Encyclopedia Feldenstein

 

In the process of considering this collection, I briefly flirted with the idea of adding "The Encyclopedia Brown" book series to my collection of favorite books, featured in a post on the right side of this page. My list is a pretty ramshackle list to begin with, full of erratic, unsavory books that are occasionally of questionable literary merit. So why not add a stupid children's series that always fascinated me and is full of seemingly unearned and mysterious charm?

I don't know.

I just couldn't quite get myself to do it.

I loved the "The Encyclopedia Brown" books growing up with their primal nostalgic view of childhood (and the world), their tiny simple stories hardly bigger in narrative than a comic strip, and, most of all, their knotty little mysteries of absurd simplicity (once you look in the back!). "The Encyclopedia Brown" books taught me that I like mysteries, but also that I am not particularly gifted at solving them (you cannot put a small child with bare feet on the hood of a car that has been driving for hours! The man is lying!). Indeed, to this day I am not the sort of person to read a mystery and suss out the clues and divine their meaning. No, I know the way to figure out who is guilty of the crime and why and how they did it, is to read faster. The end will tell me! 

This is the beauty of books: They are written.

But there is one canon element of "The Encyclopedia Brown" books that is too pointedly at odd with human reality to embrace. I am all for rewriting the rules of humanity and the universe for our pleasure and edification in fiction.  But this is so absurd in its contradiction of human behavior that I fear it may  even have had a deleterious effect on the world itself. I speak of the device in "The Encyclopedia Brown" books wherein a character (or criminal) is caught irrefutably in a lie and so promptly gives up. This instead of simply lying more. The horrible petty criminal and bully Bugs Meaney cannot refute reality and logic itself!

Ha!

May I present the theory to you that the inability to bring down Trumpism in this nation, despite his being every bit as stupid as Bugs Meaney, has its source in "The Encyclopedia Brown" books? All these old democrats, these Reddit social commentators, these lawyers and journalists across the nation, they all read Encyclopedia Brown. Or at the least they were close enough to absorb its insane fantasy: That villains blush. That the evil doer caught in his web of lies will stop spinning. That if like in Encyclopedia Brown we can just come up with the perfect, distilled, most logical and unmistakable gotcha moment, the criminal, crushed and exposed, will be defeated.

How's that working out for you America?

Although come to think of it, I'm not sure it stopped Bugs Meaney's neighborhood reign of terror either.

This is quite an introduction to how I changed the cover on these four books on National Book Day. So who am I to complain about justice, being hardly better than a vandal. 

Alas, who will stop me?

I know!

We'll put Encyclopedia Feldenstein on the case!

Cartoon Day: The finale, or, bad weather...

 

And here then is the last cartoon of the day. This cartoon is a reflection of a day at the library that has been full of tornado warnings, the canceling of library evening programs, and an increasingly quiet library under ominous skies. In what was no surprise to any of us who have been around the weather block in Saint Minneapolis a few times, none of this developed into anything more than light rain around here.

Fortunately, I have immortalized this day in this, my final cartoon of cartoon day:

Cartoon day: End of the aisle

 

Clerkmanifesto in a nutshell

 

Cartoons keep coming...

 

The introductory comments make this whole process even more challenging, so we'll just let the cartoons do the talking for the rest of the day. I hope you enjoy them, or some of them, or maybe just one of them, or possibly none of them if that's your thing.

Shelving optimism

 

Half the time this is correct:

Cartoon day continues

 

Here is the next cartoon celebrating cartoon day at the library, which isn't a holiday or anything. It's just me, posting cartoons, in an overly complicated way. But I have decided this is better than lumping them all together.

This cartoon reflects on my fear of spiders and a small challenge presented by my darling wife. There will be another couple of spider themed pictures to come today.

Cartoon day at the library

 

I have a few library cartoons that I thought I might sprinkle through the day today. So look for a new one every few hours, at least for a little while. They will range from the sweet to the vaguely horrific, just like real library work!

We'll start off easy with this one:

The ultimate expression of my endeavors

 

The flurry

 

I have been busy. I have been working night and day on clerkmanifesto. There are pictures and cartoons I meticulously generated that are squirreled away in folders that I would likely be delighted to show you here, but because I was so constantly making new things and posting new things and developing new things they became lost in the flood. For the past few weeks, one could find me whispering secret instructions into my phone at any hour of the day, and a thousand ideas and photographs gushed forth.

And then, today, I got tired.

It was so sudden. I walked out to the front desk of my library. It was quiet. No one needed my help. It was the perfect moment to commence with whatever project, large or small, was next. But instead, I just stood there, staring into space. No cartoon idea could induce me. I did not want to convince a cheerful "can do" AI to make the exact picture of a bugheart fountain in Clerkmanifestoland that I wanted. It wasn't simply that I did not have a new plan, I didn't particularly want a new plan.

I have never thought of myself as manic, bipolar, but maybe for any and every identifiable psychological condition to exist, it must be part of the great human brain. Maybe we all have a little bit of everything; mania, sociopathy, autism, schizophrenia, extroversion, anxiety, depression. Some are overcome by one or the other. Some live with it. Some experience flashes of them they barely recognize. Some make glittering use of them. Some of them lurk buried unseen in the brain, and some people are used and devoured by them.

In an hour I may suddenly fervently need to put myself and clerkmanifesto on a bag of chips, or create a dazzling Monet painting of me walking through the library with a parasol, but that may not happen for days or weeks. The fever abates. 

I want to watch the stillness.

I just want, once again, to write a thousand words, when a single picture will do.

