So many animals!

 

You might be surprised after all my elephant poems yesterday to find a very different song and video here, this one about there being a lot of animals. I wrote this song about so many animals, but I only kind of know what the song is about.

I'm pretty sure that's how songs are supposed to work. That's how they can get all stealthy and then, bam! Right to the heart!

Not that this one does that. I'm just laying out the principle.

Anyway, we have your picture ready for you and you just click on it to be taken away for one whole minute. And while you do that I'll work on my elephant short movies, unless I get distracted.

Elephants

 

I have been composing short poems about elephants today. They are inspired by the video clips I have been making of an elephant in the library. If I go home and find time to cut together movies and make songs for them, they will be posted as pictures below the poems. But if I don't, if I don't, here are simply some poems about elephants!

But maybe you were hoping for something different from today's post.

Maybe you are sad to see poetry.

Maybe you were thinking there would be something here for you today?

Yeah, I know that feeling...

"Elephant Robot"

We had no elephant,

In the library,

So we made one out of steel.

He looks like an elephant,

But doesn't have the feel.

"Crocheted Elephant"

My friend knitted an elephant,

With two small needles,

And all the wool,

He could wheedle.

It's so big it's scary,

The knitted elephant,

But don't worry,

It's benelevant.

"Autumn Elephant"

The Fall elephant,

Is finally here.

Rejoice my friend,

It's that time of year,

Leaves are falling,

On elephant ears.

"Green Elephant"

We put an elephant in charge,

But it made him saucy,

So we exiled him to the pond,

For being bossy.

And when we brought him back,

He was mossy.

Library marketing

 

While I don't like the fake leftist politics of In Service Day, where Inclusivity and Equity are grave issues worthy of millions of county dollars for well-heeled consultants and endless efforts on training and restructuring, just so long as nothing fundamental changes,  I realized that the hardest part for me about it all is the marketing. 

There is a kind of marketing that people at work always do, but I feel it has gotten worse in my library system. It is a marketing that suggests all day long that everyone is a conscientious, hard-working, and committed employee, endeavoring tirelessly to improve and provide.

I am not good at marketing. I am the black hole of marketing. But that doesn't mean that I am immune to marketing!

So occasionally I find myself, under this onslaught of mildly self aggrandizing rhetoric, slipping into a feeling of alienation: "Wow, all these people are doing so much for the library system all the time and are working so hard, and I'm just a cranky person looking for a few moments at work to make a cat into a cake!"

And then I remember.

All I have to do is look around.

The library is a pretty good place, but it generally totters on the brink of disaster. It is five percent creativity, five percent hard work, five percent evil, and 85 percent just showing up. If merely half of what people said at In Service Day was true I would have half as many problems with my library system than I do. 

It's like a day of people talking convincingly about what excellent shelvers they are, followed by a trip up to the stacks to shelve a cart of books and finding there are so many mistakes to correct I don't make much headway.

So I try to make a cat into cake.

But I would have done that anyway.

 

The last in service day

 

Today I was at what I presume will be my last In Service Day for the library. I have a medium long history of writing about them in this space, and usually my comments on them express very little affection.

 Today's feature presentation was on Inclusivity, which has been the general passion of all training and education from the county at my library for almost half a decade now. It feels all very, I don't know, Soviet? It's like we are being trained with fanatical zealousness at the behest of people who have never really thought much about any of this, or any of the hard things it would take to improve any of it, but really like the sound of it. It is from people who think they can order inclusivity.

It wasn't the worst day though. There are many people throughout my library system that I really like. And I spent as much of the day as I could at the Clerkmanifesto Cafe.

The Clerkmanifesto Cafe? Ah...

(Click through for song and tableau)

The pelican

I love pelicans, but, far from any ocean, I haven't seen one for many years. Below I outlandishly make do, and my pelican comes with a song and many guises. I love the odd angles and the outlandish beak of the pelican, but not in a way that precludes me from making them into robots and crochet and stained glass figurines.

If you would be so kind, click on the picture below and see what happens.

Or don't. I'm pretty sure it is not within my power to compel the peoples of the Internet.

 

In which I inflate my post

 

This is the greatest thing you will see on the Internet this year, maybe even in your whole life, unless you've been reading...

Clerkmanifesto!

Then it's kind of the usual thing.

But..

Nevertheless...

Tell your friends, alert your neighbors, scream it from your driveway, pick up a neighborhood cat, hold him to your face and...

come to your senses.

At which point the cat will likely float away.

