater. 

So I decided to see how it might animate my Scholomance logo.

Oh lord.

And if you think this is good, you should read the books. They were 100% written by a human!

Anyway, here's the design. Click, as ever, to animate (though I now have a longer version (twenty whole seconds!) linked, so the "come alive" thing will be not exact.

Me, Dan, and the stormy night

 

On a night where the dire thunderstorms were rolling in it was just me and Dan for the evening. This is traditionally considered an emergency level of staffing. But fortunately it was busy, wait, no, back that up. It was unfortunate that it was busy. Also Dan likes to take breaks, and he is very committed to them.

So there I was at the front desk and with no one in the back room and, well,  with no one anywhere. A line had formed and I was also answering phones. The young people I work with don't understand that this is how things always used to be around here, back in the 90's and early aughts. Now it was just... nostalgic. I mean, I was putting people on hold. I was helping multiple people at a time. It was all happening!

I even picked up the phone while everyone was needing help and there was a deaf person on the phone!

It was okay though. They had an interpreter cause I can't use my sign language over the phone speaker.

Also I don't know sign language.

After what felt like hours of weather alarms, when the storm finally started, everyone disappeared, but Dan showed up, so that was nice. 

He was bidding on a scroll saw on his phone.

He didn't win.

Just a short line of promotional footage

 

I am so bad at marketing that I defy the odds and create a black hole where all marketing goes to die. This could be useful because my superpower could be used to bring down the very institution of Capitalism, whose ravages threaten to destroy the whole world!

I am ready to do this noble work!

If only I could get the word out.

So, all that said, the marketing featured below is not really meant as marketing. It's more like a dry exercise- possibly a satire of marketing? Or maybe it's just more of my endless dream world. 

Recently, I have been making many, many videos dealing with bringing Van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, and their paintings all to life, but I haven't been entirely satisfied with my copious results. So at some point, as a lark, I ran some more frivolous experiments with these two giants of the arts. 

These offhand ones of course worked marvelously. Go figure.

As to the third picture?

He's just a little jester, hired to get the good word out at the library I work at. He seems to enjoy the work.

(Remember: click to bring the pictures to life)

The most amazing videos you will ever see!

 

Sure, it's pretty simple nowadays. 

Say I want a rainbow colored cat in the library. I could dye a cat, but WHO WOULD DYE A CAT!

So I go to an AI photo generator and say "rainbow cat" in six or seven different ways and end up with 22 different rainbow colored cats that are all so fantastic I hardly know what to do with them all.

But fine, I choose one lovely cat more or less at random, and then hit "remove background". Three years ago this was an hour long process that usually looked a mess unless I got lucky. Now if I'm unlucky it takes me five minutes to deal with minor problems, and, voila, I can just plop the cat into an appropriate picture of my library. This too used to have to have all the stars of perspective line up in a stroke of rare and phenomenal luck, but now just involves me letting photoshop situate the cat as if it had been simply sitting in that library like a champ!

Rainbow cat in a library.

In the past I would have been thrilled, and I am a little, but it's not enough! I need video. So I plop the picture into the video machine, and, 20 iterations later, that are all so, so, SO close to perfect, I am finished!

I can show it to you!

I am so proud.

But first I have to do this orangutan.

And then there's the picture of Van Gogh showing off his "Clerkmanifesto" arm tattoo.

And there's the blue fox on the library shelf.

And I'd like to show you them all, but now it's midnight. So how about this instead:

It's really all about the journey.

oh, all right...

Frequency of miracles

 

My AI video generation obsession continues. Whether that is good news or bad news for readers of this long running bolt hole of the Internet is beyond me. However it goes for you in particular, the new instructions apply and are blessedly simple: click the enticing (or not at all enticing) picture below, and watch it come to life.

It is a miracle!

A miracle!

And to say that each miracle comes at the cost of a hundred slowly and obstinately misunderstood requests would be churlish.

The Universe has always been hard of hearing.

The world you just missed out on

 

Reading in bed, from the Scholomance Trilogy, already perhaps my sixth time through the amazing books, I felt so tired I could barely keep my eyes open. So I turned off my booklight, set aside my book, and cuddled up into the edge of sleep, where, for mysterious, magical, obvious reasons, it suddenly occurred to me that I had not written my daily column for clerkmanifesto.

