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. 

The blank slate

Out at the front desk of my library, where I have worked for nearly 30 years, I face the blank slate of an hour at the library once again.

Will anyone visit?

Might they check out some exciting bits of literature?

Will someone require a new library card?

Will there be a wacky question?

Will any wild animals walk in?

Will the police be called?

Will a small child with pictures of strawberries on her coat drop by to stare at me?

Will two teens awkwardly greet each other and hug sideways.

Will someone in a peach cardigan and a bright green bag check out two books in a hurry at the self-checkout machines and then race out the doors?

Will someone stumble going up the stairs?

Will a man hand me a whiffle golf ball and apologize for it?

To all of which we can only answer:

Yeah, probably.

 

The sport I follow

 

For many years the main sport we followed here at clerkmanifesto was soccer. And though I tried to keep my soccer commentary on a back channel, one inclined to the research (it's never happened before, but it's always possible) could surely pull out and read through many dozens of soccer themed posts from my history of essays. 

And it has been irresistible to write about it a little: Soccer is a rich, complicated, beautiful game, flowing in wild narratives, and full of amazing insights into life itself.

Unfortunately, and I say this with real reluctance, soccer is also stupid.

Soccer is so, so, so stupid!

It is like the stupidest thing ever! 

In fact, I think soccer is the stupidest sport outside of professional wrestling, which, as you know, isn't even a sport at all! Wrestling is, well, like soccer with more planning.

And while I can't claim that this analytic conclusion concerning soccer is free of personal bitterness (after all, my heart has been raked over the burning coals of soccer more times than I'd like to admit), it is not completely disconnected from reality. Sure, at least half of all soccer match results are attributable to one team being better than the other, but, and this is super important, a disturbing amount of the remaining games, when teams are at least roughly close-matched, are decided either by insanely bad calls, moments of random luck, or the work of capricious gods who are simply mad at everything.

So I have switched sports.

I now exclusively follow English Amateur Competition Shows. Essentially these are The Great British Baking Show, Great British Sewing Bee, Great British Pottery Throwdown, and The Great British Flower Show which had only one season and might not have been British, I don't remember, but it was brilliant anyway. These shows have far lower stakes, more admirable participants, and much better judging than soccer could even dream of. And not only are these shows more wholesome, egalitarian, and fair than any professional sport I can think of, I can also watch them on the couch with my darling wife.

I'd say the only real shortcoming to these English Amateur Competition Shows is that they don't really make enough of them. 

So, in a spare moment, every once in awhile I check in on how Messi is doing here in America.

He's doing pretty good. But he's getting close to aging out of the game now.

Maybe he should take up baking.

I am replaced!

 

This morning my wildly successful, world-famous art show ended. For about a month, my photographs of library workers with their spirit animals were the talk of the library. Or maybe not the talk of the library exactly, but toddlers clearly loved them, and that's good enough for me!

But today a team of people from the local school district swept in with their own vast array of display racks and their hundreds of pieces of children's art, and just like that my show was done. It now sits in the back workroom of the library dreaming of its ancient glory days of yore.

It is hard to be upset because the new work is so varied and plentiful and charming and creative. It's great! It's got everything from paintings on old record albums to colorful 4th grade renditions of Venice canal houses (did they go on some kind of amazing field trip?) to weird canvasses made out of origami cranes.

I haven't seen all of it, but at one point I was viewing a landscape, and I felt like I was being watched.

I was!

By the stairs, there was a whole wall of paintings of eyes!

Here, I sort of took a picture:

Poetry classics from history! Faeries: the music video

 

Today in poetry corner we are featuring a nineteenth century Irish poem about wee men, by William Allingham, called "The Faeries". It's about little faerie men! But it's kind of a classic dark fairy tale, so those of you troubled by such creepy themes of children in peril and people tormented for digging up thorn bushes may want to steer clear today. 

Though I was not specifically familiar with this poem, its influence courses through some of my favorite more contemporary fantasy. It can be found lurking fiercely in the best work of Terry Pratchett, and is referenced in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory". This is surely why so much of the poem was so wildly familiar to me.

It is set to music by it's own glorious internal rhythms, by AI and, well, by me through all manner of editing. But mostly it sounds an awful lot like it's written and performed by The Band. In that guise, it gets frankly uncanny at times, particularly when Richard Manuel Robot sings. The images are a barrage of something a bit like moving photographs, which speaks to the current level of AI video. As to the quality of things syncing up nicely in the video, it is, mmmm, erratic, which speaks to my refusal to spend any more of what was probably already too many hours fiddling with this. 

Also, for reasons related to this above, and to my limitations with these tools, we also lost a verse from this poem about the king who is old and gray and losing his wits. 

Once again I am astonished by what AI music can do at this point, but AI video isn't quite all there yet, and nearly always comes, as you will see, in rough, tiny clips. For those interested though, there are demonstrations of work in progress on AI video that suggest brilliant new astonishments are not far off.

I have probably at this point 15 other poetry songs collected, but none are likely to be suited to this approach, and I am not sure I would like to take this route again. So if there is another poetry music video it will likely be as different from this as was this from my Emily Dickinson video.

I do hope you'll enjoy it.

The rich are different than you and I

 

Following, as I do, the workings of our increasingly broken legal system, and, of course, the absurd slow-walking of the endless array of Trump trials, I had, this very morning, an epiphany:

Justice, for the regular person of no means, or of modest means, or even of adequate means, in this country, is as simple as moving from point A to point B. Steps may be missed, the process may be hurried, but the key thing is always that going from A to B.

