The visitation

Newbery Award winning author of The Animorphs and The One and Only Ivan, Katherine Applegate, just visited my library. Though yesterday in this space I may have claimed that three billion people were coming to see her, it is possible I overestimated and the number was more like 327. 

It is still a lot!

People might one day ask me: What was Katherine Applegate like?

Hold onto your socks:

She was very nice!

Up until now my go-to famous author encounter story at my library was with a bestsellingish writer named Elizabeth Berg. She wasn't doing an event. Her mother was ailing and lived locally so Elizabeth Berg was in town for awhile. I mentioned something about her name and the author "Elizabeth Berg". She said "I am the author Elizabeth Berg." 

I responded, "I've shelved a lot of your books."

To which she replied, "I bet you have."

Yes, that's the whole story.

It's all in how you tell it.

But I can retire that story now, or maybe make it into my Library Author Encounter Story Emeritus. Because my new Katherine Applegate story is way better!

If you will recall from yesterday's post I cobbled together a fictional picture of Katherine Applegate sitting with her most famous main character, a gorilla. I applied a few arty filters to the picture. They were okay, considering I didn't have my best tools for that kind of work, what with my being at work and not on my own computer. 

I showed the pictures around to a few colleagues and bystanders.

"Are you going to get her to autograph them?" People asked.

"No, I'm too shy," I answered.

I left the pictures on a table in the breakroom though, knowing she would probably be using that as a sort of green room.

Eventually, the author arrived in our backroom and was clustered upon by the usual, mysterious publicist people who acted like ladies in waiting, and whose sole purpose seems to be to accompany the author wherever she went. They all made their way into the break room, leaving me taking care of the check-in machine. A minute or two went by and one of our people, a branch manager in charge of the event, came out of the breakroom.

"She loved your pictures!" She said. "She was so excited by them that she wants to meet you."

I was immediately ushered into the breakroom, through the small crowd of her retinue and the other event organizers. The scene evoked ones I have only encountered in movies, of regular people meeting the President, or a Monarch. The author thanked me effusively. I was then hugged by this famous lady. And finally, she asked me to sign all three pictures for her (who is getting whose autograph!), and I posed for some pictures with her.

It was all kind of dazzling.

And very sweet.

And humbling in its way.

Except in the sense that this was far more in line with what I expect the reaction to be to my art!

Big event

 

Acclaimed children's author Katherine Applegate is coming to my library!

Tonight!

And not just for a casual visit. Not just to get a library card and then mysteriously leave the library without checking anything out. Not just to ask me if I can help her fax something.

No, it is for an author event.

Katherine Applegate wrote a very popular book called The One and Only Ivan which was a major motion picture (never saw it), won the Newbery Award, and will possibly come to be considered a classic, though after only 11 years it's hard to tell for sure with that sort of thing. 

I liked it, and isn't that all that's important?

Katherine Applegate also wrote a popular series of books called "Animorphs", which were ubiquitous around here a quarter century ago. They all had strangely compelling pictures of young people turning into animals on the cover. I don't believe I ever managed to read through a whole one of those, but I have been known to work in a similar photographic oeuvre to the cover art for them.

So we are expecting three billion people to come to this event.

That sounds like a lot, but we've brought in several extra chairs.

Many people wonder how we managed to score such a magnificently famous big time author.

It wasn't pretty.

It looked like the Saint Paul Library system was going to get Ms Applegate to speak at one of their libraries, so we sent some burglars in to their administrative offices in the middle of the night to plant bugs to give us an advantage.

Then our burglars got arrested!

There was a bit of a scandal, a shameful cover-up, and there were resignations. 

The whole thing came to be known as...

Applegate.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

And that is how we came to have Gerald Ford as our library director.

Here is the commemorative picture of Katherine Applegate and her main charcter I made for this event. I'm too shy to show her, but if she wanders into our break room, or reads clerkmanifesto every day before breakfast, then she can see it.

Exodus

 

Nothing happens for years, then it happens all at once.

Just so long as it all averages out in the end. The stupid universe has to make sure every stupid thing averages out in the end!

Which, admittedly, can work out for the best. 

But it isn't all that great when things seem to be humming along well enough for so long that you're foolishly getting tired of it.

Maybe I should get to the point?

Everybody is quitting the library where I work.

Everybody is quitting the library where I work!