I make sure there is one of these here every morning at 6:30. 

It is not the sort of thing I mess up.

But that one was pretty close.

We came within inches of me sleeping now, and you...

We'll never know.

One rule to be a good library clerk

 

Now that my vast career slowly winds to an end, let me lay it out for you: 

How to be a good library clerk.

To be a good library clerk takes only one thing: 

Correct more mistakes than you make.

Ah, the young one asks: But how does one know if they are correcting more mistakes than one is making, for if we knew the mistakes we made wouldn't we not make them?

Alas that I have an answer, and it is dark!

If you are not in a state that oscillates between irritation at all the mistakes you are always correcting, and sheer horror at how regularly your co-workers seem to make those mistakes, then you are making more mistakes than you solve.

 

Clerk emeritus

 

I am back from vacation. And here I am yet again at the front desk of the library. Unclear on the exact dates, today may be the exact 30th anniversary of when I started working at this job.

I should fucking own this place by now!

So in this last year (yes, this will be my last year here working at this library), I will do my best to pretend I do.

I 

own 

this 

place.

And what does that mean? You may wonder.

Me too.

I think, after all the effort, and the accomplishment of my dreams, it might mean that it doesn't mean anything at all.

Picture to life: Penguins

 

 

While on vacation we are running a pictures come to life series here at clerkmanifesto.

Simply click one of my old clerkmanifesto pictures that once upon a time I crafted of my library, and then watch it come to life!

Exciting!

But if it's not exciting to you in particular, we are also including a three-star blast from the past library column for you below to keep you entertained while I loll about for awhile on a great lake.

Today is the last one of these. I am almost back to business as usual around here, whatever that means. But one last picture come to life here, and one last blast from the past.

Catch 22 Library, 2014:

There I was putting another cart of books in order by authors' last names. Patterson goes before Preston, Sail before Suzanne's Diary, when I came upon something magical. There were two identical copies of Catch 22 on my cart! Yes, this sort of delightful thing has certainly happened to me before, but this time, with such a fine and funny book, it seemed somehow so visceral. How neatly these two books went together on my cart! How little fuss in regard to their relation to each other! One copy could go before the other or after the other and it was all the same. And then it came to me: we have, all these years at the library, been making it so unnecessarily hard on ourselves. All these vast varieties of items, all different, in so many ways; different types of media, different subjects, different author last names, different titles, thousands and thousands of different things.

It's a horrible lot to keep track of, to put in order, to organize and account for.
But what if we, at the library, had just one item. No DVDs or talking books, no paper backs or non fiction, no genres or stream of authors through history. One author. One subject. One story. One book. How about that Catch 22 for instance. That was a very good book. We could just have 10,000 copies of Catch 22! Think of how deliriously easy it would be to put a full cart of those in order, how easy to shelve them, how easy to find them! And reference questions, my God!

"Do you have any copies of To Kill a Mockingbird?"

I don't even need to look it up. I don't even need a computer. "No. We have Catch 22. It's by Joseph Heller."

Ha, you say, but what about those people who want to read To Kill a Mockingbird?

I am not heartless. I have thought of this. Each branch in the library system can have their own book. So, for instance, one of our other branches could have all To Kill a Mockingbirds. It would be a little like those One Book programs cities sometimes have, where everyone is supposed to read the same book, only this would be on a different sort of scale, and more permanent, and more beneficial to our shelving system, oh so much more beneficial to our shelving system. Each branch could, instead of being known for their neighborhood or town, could be known for their book. We, for instance, would henceforth be known as The Catch 22 Library. Sure, someone could still come in and say "Do you have a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird?" But I can say "No, this is The Catch 22 Library." And I could put a lot of emphasis on "The Catch 22 Library." I even wrote it in bold so you could see. "If you want To Kill a Mockingbird" I would say "You need to go to the To Kill a Mockingbird Library."

Sure, it might be a pain for the patron to have to schlep all the way over there for a book, but I think that once they get there, they'll be delighted at how easy the book is to find on their shelves.