Alas, a journey into our current political situation

 

In my life I have always been politically attentive, sometimes even studious. Much of this comes from a genuine desire for a better world for everyone.

So naturally, like you, I have suffered terribly.

My sources for political knowledge and insight have varied from books and newspapers, interview shows, political, artistic, and economic theory, movies, radio, TV, magazines, and the video essay. With the advent of the Trump era my attention heightened for two reasons; The stakes seemed to be getting so much higher, and YouTube, podcasting, and the short video format produced so much more informative, entertaining, and thought-provoking content. And so I followed politics with increasing intensity.

I was very well informed.

And though I tried to share my political knowledge and ideologies with the people around me, I am, alas, better at art, magic, and clowning. So I also tried not to share my political knowledge and ideologies. 

With very mixed success. Jesus, look at this!

And then Trump was elected again in 2024.

I had to take a break. Not just because it was all too horrible to process. And not just because it seemed to demonstrate that all my attention was functionally meaningless. But because all of the people who I read, and appreciated, and who I still believe are mostly thoughtful and clever people, had, in a sense, failed.

I know that some of this is simplistic. I know that people fight, have fought, and must continue to fight for what's right. But I also understand that the election of both Donald Trump and a Republican majority was a failure of this country too large to really look away from. 

Too large for it not to have been the responsibility of everyone.

Everyone.

Me too.

Well, maybe not you, but you can decide.

I went on several deleted rants here in this space about how despite this spread of guilt, some people are far more guilty than others, in proportion to their power. But fine, let's just say that's true. The main point is that I have yet to hear any contrition, anywhere.

And so I walked away.

But fascism is loud. And I keep hearing it around the edges of things even as I try not look its way. But when the tide is low there is no reason to think of the water. And when it's high?

The water sloshes miserably in one's boots as one tries to walk.

And so sometimes I drifted irresistibly, accidentally back. Just a little. Just to a person or two who I respected, or appreciated, or learned from the most. Which is how I saw one of Innuendo Studios rare videos:  The Alt-Right Playbook: The South Bank of the Rubicon.

It didn't make me feel worse, exactly.

And I really think it's the best understanding of this country in the wake of the 2024 election, the best analysis, the best... consideration.

I don't hardly ever share things like this here, but today I'd like to just this once. It is not a bombastic piece. It is measured, and serious, and thoughtful, but I think, heartfelt. And I am hoping you might like to take it in.

The Alt-Right Playbook: The South Bank of the Rubicon.

Leaving early

 

I can see that this is the kind of post that might give the casual reader the feeling that I don't like my job. So you should know this:

I kind of like my job!

I just like not working way better!

One of the peculiarities of my schedule at the library is that every single day I work, I work until closing. My library is open for 59 hours a week so this is not true for any of my colleagues. For the most part, I am happy with this schedule, although there is a touch of pained jealousy at that all too common point in the day where I have to watch my co-workers leave while I have to stay behind. Another side effect of this schedule is that when I do leave early, for an appointment, a minor catastrophe, or in some prearranged vacation, I get the peculiar feeling of transgression, like I am playing hooky, or leaving something incomplete. Of course, it is a sublime feeling as well, like I am stealing time. 

Time is delicious.

With this in mind, over the past few years, on the almost but not quite rare occasion where I go out after work with one of my two local friends, I have taken to leaving one hour early and using one precious hour of vacation time to do so.

This is great.

This is happening today and in 75 minutes I am leaving to go to a restaurant called Lynette to schmooze with old Marcus. Leaving an hour early is not much really. And an hour of vacation time, though small, is terribly valuable to me. But outweighing all of that is the invaluable fact that all day long a secret refrain quietly rings out in my spirit, like a lovely whisper slightly lightening everything:

I'm leaving early, I'm leaving early, I'm leaving early, I'm leaving early,

The height of my political cynicism

 

At the height of my political cynicism, where the situation is too dark for me to spend much time with it, we are having a special election for a County Commissioner.  I know, of course, all about the looming fascism here, and the very real Republican horror slowly lowering on my country like a dark, miasmic fog right now, but these county commissioners are every one of them Democrats. 

So that shouldn't be so bad, right?

But that's not the way it works. 

And I happen to know that none of the county commissioners are, well, for lack of a better word, good.

Or to put it another way, they are bad.

For instance, the reason there is an open seat for this special election is because the County Commissioners created a new agency, and then one of them left to run it at a very generous executive salary notably higher than that of a County Commissioner.