Yes, I am exaggerating, but in this narrow time period it is at least a fifth of my library co-workers that are leaving. Great ones, indifferent ones, terrible ones, all going on to new opportunities, all riding into the sunset like a brave cowboy.

Bye Shane!

No, none of them are named Shane. 

And they didn't bring justice to our little library. But some of them were nice to have around, which is good enough to make this a tragedy.

Six and a half people gone! I'm already starting to forget some of their names. And there is no reason to assume it is all over yet. We went half a dozen years without half this number leaving! Now, if a co-worker I'm half fond of disappears to shelve in fiction for 45 minutes, I start to slightly panic. Have they taken a County position in Numistical Data Strategy Support?

No?

Thank goodness!

Some barely adequate desk partner shows up to work with me at the desk. "Oh thank god you're here!" I cry out emotionally.

"Could you stop saying that to me every ten minutes." They complain.

That's totally something someone leaving would say!

Well, good riddance.

Northern Lights

 

The Northern Lights put on a spectacular show across vast swaths of the northern hemisphere. This included Minnesota. 

But you can't see the Aurora Borealis worth beans from the light polluted cities, or even from the small cities.

So everyone hopped into their cars, late at night, and drove off as far away from everything that they could get!

And when they got there they found that everyone else came with them, and they were crowded horribly together on the sides of the road and in the tiny parking lots of the small muddy lakes of forgotten regional parks. 

And cars came and went, their blaring headlights flashing over the masses tramping through the mud. And the trampling masses could hardly get all mad about it, because ten minutes ago they were the ones blaring the lights!

And so the poor wonder seekers had to go farther and farther. But they only found other cities and other people, all gathered together in great bunches to get away from everyone else!

But yeah, they saw some Northern Lights. And it was neat, vaguely, like, kind of neat. It depended on how far you drove.

Yes, I was there, with my dear and intrepid wife.

We drove and drove like we were going to a ballgame or a giant concert or something. And even though we did not know where we were going, everywhere was the destination that everyone else was headed to as well.

It was less awful than I have made it sound.

And not as good now as you might imagine.

Yes, it was right there in the middle with most things.

If you saw some pictures you may have been enviously amazed!

But pack up your jealousy for you won't be needing it. You have missed less than you thought. It turns out that the cell phone cameras see totally differently than the naked eye, and they produced far more colorful and amazing pictures than anyone could see with their simple, puny meat eyes.

In short, the pictures you might have seen of the Northern Lights were hideous lies that people downplayed the inaccuracy of to feel less bad for driving in traffic to nowhere at midnight!

Here is a rendition of kind of what the scene we were at looked like, but only according to what a phone camera might show of it:

Sorry, no, there wasn't a flying saucer. That is just something only cameras see also.

But what, you might wonder, did the Northern Lights look like with the naked eye?

Not as good as this, above, but,

BUT,

And this might be important:

You had to see it.

The viola player

 

I was out at the front desk with a very part-time co-worker. I like him. We were talking about the viola, which he plays. When we finished talking, for some odd reason, I started to compose a joke in my mind about a viola. 

Unfortunately, it didn't work out. 

And this is how it goes:

A dyslexic viola player was having problems with their viola. So they took their viola to their local instrument repair person. The dyslexic viola player watched the repair person nervously for quite a while as the repair person asked questions and poured over their viola. Finally, just as the viola player was starting to think the repair person would never figure out the problem, a thrilled moment of understanding passed over the repair person's face, and they handed the instrument back to the dyslexic musician triumphantly,  "Voilà!" They said.

How I roll

 

You can take this as an example of how good I am at my job.

You can take this as an example of how bad I am at my job.

But you might just want to take this as an example of my job.

I answered the phone at my library. A patron said they got an automated call informing them that items they had were soon due. They wondered if they could renew them. Having them read me the barcode of their library card I went into their record. They had two items due in a day or two, and two more due in just under a week.

I explained this and asked, "Would you just like to renew the books due tomorrow, or should I renew all of them."

"Yes." The patron responded.

So I did.

Shakespeare's Fairy Queen

 

I don't exactly know what Shakespeare is all on about here, but it's all very lovely, especially sung, as I have rousingly made it do in collaboration with my robot friends.

I don't by any means perfectly get along with robots, but on the whole have formed a fair few friendships with them. And I like some of our work here. I have been singing "Over hill, over dale" for a week now and little do people know that when I do this I AM LEARNEDLY QUOTING SHAKESPEARE!!!