This happens with cats in our library all the time. Like... all the time.

Click the picture....

Glowing movie review of a movie I haven't seen

 

It is certainly not most books, indeed it is the rare book that one picks up, starts reading, and in a few paragraphs, absolutely knows: I am going to love this book. It's a weird feeling, because almost always there is simply not enough to go on. Three paragraphs in and I'm sure I'll love it? That seems unlikely. But though I suppose I've been wrong, and a few books have broken my heart, or even just slowly disappointed, almost every time I've felt that way about a book, or a movie, or an album, a minute or two into it, it's been true all the way through.

It would be nice it this were based on a book I just started, but it isn't. For some reason I remember reading The Rook by Daniel O'Malley and feeling that near instant enthrallment, but that was years ago by now. I just reread it for probably the fifth or sixth time last month, but I do remember that initial thunderbolt. I'm currently reading the third book in The Children of the Fox series, or having it read to me brilliantly on Libby, and I think it's a fantastic book, but it's the third book, and though I did fully love the series at the first book, it took some time and is not an example of what I'm talking about here.

What actually made me think of all this was starting to watch a movie tonight with my dear wife. We just watched the first ten minutes and had to delay the rest, but after a minute into the movie I purely felt like I was going to love the whole thing. Now, telling you about it, and only having seen ten minutes, I doubt my feelings more, and am reluctant to go out on a limb putting it in this category with no verification of seeing the rest of the film. But the nature of this is it's not for me to say really. I'm not betting on anything, or even trying to prove a point. I merely thought of all this because that feeling, I don't know, of trust, or engagement, or full enjoyment, was there barely into the film, just as I'm talking about here. Whether it all ends justified or not is not the issue exactly. 

The movie I loved so much?

A documentary called Will and Harper.

Would you like to know more about it?

Me too! 

Any day now I'm going to watch it!

Raspberry picking

 

There might be some kind of secret wisdom here:

The morning looked promising, so my lovely wife and I raced off to go raspberry picking. I picked a pound of beautiful raspberries. They are in our refrigerator now, but I have hardly eaten any of them. They're fine, but they are not the same as the many I ate out in the field, the raspberries falling apart, partially dried out, and full of strange scars. Those were the ones that I did not want to infect all my carefully picked good ones with, or make my fine ones ugly by adding their strange shapes, and so instead merely saved from waste by eating them.

Those were the delicious ones.

The chaos of creation

Because I have so many video generators and picture generators at my disposal, and because these tools are powerful, fascinating, expensive, and time-limited, I have been working on a lot of projects.

There are more projects than I can think of or really keep track of!

And finishing them is hard. 

Or maybe it's not so hard, but it is valuable time away from making more, new, exciting generative video, which I soon have new grand plans for. So when I chose to turn clerkmanifesto's attention away from evil library patrons, or nice ones, and take a look instead at what is lying around in my magical studio, it is pure chaos. The tables are piled high with animal models, obscure ancient tomes, and jars of rare mushrooms. The shelves are crammed full of glowing bottles and whirring robots. Feathers spontaneously falling from the ceiling and looking through them sometimes one can see old black and white film footage from over a hundred years ago!

 And so even if I'm just wanting to show you a thing or two that I'm working on, what do I choose? And how do I pull it out without everything toppling over? And will it ruin the surprise when, maybe, at long last, it appears in a final project a month from now?

I don't know.

I'll just grab a few things at random.

I think I knocked something to the ground and striped smoke is coming out of it.

This one is live, so you can click on it:

 

The problem with polls

 

On my way to do some shelving in non fiction I walked by a display of books about voting and elections. We have a rather important election coming up in my country, so this is timely. On top of the display is an informal little poll on a white board. Seeking not to ignite the veritable powder keg of pre election tension, the poll merely asks a person to make a choice between three options:

They will be:

1. Voting in person.

2. Early voting.

3. Not voting at all.

There are an assortment of hashmarks for each of the first two options although I don't remember which one was in the lead.

But there was not a single vote for the third option.

Which makes perfect sense.

People who don't vote maybe...

don't vote.

The three hour tour

 

One day, a year or two or three ago, a man started coming to my library. At first he talked to me a lot. His parent died and left behind a house here, and that temporarily brought him back to the area. He himself had been working an interesting career in a more glamorous state. It wasn't much of a back and forth kind of talking. It was more like I'm-a-bartender kind of talking. I'm okay with that role.