So the hope would be that a really good person is running for this newly created opening. But there is little news or information about the people running for the position. 

And here comes the cynicism part.

We know that no one good is running because if they were...

We would be hearing all about their flaws.

The wit and wisdom of me

 

In the aftermath of my post about how I could stand to be more humble, I would like to now quote myself. And if this goes against the ambitions of my last missive, well, I offer this:

All of clerkmanifesto really is simply me quoting myself.

Our story begins at the children's room desk. There, the librarian, putting her desk in order, discovered that a sign had been on her desk saying "The library will close at 5".

The library won't actually close until 8 tonight. So she removed the sign. And in so doing, she looked at the sign and said "I didn't know I had this power."

So I said:

"We all have the power to do everything, once."

I could stand to be more humble

 

"I could stand to be more humble."

I say in an act of self reflection so awe inspiring grown men weep.

This thought came to me when I turned on a jazz station driving to work today. Well, not the second part of the thought. That came later. But the first, humble part came when I heard, as I usually do, a terrific song on the jazz station and, luckily, my car radio was displaying who the song was by:

Chick Corea.

I have nothing against Chick Corea.

I have heard of Chick Corea pretty much all my life in the way one hears of someone and then just thinks:

Eh, whatever.

And it never occurred to me that Chick Corea might be absolutely fantastic to listen to.

I probably don't know a lot of things.

I like the jazz station because it is a nice place to be ignorant. Pretty much everything is a pleasant surprise.

After the Chick Corea song, a song came on by, well, I can't remember the name, maybe Joey Defrancesco? It was just as good really as the Chick Corea one. The title was something like:

Things You Don't Know.

There are still a few.

I wouldn't mind finding some more.

The Sunday funnies

 

It's always pretty quiet around clerkmanifesto on Sundays. It might be quiet around clerkmanifesto on all days, but I can't tell because clerkmanifesto is so large and full of footprints, and they could be fresh or a million years old.

Although someone is eating the cookies I leave out.

But yeah, Sunday is quiet, so it's a good day for just kicking back and reading the comics. Or watching them. Today is sort of a comic, in its way.

This is a comic called:

"They Are Already Among Us"

This video has sound and can be played right here in our own living room where there are snacks and stuff! Click once on the video for it to load. Click on the bottom right if you want a more cinematic experience, and then click again on the video to play it and its lovely music. Voila!

Dan Dan Dan

I'll admit this might not be the most appropriate video project, nor one for me to have taken so seriously. But my co-worker Dan is something of a bizarre muse to me, amusing in stories, funny in a series of "Mini Dans in the library" pictures where he is so tiny he can hold up towering books like a human bookend, and now he is appealingly reproducible in AI video with his distinctive features and expressive... qualities. So the lark of putting him drunk in alleys with dinosaurs just sort of ran away with itself, leaving me with something approaching a two minute movie. Yes, twenty seconds might have been a more appropriate length for all of this, but there's simply so much irresistible Dan in this movie! Well, irresistible to me, and it even has the suggestion of a storyline! Although as to that, you'll have to supply a fair portion of it for yourself. 

I wrote a whole thing here about how to watch this now on clerkmanifesto and then found my video is simply too fat to show here, so we're back to directing you to YouTube, for today at least. Click on the picture to watch the (possibly painfully long- depends on how much of a Dan fan you are) video. 

It has meticulously crafted (only sort of fake) music, so turn up your stereo system.

Things that work on clerkmanifesto!

 

Having struggled for some time with the functionality I have here with my posting of visual elements, I am delighted to find I can do things that I wasn't able to do before. One of these now appears to be video! I might like this method better than linking you over to YouTube or Instagram, but this method looks a little less fancy at first glance, and it requires simple instructions which I will share with you now so that you can watch the following two library promotional non promotional videos in the best way possible.

These videos all have sound.

Instructions:

1. Click once on the video. This will load it and give you a fresh viewing box!

2. (Optional) Click on the box in the bottom right corner to give you a full screen version. The video will play fine without doing this, but it will be very small and you will miss out on the fantastical cinematic wonder of my movie (or, er, TV commercial?)

3. Click one more time on the video to play it.

That's all!

Pretty easy, huh?

It might even work!!!

So try it out...

The fun-pak

 

Today is a medium-sized fun-pak of entertainment on Clerkmanifesto.

First we start with a pretty good Library Promo, featuring a buffalo, which, as one of my co-workers so nicely informed me an hour ago, is the national animal of the United States of America.