I spent the day working on a few pictures with some new tools, but they really took too much time and didn't work as well or as easily as I hoped. But I wanted to show you what I had of these photos, and I thought maybe I could set them as a bit of slide show behind one of my poem songs, killing two birds and all that. 

So you will find this is way simpler than my other music videos- less a music video, and more an opportunity to show you a few pictures I was working on, and, honestly, haven't really worked out all the way, and play you one of my songs as I do it.

How's that?

Your enthusiasm delights me!

My kind of wisdom

 

Late of a work evening I was telling one of my co-workers some bit of nonsense, or cleverness, or god knows what, because the person suddenly looked up at me in a curious way.

"I am a font of wisdom." I explained.

But then, upon reflection, I was concerned I would be misunderstood, so I added, "Not a font of wisdom in the sense of a fountain, rather more in the sense of a set of characters in a consistant size and style."

Our dwindling staff

 

This Spring's half day In Service Day came and went without my attendance. But the one thing that everyone was super excited to tell me about is the moment when the county's human resources department explained to everyone about the the county's 36 step hiring process.

Over the past years my library has been shedding workers like fur from an old sheepdog. Replacements are ever promised, yet never arrive. Finally, an explanation!

A 36 step hiring process. This, the County thought, would surely explain it to us all!

That was the highlight of the day.

I think it was the combination of the ridiculous, the hilarious, and the quietly insane that people found so appealing. Many people told me about how a hilarious comedy show sketch could be made out of it. I disagree. It would make a terrible comedy show sketch. I don't think any of these people have ever tried to write a comedy sketch! This story barely even makes a decent blog post, though I will continue to apply every one of my formidable skills in that department to do the best job possible of it.

Even that may not be enough.

What it really requires is a freakishly talented Jewish Czechoslovakian writer to bring it properly to life, and even they'd probably need a full novel to do it. 

It would be a funny novel occasionally, but that probably wouldn't be its most salient feature.

By the end of the novel I don't think anyone would actually be hired.

Just like in real life.

My persuasive powers

 

Our self checkout stations are basically just big screens that offer clear, simple, even cartoonish instructions and work very well. But one of them was freezing at a particular part of the checkout process, frustrating people, so I decided I would try to reboot it to see if that could resolve the problem. This was one of three machines in a row. None of them were being used. I stood next to the one I was trying to fix to be able to access the power switch on the back of the machine.

I turned the self checkout station off.

The machine went completely dark, as it does when it has no power. I set to waiting a prudent minute before rebooting it. Twenty seconds into that period, a library patron, eschewing the other two available machines with their bright, welcoming screens, came to the one I was standing at. There, next to its large, black screen she set her items on the desk and began to attempt to check out her books.

"You might want to use one of the other machines." I suggested.

She did want to!

But probably only because I am so good at suggesting.

Politics

In these times where politics are breathing down our necks, it is important to remember that at their core they are not complex. Even the reviled and reductionist Left-Right scale, simply expressed, can have potency. Here I convey the three main stops on the scale as self-expressing entities:

Right: 

I cut myself to try to feel, but sometimes I'm just here to drink the blood.

Center: 

It would be insane to swallow this jar of thumbtacks, so let's just swallow half of them.

Left: 

I have an impulse to do good, but most especially when it is easily thwarted. 

Me and my buddy Baudelaire

 

Having gathered a head full of steam on my setting poetry to music and making music videos project, I have a new one already! 

I just happened to have a free day lying around, so I spent every last second of it cobbling together a music video for Charles Baudelaire's "The Ragpickers' Wine". 

It is a super long poetry/song, more than seven minutes, so you have your work cut out for you.

But it will be worth it.

It might be worth it?

I have this beautiful dream that you'll find it worth it?

Yeah, that last one.

I would tell you what "Ragpickers' Wine" is about- Paris, poverty, art, poetry, self-righteousness, garbage- but I'd probably be wrong. Just listen to it a few dozen times like me and you could find yourself wrong about it too.

Two poems ago, with the wee faerie men, I made my video entirely out of AI generated clips. Last poem/song video by Walt Whitman was all made from my own filming on the river. And today's video is different yet again, made entirely of very old found footage.

Again, this is probably worth watching in a more expanded way than I provide right here, but how you do your own ragpicking on the Internet is, of course, your own business.