A grab bag of me everywhere

 

As I cannot resist inserting myself in assorted book covers and dvds, they are starting to accumulate.

I am knee deep in them!

So I thought I'd put this little spot here on a lonely clerkmanifesto Saturday where I can show this variety of pictures that don't have anywhere else to go.

  

I knew there had to be a club for this!

 

Not only do they checkout late, then they use the bathroom on their way out, and stop to browse our free materials while we are trying to get the library locked up for the evening!

From a shirt at a local mall, adapted slightly:

Dancing with death at Clerkmanifestoland: The Stunt Road Wild Ride!

 

In what is becoming a sort of weekly feature here, today we take another visit to Clerkmanifestoland, the massive theme park of this very clerkmanifesto you are reading now. With its famous bugheart fountain, and its five lands (New Saint Minneapolis, Bugheart Sur Mer, Dreamland Rome, Library Storyland, and The Clerkmanifestoland Wilderness), Clerkmanifestoland is the perfect amusement park for readers of clerkmanifesto. And though there are not all that many readers of clerkmanifesto, it does mean that the lines for the rides at Clerkmanifestoland will be shorter than expected.

So far you will have learned about "Fox and Skunk in Arles", "The Condeluded Ride", The King of the Schnorrers 'Experience', and "Voyage to Catcher in the Rye". We have heavily referenced "Kayaks on the Escalante" and "The Bernini Vs Borromini Theater". You will also have done a bit of shopping in one of Clerkmanifestoland's many souvenir stores. I am actually a bit shocked at how much we have covered here already in just a few weeks. But there is still a lot of the park left for us to explore. And today we are taking a look at a ride inspired by the hijinks of my youth in the chaparral country of Southern California. 

Yes (in case you have been awaiting it!) we are featuring The Stunt Road Wild Ride!

Stunt Road Wild Ride is one of two major attractions in The Clerkmanifestoland Wilderness. So let's head through the gates.

With the Clerkmanifestoland Wilderness being a larger open land you will need to take a long, scenic wander through Kayak Country and past The Campfire Theater to find the queue for the Stunt Road Wild Ride.

Drug taking is one hundred percent optional for this ride. Due to local laws the park does not sell a ton of drugs. Or perhaps I should say, the park sells every kind of drug it is allowed to. Peyote is not one of these drugs, but the ride has quite a few references to peyote nonetheless.

Clerkmanifestoland is really more of a theme park, and as such does not focus much on thrill rides. The Stunt Road Ride is about the recklessness of youth, hallucinogenic drugs, finding rattlesnakes, and the time my friend Grape and I nearly crashed to our deaths while having a little adventure while going too fast in a car on the way down from Stunt Peak in Southern California. But Stunt Road Wild Ride is also one of our two thrill rides, so to speak, both of which are located in the Clerkmanifestoland Wilderness.   While this ride is not a traditional roller coaster, with great drops and loops, it is nevertheless a bit of a wild fun (it's in the title). It can feel very fast at times, and it turns and twists and drops through the environment in crazy and sometimes unexpected ways.

Most of our rides are connected to a gift shop, and Stunt Wild Ride's shop is called Clerkmanifestoland Wilderness Plunder. It is next to a record store called "Oz Records" in the Topanga Canyon inspired section of the park. This might be too much detail for you, but this shop is where you can find "Stunt Road" and "Kayaks of the Escalante" merchandise. I am partial to the various Stunt Road t-shirts myself and have been thinking of getting one.

This area of The Clerkmanifestoland Wilderness is across from the theater entrance and features the only eatery in this section of the park. 

Behind these shops is a looping hiking trail that's almost two kilometers long and takes in landscapes from both the kayak and stunt road rides. On a crowded day it's a great place to get away from all the people and lines, and with dedicated tableaus and scenery it is arguably a ride in and of itself. 

I have mentioned the eatery here which serves elevated backpacking food. It is surprisingly good, though with its odd concept things can be a bit hit or miss, so order carefully. To me, and from what I've read online, the gold standard here is the peanut butter trout. The trout are actually raised onsite in a pond one can see both from the Wilderness Trail and The Escalante Kayaks.

And that is our tour today of The Stunt Road Wild Ride and its environs. Perhaps it has whetted your appetite for visiting? Clerkmanifestoland is open 365 days a year and never closes for private events. It has no special passes, no early entry times and no ticket discounts. Though it has reached capacity a few handful of times in the past, just being able to show up and get a ticket is pretty reliable. Perhaps this is all because the park is rather difficult to get to, but I think if you make the effort you will find it worthwhile.

Sarcasm, or have things just been pretty mellow all these years?

 

The mattress factory

 

In an old working area of Saint Minneapolis, by the train tracks, an old mattress factory was converted into a kind of small industrial area wonderland. It is now full of glossy hip start-up companies, a really nice coffee place in an enormous space, large outdoor seating areas, and a perfectly serviceable brewery. The whole thing is watched over by an old water tower of surpassing charms. My darling wife and I love to get tea/coffee/beer there and drink them at one of the outdoor tables if the weather is remotely agreeable.

The brewery is called Lake Monster Brewing, which naturally led me to these pictures:

But wait!

Now that you are developing an affection for octopi on the loose, you are wondering: Where else can I see enormous octopi on the loose in Saint Minneapolis?

Good question.

I have your back!

At the best neighborhood restaurant in the area, Okome has, on occasion, a massive octopus sprawling across its dining room and wandering through the kitchens. And I, luckily, was able to get a few pictures of it for you!

No need to thank me.

No one ever needs to thank me here.