At least until they change it into, I don't know, an angry dog barking in someone's yard.

Sorry, things are getting a bit dark here in the USA.

And this is supposed to be a fun-pak!

So maybe to get back on the fun trak start with a click through on the buffalo below. There is a good song with it too:

And, as if that wasn't enough, next is a trip back in time to exactly eight years ago to the day, and a post called "Dear Library Director".

I pick the year for these ahead of time on these throwbacks, predetermined, so they really are luck of the draw, and not in any way a best of, and...

...at first I was like, uncanny, I have hit gold.

But as I read on I was like...

Hmm, I don't know.

And then I was like...

Well, why don't you make up your own mind here. It's one of the things I like best about you.

So here is "Dear library director", from January 23, 2017.

Dear Library Director,



I'm just so tired.

I have been working here, if you can call it that, and I think you can, for over twenty-two years. Twenty-two years! Do you know how long that is? 

It's twenty-two years and then some, as I previously stated. I don't understand why there would be any confusion. 

I realize it is not so much the labors of my job that exhaust me. I have learned a great deal about how to mitigate those with a kind of "work on demand" approach. No, it is the pretense that exhausts me. Everyday I have to pretend. I frequently have to pretend I'm working. I have to pretend I have bosses who are in charge of me. I have to pretend I am a cog in a highly structured library machine. I have to pretend I am part of a reasonably run, hierarchical structure. I have to pretend that I am a library worker, a clerk.

I am not any of these.

I realize this may come as a surprise to you.

Allow me to outline my actual job:

I am a wild card. 


I am the trickster of the library, Coyote, the court jester. I am both its good fairy and the touch of acid to keep it honest. I am the library's blogger and its mascot. I am here to enjoy myself. I am the clutch hitter, the keeper of secrets that I will tell to anyone who deserves to know. And everyone who wants to know deserves to know. I am the visionary ignored, the history keeper, the bon vivant, and the teller of tales. I am he who makes our library into a living room, the bartender, the loose cannon, the flaneur watching soccer games in the teen room. I am the one who makes the whole library into a theatrical production of community theater. I am the hail mary pass, the giver of gifts, and the dreamer of library dreams. I am every cartoon ever drawn about books and libraries. I am a satire of bureaucracy, the wilderness at the heart of the library, the burning fusion mysteriously powering it forever, and that which must not be named.

And I am good at this job.

I was made for this job and have made this job mine.

But I am not nearly as good as I could be. I am held back by the false expectations that I should shelve when I'm supposed to shelve, that I should appear busy, that I am beholden to people who are allowed to tell me what to do. I am held back by the urgings of normalcy, industry, and conventionality. This is a painful fiction that serves no one. It merely frustrates my managers. It irritates the more confused of my co-workers, and it dampens my full exposure to the greater library.

It is a foolish consistency, the hobgoblin of little minds, it is Derwood to Samantha, and it is a trim for Samson's unwieldy hair. It is employing dementors to watch over the grounds of the library.

Free me.

Make me Clown Prince of the library. Trust danger. If there is no way around our entrenched structures then have me report to you, with the understanding that I report only to the mad little gods of the forest and to the books on our shelves. There is work to be done. Dark times are upon us. Now is not the time for us to cower in the shadows, now is the time for us to reach for the stars.


No, I am not the one who reaches for the stars. I am the one who creates the beautiful accidents that hurl us there.




In deep camaraderie and library devotion,







Feldenstein Calypso
Clown Prince of the library (provisional)
















And finally in our fun-pak, there are these test clips to see if I can upload video once again directly to clerkmanifesto. They are just short pieces of Dr. Seuss at the library, and one is "Dan with a dinosaur". They are designed so that if they don't work you won't have missed much, but if they do work...

Fun for the fun-pak!

(Update: They seem to work if you click on them a second time!)

New staff and clientele at the library

 

Continuing on with clerkmanifesto's most recent project of library promotional films, I have a very cat oriented video today. The staff, always pretty catlike, becomes more so in this rendition of my world, but the library itself, as you will see, also moves in a cattish direction.

I am still plagued by some finicky transitions, but I am back with an AI generator called Minimax which, despite its many limitations in this regard, is still my favorite generator, and I am happy enough to show you this latest 30 second, er, I don't know, Ad?

There is music and, of course, click through the picture for all the fun to begin.