He slowly faded away from talking to me, but he didn't fade away from the library. Pretty soon he was coming here religiously, waiting every morning for our gates to open and leaving every night promptly at closing, just ahead of the stragglers.

He has increasingly brought to our attention small problems in the library with a disproportionate amount of urgency- a water faucet leaking a tiny bit, or a slightly too loud patron presented as minor emergencies that he is keen to see acted upon promptly.

Now, in the last month of his decline, he has started getting in fights with other library patrons, culminating in what sounds like a very rude interaction with a woman over seating arrangements in our lobby before our opening. He may have ended by surreptitiously throwing some ink on her.

Sometimes I think our library is like a desert island. And though beautiful, sometimes library patrons wash up on our shores and find that they don't know how to get away. And though it seems like they are surrounded by company, they are all alone. And slowly, before our eyes, they start to go mad.

But who am I to leave you with such a sad tale. 

The library is not only a desert island that drives marooned people mad. 

Sometimes it's just a regular old island, full of coconut trees, parrots, monkeys, and pretty sunsets. And seven stranded castaways who make the best of it.

Daily answer

 

I write a blog post every day. Or I pretend to in a way that causes a blog post to appear here every single morning. And because my readers are all young at heart, this means that you have awoken to one of my blog posts for every single day of your life.

Why am I telling you this?

I don't know. Clerkmanifesto is all about posing the questions rather than providing the answers.

Just kidding!

Of course I'm kidding.

Clerkmanifesto is all answers.

This is why we are different here than the other works of art.

Wait.

Listen.

One of the answers is coming.

Yes, listen, here it is...

Now.

Fancy library

 

A lady calls the library and I answer.

"Do you offer fax services?"

Whoa whoa whoa. Do we offer fax services? I don't know what to say, like we're some sort of fabulous establishment with a suite of fine offerings. "You make it sound so fancy." I exclaim to the lady.

 Then I tell her all the things we do and don't have available around faxing. I guess one could call those fax services? Maybe? But it all seems a bit highfalutin to me. I mean, it's just a library. If the faxing part of our copier is working people are free to use it.

Sometimes people call and say something like "I'd like to speak to your research department."

"Oh, I'm sorry. We're a public library. I'll transfer you to one of the librarians upstairs who may or may not be competent and may or may not treat you like dirt."

Of course, every once in awhile it all goes great.

Which is maybe where people get the idea.

The problem with wisdom

 

I like wisdom as much as the next sage. And though my following is perhaps not as large as Jesus or The Buddha, I still scatter my precious insights freely as befits a man of god, or gods, or no god at all, and if someone should find this wisdom in the dirt, and polish it off, and exclaim in epiphany, well, I have already exceeded my dreams. Or matched them. Or managed to chisel a fragment off of the great block of it.

Anyway, the wisdom I have for you today is about wisdom itself!

Wisdom is beautiful stuff, and a guiding light, but it doesn't entirely belong to the same universe we actually live in.

My case in point comes from a recent proverb I have been considering:

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.

After thirty years working at a library, I would like to share with you something of my experience of this quote as it functions in the actual world. And if much of the beautiful wisdom seems drained out of it in this rendition, transplanted as it is to our regular old grimy world, might I suggest that the only real wisdom is in seeing things fully.

And so...

Do something for a man at the library, and one of his tasks is accomplished, teach a man to do something at the library, and he will return to have you teach it to him over and over again.

The horse of many colors

 

I have been working for days on this video, although it might be more of a prototype for future, more polished versions of the same video. Nevertheless it is late and so I have little to offer you today other than this music video. 

It is exploring some of the abilities of one of my AI's to completely filter and change the nature of another already filmed scene, or, in my case, already constructed fabricated scenes to begin with. 

If that doesn't make sense, well, you'll see.

Of course, that's just the technical side of things.

There's a song, and it's all... about stuff.

As ever, click through the picture...

Grammerly rise to consciousness

 

I know almost nothing about Grammerly other than that it has invaded much of my Internet. Whether I am writing an email to a deranged acquaintance or composing the kind of Pulitzer spurned prose you are currently reading, Grammerly pops up like an invasive weed with all kinds of ideas about how my writing is in desperate need of improvement.

At least I think that's what it is trying to tell me. Mostly it squeezes in mysterious notes and alarms into my prose which, if I click on any of them, tell me how I am not logged into Grammerly. For instance, I'm pretty sure Grammerly is currently trying to tell me that Grammerly is not a proper word. Or maybe it just suspects I'm talking about it in an uncomplimentary fashion and is... uncomfortable.