More poetry losing to music

 

I have been periodically resolving that clerkmanifesto is a grand plan. And though for many of its formative years it hewed to a strict written format, it almost immediately wandered into every subject my mind is capable of touching on. Then, at some point, it irreversibly ventured into images, and at this point, it wanders the universe at will: video, VR, time travel, and so on.

And just look where it is now.

Floating in space. 

Just like you.

As you might know, my current obsession is with setting poems to music. Though I probably have something close to twenty songs painstakingly created in this fashion, having to also build a kind of YouTube music video to show them here is so complicated and time-consuming that I have hardly had any examples for you thus far.

But an odd result of this elaborate process is that I am subsumed in poetry and carry all these poems around with me endlessly in my head and on the edge of my lips. Half the time I wander the library at my work, I am not even thinking my own thoughts, rather lines of poetry run through my mind:

Walt Whitman:

"Mississippi! Mississippi! mighty central stream,

Down-stream, up-stream, all the veritable wonders,"

And Edna St. Vincent Millay:

It is the whisper of the wind, and the wind's gentle sigh,

It is the river's voice, and it speaks to the sky.

Or, again:

I remember three or four

Things you said in spite,

And an ugly coat you wore,

Plaided black and white.

Sara Teasdale:

And the moon is a silver blade,

That cuts through its flow at birth.

Or Baudelaire:

Yes. these people, plagued by household cares,

Bruised by hard work, tormented by their years,

Each bent double by the junk he carries...

Although I must confess, I had to look all these lines of poetry up.

 Carrying the songs of these poems in my head, I sing them vociferously, with great passion, but the beautiful lyrics are mostly wrong, lost, or mumbled blurrily.

The Mississippi by Walt Whitman and me

 

It was an absolute pleasure to work with Walt Whitman! He is a beautiful writer, a very positive person, and a charming collaborator.

I don't know what he thought of working with me because he is dead.

In what is just one of several downsides to being dead, the dead belong to us.

Which I suppose makes me sort of a grave robber, but the good kind! The kind doing important anthropological research into the evolution of people.

Or their stagnation.

Or whatever.

Today, finally, I have a poem set to music, with serviceable, appropriate imagery I shot down by the river.

Down by the river,

I shot my footage,

Dead, I shot it dead.

Sorry, don't mind me.

Anyway (you can mind me again), below is some of Walt Whitman's stirring verse on the veritable Mississippi, set to music by machines! And me! Unlike a lot of the poetry I'm working with, this is pretty straight forward in terms of immediate intelligibility, but if you listen to it 47 times like me, you will find that your understanding of it nevertheless deepens.

It's probably best opened up or watched on YouTube. But my statistical analysis of it shows that most people prefer to not watch it at all, so chart your own course...

On

The Mississippi!

The bright side of the best people leaving

In a bit of bombshell news, in a week full of bombshell news, it has come to my attention that one of the most universally beloved of all my co-workers is taking another job at the County. This long-time library co-worker, who is an absolute delight to work with, has found a job in the county that pays her more fairly and even lets her work sometimes at home!

So, uh, good for her.

I guess.

Whatever.

I can take it. I've been here before. It's a trail of broken tears around here. The bad people go and become hilarious anecdotes, the good people go and leave their misty little scars, and here I am, forever, so far...

My response to this imminent loss has been to go to all my other co-workers and, rubbing my hands together with dark glee, exclaim mysteriously, "My diabolical plan is working!"

It doesn't matter what it takes; no one working around here shall dare to be more beloved than me!!! 

 

Know your audience

Momentarily we will return to our all poetry format, wherein I post YouTube videos here I have made of famous poetry set to music, and then crudely crafted into music videos.

These are magnificently popular among my poetry-starved readers. 

I mean, they would be if I had any poetry-starved readers. 

Oddly the whole world is kind of topped-up on poetry right now, but can't get enough pool-cleaning videos.

No judgment.

But this brings me to the point of today's missive: You have to know your audience!

For instance, ten minutes ago at the front desk of my library, a patron came up to me and said "I can't find one of the items on hold for me."

So I said, "This is the worst thing I have ever seen happen in thirty years working at this library!" 

Then I added darkly, "Someone will pay for it." 

Then I went to find the book.

This is pretty cheeky. I could only do it because I knew my audience.

Which, alas, is not the same as getting the audience to like me.