I sell the library

 

As promised, or warned? I have the first of this round of library videos. We will start with a simple tribute to lions in the library. I am relearning how to do transitions, which are always a bit wonky when it comes to this AI that I'm using, but when it gets a shot I am hoping it will get, it makes me very happy indeed. This is what happened when the camera lick shows up. 

You'll see.

Anyway, click through the picture and you'll be on your way. And note: We have music again!

Old revelations new projects

 

I am working on new images for new projects which is always a tricky time at clerkmanifesto. Everything I make is for clerkmanifesto, but some things take longer than other things, which sometimes challenges the sacred law of daily posting. One solution is to show work in progress, which is what we are up to today. And as you will soon see I am working on library promo pictures. These will eventually be for short films of some kind.

I don't know why I am making library promo pictures. They're not actually promoting anything. They're really just whimsies.

Perhaps my upcoming departure from the library after so many years is playing on my mind. And even my careful circumspection around exactly what library I have been writing about for all these years on clerkmanifesto seems to be falling away to the point where I now have animals emblazoned with the name of my branch. I look around where I work these days and think "What a tiny world it all is and what a big one it has been."

I won't be sad to go.

But I'm not sad to have been.

Life at the library desk with a patron named Robert

 

A very old man came to the front desk of the library to check out some old movies on DVD. His name in our database was Dr. R. H. Diebold. We chatted amiably about his movies, or, at least as amiably as people can chat when one of them can only hear about 30 percent of the conversation. Then, suddenly he got very upset.

"Never use my first name!" He exclaimed trembling. "I am a published author and speaker and I should be addressed by my title. Never by my first name!"

"I don't even know your first name." I said calmly. And then I showed him his name in his library record.

He calmed down considerably and then started muttering about ghosts and paranormal events.

All that education 70 years ago only to be mocked in one's dotage by malevolent spirits!

The honor of my company

 

The structure of me and my library colleagues' workdays is roughly, but thoroughly determined by a daily schedule. This schedule is created with no small amount of effort, but not with much flare, by one of our two managers. We staff members consult it like it is some kind of grand oracle. And it rather is, as it predicts much of our short term futures, the company we will keep, and the intensity and nature of our work tasks in the day to come. Though there may be but half a dozen circulation workers at any given time, there is no time of the day where one can be sure not to find them all gathered around that schedule consulting it like a theater camp checking the fresh postings of assigned roles for that Summer's production.

With such import ascribed to our schedule it is no wonder we all attach an undue amount of meaning to it. I am especially susceptible to this and am prone to easily developing conspiracy theories regarding schedule assignments. I easily feel I am being split off from the co-workers I best like when we are paired at the desk or back room, or that I'm being punished with too many responsibilities. With more cooled passions I can see that I am probably being heavily relied upon with the responsibilities, rather than punished, although I probably actually am right in thinking I'm being split off from the co-workers I like. But even within that I am also aware I constantly overrate the intentionality of the schedule, as, like I said, the schedule maker has no great skill or sense with it, and half the time is just trying to make all the slots full as best she can.

A great example of my misguided paranoia as regards the schedule came this weekend when, with an almost full staff of people I really like, I was instead teamed up with the only really difficult desk partner. My immediate emotional reaction was that I was being punished by being paired with who I was paired with.

Who was I paired with?

The manager who creates the schedule.

I am forced to admit she probably wasn't thinking of herself as a punishment.

Promoting clerkmanifesto to no one for fun

 

I have a series of short, clerkmanifesto promotional films for today. These are little ai animal films shot in wide format and then crudely translated to a vertical format by my simply filming them with my phone. I sort of like the effect, but there's no music or editing in this system, and the only sound is usually the ambient sound of the back room of my library.

I post these on YouTube and sometimes hardly anyone sees them, but sometimes, mercurially, YouTube randomly shows them to 500 people. And then, even though maybe as many as 11 people will go to the trouble to upvote one of these clips of, say, a cat with its fur dyed to read "Clerk Manifesto", I'm not sure anyone has ever watched one and thought "What is a Clerk Manifesto?", and followed up by searching for...

all of this.

But if they did see a cat with clerk manifesto fur, loved it, and tracked down clerk manifesto on the strength of it, they'd really just see something like what you're reading now, which is pretty confusing. 

So I'm not sure my perverse complexity would really make these videos a big Clerk Manifesto seller no matter what.

But...

...I'm not trying to sell Clerk Manifesto.

In fact, I have been thinking lately that even giving it away is asking for too much.