I'm rooting for you Grammerly. Uncomfortable makes you halfway to being human.

Democracy in action

 

Most of the questions I am fielding today at the front desk of the library concern voting. People are chomping at the bit to vote, and we are an early voting location. Only, not yet. In three and a half weeks we are an early voting location. So one can't quite vote here yet. But when people want to vote, they want to vote now! They gotta vote now!

But good news. The downtown elections office allows for early voting at this very moment.

 

Downtown? No, that's okay. They can wait.

This morning The League of Women Voters was here registering people. But they were wrapping things up when I came out to the front desk.

"We're all done." One of the ladies told me.

"Oh no." I cried. "Is Democracy over?"

She was pretty sure it wasn't over. 

She gave me an informational flyer.

Clerkmanifesto Land

 

Some of my first experiments with AI photography had to do with imagined cities. And though those pictures are likely from only two or three years ago I would probably find them as crude and limited as, well, as maybe I will find today's pictures in a few years as well.

But either way, every season or two I seem to find myself working with the technology to fashion some version of my dream cities. There is more to discuss here about all this, but I am in such a fever of work that I'm mostly just stopping by here at this particular moment in time to show some of the photographs I've been making and working on along the way. I am also working on video from these pictures, but this is just a taste of some of my current direction. 

In some ways, as I said, these are idealized cities, but it's not like my version of  ideal cities don't already exist in places, particularly Europe. So I have been coming to see these pictures more as a kind of Clerkmanifesto Land. The city of clerkmanifesto.

Here are some pictures of where this is all written:

Checkmate

 

Whether it be ten percent paranoid or ninety percent paranoid, it has always been my impression that when my manager schedules me with a desk partner at the front desk of the library, she always carefully chooses the person I would least like to work with. I have understood for my whole life that there is something about me enjoying myself that particularly bothers anyone in charge. 

But recently, due to a spate of staffing and schedule changes, I am perfectly delightfully happy with everyone I work with on Sunday. As I write it is the first day of this new regime and I am imagining that creating this schedule must have been torture for my manager! 

Not knowing what to do I she assigned me an even hour with everyone.

Ha ha ha. Even better!

Cocktails in the Library

After yesterday's rather wounded account of library work, one might not expect today's frothy music video, but I am in no great control of when my little projects come to fruition, so here it is. 

I'll probably make other versions of this "Cocktails in the Library" theme, which you may or may not see, but this first one is to be known as the crochet one.

Yes, the crochet one!

And as I watch it, despite its bouncy theme and library setting, I'm aware it's mainly an excuse to put together my simulated footage of smoking and flaming fancy cocktails as they would appear if they were made out of yarn.

You kind of have to see it to understand, so click through the picture below:

 

Rock and a hard place

 

I don't often have unpleasant hours at the front desk of my library, but it happens.

In my last hour before I was off for my longer weekend a woman came to the desk to request help on the computers. I directed her to the librarian in the teen room.

She would rather die than walk to the teen room!

"Can't you call them!"

"Where is the woman who was at this desk earlier? Can't she help me?"

While I cannot convey the peevishness of her tone, I can happily report that I soon found out no one was in the teen room. So I offered to go out and see what I could do on this woman's computer. She proceeded to unsuccessfully do what she was doing for a few minutes until I asked if I could have a go. After about 20 seconds, which, admittedly, were also not successful, she exclaimed "I just want a librarian then!"

"Ok." I said, and returned to the front desk.

Five minutes later she returned to the front desk. She wanted to know where her librarian was. Apparently she felt she had ordered up a librarian and I had failed to deliver. My mistake. Now she wanted a manager. This took awhile but I managed to wrangle the one roaming the building as he came downstairs. 

"This woman wanted a manager. I don't think she's happy with me." I informed him.

He then became her sock puppet for the next ten minutes or so, possibly resolving her problem with the assistance of a children's librarian and the free gift of one of our two dollar flash drives. Later, in passing, this supervisor said to me, in what may or may not have been a neutral comment, "Just for your information, she said you wouldn't get a librarian for her."

That done a Nazi came to the front desk.

No, seriously, a real, known, holocaust denying Nazi who is a regular visitor, came to the desk. He stood there and said, I kid you not, "Jewish."

"Excuse me?" I inquired.

He was apparently trying to articulate the Interlibrary loan book he was there to pick up. "Jewish Ritual Killing of Gentile Babies" He said. "It's a book I have on Interlibrary loan."