Justice for the rich and powerful and their interests in this country uses the very same system, with one essential difference- it ever goes by halves, and so by such means, can never arrive.

Your questions answered!

 

Running a famous Internet blog like clerkmanifesto is a source of tremendous interest for people. Nearly everyone I meet is full of questions about me and about clerkmanifesto. Just the other day an old friend was in town visiting my darling wife and I, and, though I didn't mention my blog because I knew that's all we'd be talking about for hours, my friend couldn't resist asking:

"What have you been up to lately?"

"Oh, I'm up to this and that." I said, more or less.

Then she talked about her friend who was gored by a buffalo.

Fair enough.

But I know that lots of you out there in Internetland have so many questions about me and my blog, and I thought it might be worth taking the time to answer as many of them as I can today.

So please simply speak your questions aloud to your computer (or device), and I will hear them, but do speak loudly and clearly as the rest of the audience, being farther away, will have a harder time picking up on your question.

Thank you so much for your question! Yes, I wasn't kidding. Her friend really was gored by a buffalo!

Thank you for your question! Can I please remind everyone though to speak up as I think some blog readers cannot hear the questions. Yes, I believe it was in North Dakota. They were hiking in possibly a National Park there, skirting along a meadow, and not, as far as I know, antagonizing any of the buffalos in any way.

No, that's okay. I'm here to answer any of your questions, whatever they are! Just, if I could ask, please do project more as some people cannot quite make out all the questions being asked here. But, to your question, and this is not for the squeamish. They were gored in the stomach and it was considered a bit of a miracle that they survived at all! Apparently, though, a year later they are much recovered and doing quite well.

No, that's okay. To your left, through the gates, and then you'll see them on your right. Yes, we can wait.

Once again, if you would please speak right up so everyone can hear, but, that said, if you don't mind waiting? I promised the last person we would.

No, no, that's hilarious! That's one of the funniest things I've ever heard! Could you just say that a bit louder one more time so everyone can hear it?

Ha! Still funny. I hope you all caught that.

Thank you. I am touched by your sentiment. Most days, really.

I'd rather not talk about money, but, zero dollars, roughly.

That is extremely generous indeed! And you don't mind that everyone here now knows this?

Good point. I think some people are having trouble getting all of the questions. So to remind you: Please do speak up when asking your questions.

Oh my goodness! You're right! Thank you all so much for coming, and I do hope we were able to satisfy at least a little of your curiosity.

Yes, yes. We will surely do this again if we can get some of the technical issues worked out.

Donations

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

The scale of things

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

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

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

!

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

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

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

Then I pull our fire alarm.

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

In the scale of things four is just too many.

In case we ever have a new reader here

 

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

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

Me: "Yes."

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

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

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

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

No one has yet dared.

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

Welcome to clerkmanifesto.

The age of wonders

 

Let me take this moment.

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

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

Five years ago!

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

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

And then, like that, it was over.

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

2. It is all going to go bad.

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

FUCKING LOST THEIR MINDS

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

I think we know that they are not gifts; 

they are loans.

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

And fair enough.

But let me take this moment:

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

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

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

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

And,

It simply did.

Poetry

 

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

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

I adore these songs I have made.

I

Absolutely

Adore

Them!

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

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

I remember three or four

Things you said in spite,

And an ugly coat you wore,

Plaided black and white.

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

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

But who shall dare

To measure loss and gain in this wise?

Defeat may be victory in disguise;

The lowest ebb is the turn of the tide.

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

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

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

How dreary to be somebody!

How public like a frog,

To tell one's name the livelong June,

To an admiring bog!

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

But for me they are mine. 

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

 

In which I help you with your place in this world

 

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

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

And then; 

How many people have ever looked at the Mississippi River?

Either a lot!

Or none.

Do you believe in other people?

This is a more important question than one might think!

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

No one has fully dispensed with this question!

So, do you believe in other people?

You should!

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

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

And I suspect there were others as well.

Our millionth subscriber

 

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

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

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

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

Whatever.

I'm not bitter.

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

Yes of course he still loves all things pickles.

Lord, the Internet is fickle!

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

I hope I can keep my plaque.

Temptation song, the lyrics

It's late at night as I write now. 

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

I wrote a post for you, 

But compelled by mysterious forces, 

I set my words into verse.

Not so unlike this now.

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

At clerkmanifesto 

(at least, not with my own), 

there was only one thing left to do:

I got together with my robot friends, 

and made it into a song.

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

The real song is called "The Temptation Song".

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

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

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

Art

 

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

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

There are a lot of answers to this question! 

Many of them don't go together. 

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

With art!

Clerkmanifesto, the video version

It's all in the video today:

The clerkmanifesto song

  

Clerkmanifesto has a song now.

It's called "Dead Things Float"

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

To watch on YouTube

Or try here:

Or with this:

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

Lyrics:

I've been staying up too late,

telling you my stories

Obscure clerk manifesto,

Home of all my glories

(Refrain)

Clerk Manifesto

Clerk Manifesto

The cream rises to the top

Clerk Manifesto

Clerk Manifesto

Dead things float

Come hear my song

Singing ten years now

It's getting pretty long,

It's everything I wrote.

I know you know it's dreaming,

Not everything can float.

(Refrain)

Clerk Manifesto,

Clerk Manifesto,

The cream rises to the top,

I'm the least successful goat,

Clerk Manifesto,

I cannot help but gloat,

and,

Dead things,

Dead things,

Dead things float.

Yeah,

Dead things float.

I'm the least successful goat

I may be con deluded,

Bout everything I spoke,

I know just what the clue is,

Not everything's a joke,

Come here to the manifesto,

Dead things float.

Dead things float.