And don't get me wrong. I say that as a great admirer of Clerk Manifesto. It's just, I think I'm exploring something weirder.

Also, I'm not very popular.

Although on the other hand, the very fur and hides of animals love me.

Click through the (especially crude today) pictures, as ever....

Pride, Prejudice, and Annoying People

 

I have been reading Pride and Prejudice again, or rather, having it read to me while I shelve or work on the check-in machine at my library. It is one of my favorite books ever, so it is no surprise I find it clever. One might even say that the very word "clever" could best be expressed by Pride and Prejudice.

Sure it would have been nice if clerkmanifesto were the perfect expression of "clever", but no. Maybe I can be an alternate. Like, if someone is curious as to what exactly "clever" means then they read all 130,000 words of Pride and Prejudice. And if they scratch their head at the end of that and say "Damn, almost there!" That's when clerkmanifesto could step in.

With stuff like this.

The other thing Pride and Prejudice excels at is appalling and irritating characters. I am early on in the book and weathered some early exposure to Elizabeth's mother and her younger sisters. Then I hit Miss Bingley.

Wow. I don't like her at all! I forgot how horrible she is. "This has to be the worst person in the book!" I exclaimed to myself. 

Exclaiming to myself may not sound like much, but I find in my imagination I am a very large audience.

But then Elizabeth's mother dropped by when Jane was sick and was so breathtakingly obnoxious that I felt a bit hasty. And we haven't even met Mr. Collins! I'm not sure appalling people are particularly my thing when it comes to novels, but there it is in Pride and Prejudice, liberally seasoned right in with the cleverness, like they're salt and pepper. 

It works. I mean, it all definitely works. But if someone wants to try out a great novel with all lovely, clever people, I'm ready.

Would you like to buy this blogpost?

 

I resolved to include a historical post today. As ever, I would go back to some exact date in the past and take what small essay I found, as is, and share it with you here for good or ill. I chose 2021 to set my marker. That it is January 15 was already a done deal. 

I was a little nervous. 

I hoped I would like what I found.

I was surprised though at how little I remembered it. It is apparently from a short series of letters to a young artist. While I did vaguely remember the content of this piece I didn't remember a whole series!

Anyway, here is this post from four years ago. 

Dear Young Artist:

One of my co-workers is a birder. And so if I am trying to identify a particular bird I took a picture of, or if I have a particularly good picture of, for instance, a hawk, I might show him the picture. Other animal pictures come up as well. For instance I showed him a picture of a coyote I took as well. He was so impressed with that one that he said this to me:

You could sell these pictures!

In more than forty years of making art I have heard this comment countless times. It seems very flattering. And I suppose it is flattering, in its tiny, tiny way. It is a comment you may hear many times in your pursuit of a life in the arts.

But it's a paltry comment. It is a paltry comment because it splits the difference between the two comments you will actually want to hear:

That's beautiful.

and

I would like to buy that.

 

And it admits, nor rises to neither.

The hypnotic beauty of slowness

 

One of the more valuable things that volunteers at my library do for us is empty our bins. Theoretically.

Our bins are robust, wheeled carts that automatically load and unload, and hook up to our giant automated check in machine. We have 26 of these sorting bins hooked up to the machine at all times, each one receiving a particular kind of material. For instance, one of the bins might accept all of our juvenile fiction. And when it fills up it gets pushed over to sit with other full bins. Those bins are all emptied onto shelving carts, allowing us to make use of the often in short supply empty bins once again.

 It is that part of the process I am here to talk about today.

It takes anywhere from two minutes to two hours to empty one of these bins onto a shelving cart. 

This is not a function of what is being emptied. The bins are all roughly the same effort to empty. It is a function of how they are being emptied. I would not normally imagine that emptying one of these bins could take more than ten minutes tops to empty. But alas that none of our volunteers who are capable of emptying these bins in an effective manner are at all interested in doing so. Bin emptying, for some odd reason, is our station of last resort. Only a volunteer or library helper of so little capability or ambition ends up emptying these bins and it

is

a

study

in 

slowness.

Today one of our volunteers was emptying a bin for an hour, but they hadn't quite cleared the bin yet. I was loading things onto the machine and had just completely run out of empty bins. So I dashed over and desperately emptied two of the full bins as quickly as I could. 

The volunteer was still putting the same book on the cart when I finished as they were when I started.

Surprisingly, this wasn't all that bad.

In a way I prefer it.

If I can just travel far enough beyond irritation... 

...I find myself...

fascinated.