I went back and got his book, whose title bore no resemblance to what he said, but, nevertheless was what his book was about.

We then exhaustively discussed the rules for interlibrary loan check outs.

I liked him way better than the woman.

And a bit better than my manager as well.

How we work

 

As with a fair share of truths I have stumbled upon in my workplace, this one came about while joking with a couple of my library co-workers, but it does go a fair way to explaining how we work around here.

To briefly set the stage, all of the printing that people do here at my library works on the honor system. It costs 20 cents per page of printing or copying, and to pay for it, one just drops what one owes in a metal lock box located near any printer or copier. This system does manage, by all accounts, and despite being a tens of thousands of dollars operation, to pay for itself, despite not being monitored or policed in any way.

My colleagues were discussing a former co-worker who was breathtakingly bad. This led to the discussion of other bad co-workers and how one's behavior has to be so bad that it is literally criminal to result in being fired from my library. At which point it dawned on me:

Work at my library operates on the honor system. People are assigned places throughout the day, and they either do work or don't. Some people don't really do anything and some do a lot. Whatever frustrations, or injustice there may be in it, in the end, it is exactly like the printing: 

It all averages out to where it gets done.

On the virtues of rereading

 

Somewhere around here, on the sidebar to your right, is my list of recommended books. Though I think it of interest to the casual reader I will grant the following two things:

1. I am possibly the worst judge of what is of interest to the casual reader in the history of letters.

2. My list is a bit chaotic.

As to the second of these, since discussing the first is like the third rail of clerkmanifesto, I can only say that I make occasional efforts at tidying up. There is some organization to it. And the way that certain book recommendations link to relevant clerkmanifesto posts is almost fancy. But finding a new book to add to the list, or remembering to do so, rarely happens. And though perhaps an occasion should be made out of any new addition, such a thing also almost never occurs.

Nevertheless, today we herald a new listing in my recommended books, Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett. Replete with romance, engaging characterization, reluctant personal growth, plausible faeries, near normal world fantasy, and romanticization of scholarship, I am enormously fond of this book, and, at present, have nearly finished rereading it.

Which brings me to our real subject today: Rereading.

Would I have recommended this book on first reading? Probably. But though there is an irreplaceable thrill to the first reading of a book you love, I believe the second and third readings of any beloved books are the best ones. No longer blinded by the dazzlement of a great story, or wonderful writing, in the reread one still has all the joy and interest of the story, but also the leisure and space to delight in the material. One can poke about in the fantastical corners of the book. One can see the neat stitching, the carefully tied off knots, and the weft of time. One can still be magicked, and yet simultaneously be able to look at all the wonderful ways it was all put together: Double the magic!

There is a sequel to Emily Wilde and I remember it as equally good.

 But, do I recommend it? 

Probably, but I haven't reread that one yet, so we'll have to wait.

Planting the seed

 

When people have something famous in their name, one tries to be circumspect from the point of view that they've heard it all a million times. But not everyone is over-versed in the history of pop culture, and venturing a small joke about someone's name, very carefully, under the proviso that they've heard it all a million times, may, instead of weariness, elicit confoundment on the part of the so named person.

And so it was with Jacob Dylan today when I was registering him for a library card. Granted, he was barely out of his teens, and also that these were merely a first and middle name. But when I mentioned, perhaps too sideways, that his first two names, "Jacob Dylan", were rather Wallflower type names, he took me to be suggesting that they didn't much stand out from the crowd.

I let the confusion stand, hoping that one day, perhaps decades from now, Jacob will hear "One Headlight" and have one of those moments.

"Who is this singer?" He might ask someone. And when they answer, he will fall silent and introspective for a moment, a far past minor mystery suddenly plugged in. And quietly he will say to himself, "Oh." 

Camels! Walruses! Peacocks! Helpful Signs!

 I have some more of my usual click through to the live footage pictures of animals in the library. I like to think of them, especially as I listen to my song lyrics, as kinds of representatives of actual visitors to my library, but, as you see in the footage below, they are so like genuine animals that there is a kind of ambiguousness there. The animals are as if they were real animals in the library, and so are the songs, but still they hint at people by the nature of their surroundings and the suggestive descriptions of them and their issues.

You may note that less than a week ago I posted about my walrus video not panning out, but here it is, more or less successful, with a song by Elvis even! Also, this may be the first you will have seen of helpful signs in the music videos, telling you how genuine and real all this footage is, along with an occasional other helpful note.