sixty-five

  

Clerkmanifesto is going context free for 100 days!

While I retire from 31 years at the Roseville Library, sell nearly everything I own, fly with my darling wife to Japan for 40 days, and then move together to France to start to build a life there, I present a less explained clerkmanifesto, a clerkmanifesto of snapshots and time travel. Below you may see old posts without introduction from my 4,750 post collection. You may see random photos, brand new or years old. I may write a passage about Japan as if of course you know I'm in Japan, I may make a simple observation or joke, but whatever it is, I won't be explaining it. You'll have to take it as it comes.

For more context you are welcome to read this longer introduction.

And if this is all too confusing I welcome you to investigate our thousands of fully explained historic posts from the past 12 years, though I'll be the first to admit, hours later, you may still come away a little confused.

Here, however it works, is what clerkmanifesto has for you today:

I have decided to run an old essay series of mine that long ago did much to inspire clerkmanifesto. It is called "The Secret Secrets of Writing". If in my travels I am able to throw anything current onto clerkmanifesto it will be down below today's passage.

This is the third one of eleven secrets:

3. Make a regular writing time and stick to it.

I am pretty sure I read somewhere that Flannery O’Connor woke up at dawn every day, fed her peahens and then wrote for six hours. Or it could have been someone like Flannery O’Connor and it might have been for five hours or three hours a day on weekdays before eating a large, farmhouse breakfast. The point is that I could easily look it all up on the Internet because research time definitely counts as part of writing time and if I were having my writing time while sitting at the computer right now you would not be reading this. That is because I would almost certainly be researching Flannery O’connor and anything related to her in anyway possible until I should have gone to bed three hours ago, at which point I would have logged so many writing hours that I’d have to take a week or so off, by which time I would have abandoned this project because I could no longer remember what I was going to say. Which just goes to show how you should keep regular hours and stick to them tenaciously like, maybe, Flannery O’connor, who, off the top of my head and going on memories of very old research, had a disease called Lupus, raised Peahens, didn’t think well of John Steinbeck, lived in the South, and was a super good writer if you don’t mind not knowing sometimes if things are supposed to be funny or not.

One final caution here: Counting research as writing time is a lot like counting tax deductions. You can only count what you use. This is why I am trying to develop a writing style that attempts to include, by name and specifically, everything I have seen, watched or read, ever.

This is Clerk Manifesto reporting from the present in Kyoto, Japan, the city of jazz music. That would be a good opening line for a post about jazz music, but I am just dictating and composing on the fly mainly as a way to present photographs of Kyoto. Even at that I am losing track of which ones I have posted and which I have not. So forgive a bit of the chaos down here in the basement of Clerk Manifesto posts.

I think I will try for a few days just posting sets of variety shots of Kyoto since so many are accumulating on my phone. I am using different styles and have gathered together a lot of different images of Kyoto, which is such a vast and rich place that it requires a variety of approaches to express. Maybe this will be a good method for a short while, to give a less cohesive set of pictures but still try to capture some of the variety of Kyoto and the feeling of being here with each collection.

Anyway, here are the ones for today.

sixty-four

  

Clerkmanifesto is going context free for 100 days!

While I retire from 31 years at the Roseville Library, sell nearly everything I own, fly with my darling wife to Japan for 40 days, and then move together to France to start to build a life there, I present a less explained clerkmanifesto, a clerkmanifesto of snapshots and time travel. Below you may see old posts without introduction from my 4,750 post collection. You may see random photos, brand new or years old. I may write a passage about Japan as if of course you know I'm in Japan, I may make a simple observation or joke, but whatever it is, I won't be explaining it. You'll have to take it as it comes.

For more context you are welcome to read this longer introduction.

And if this is all too confusing I welcome you to investigate our thousands of fully explained historic posts from the past 12 years, though I'll be the first to admit, hours later, you may still come away a little confused.

Here, however it works, is what clerkmanifesto has for you today:

I have decided to run an old comic series of mine that long ago did much to inspire clerkmanifesto. It is called "The Secret Secrets of Writing". Though I think clerkmanifesto linked to it in the old days, I don't believe these were published here, so it makes me a bit happier to run this ostnsibly new series than it does to run so many reposts, not that I minded that too much.

This is the second one of eleven secrets and already it needs an addendum! The joke concerning Harper Lee still works, but maybe is confused a bit by the later publication of that obnoxious act of greed known as "Go Call a Watchman", which was published long after this piece was written:

2. Keep writing and you will get better and better.

Everyone enjoys the hope that their labors will have a purpose, that practice makes perfect and that, generally speaking, we improve. I particularly dislike wasted effort. If I ruin a perfectly nice sauté of caramelized onions, red peppers and brussels sprouts by tipping in too much salt I am quite capable of spending six agonizing hours in the kitchen throwing in lemons and whole cauliflowers, arugula, olives, turning it into a soup, add potatoes, curry, coconut milk, emptying the larder in the process, transfer to a succession of larger pots, try adding 6 cups of brown basmati rice, rush out to the store while it simmers to get more ginger, some honey and turmeric, and one dozen quart jars to freeze it all in so that I can carefully thaw them out in seven months and then dump it all into the compost bin.

Did this make me a better cook? Absolutely! For months I will be more cautious with salt. I have also learned that gradually adding all the food I own into a large pot with a predetermined amount of salt until it reaches an appropriate salt to food ratio is not a sound culinary endeavor. And so it is with writing. Just because you drift off into some vaguely analogical tangent about cooking a ruined meal doesn’t mean you have to follow that through to the bitter end and come up with some dodgy grand lesson or conclusion from it. And I am now almost certainly the better writer for it.

So clearly it plays out in the world around us. Great writers like Harper Lee encounter so much in a life of writing, mistakes and successes, that though each individual lesson may be small, their wisdom and craft accumulates around them like mighty oaks soaring gradually out of a ragged meadow of damp weeds. To kill a Mockingbird  has certainly moved many, me included, but it will always be the endless graceful charm and profoundly rooted craft of her later work that guides and inspires true writers.

Once again this is Clerk Manifesto reporting from the present in Kyoto. As I look back at these old pieces of writing that I made many years ago, I am struck that in this present iteration of sub posts added in layers to the bottom of other writing, we are in the least writerly phase of Clerk Manifesto’s work. These are mostly lightly edited dictations due to my technical limitations here.

And this is just as well since are focusing primarily on photographs to tell the story of Kyoto, and today will be no exception. Yesterday featured a study of the building facades of Kyoto, and I had a fair few left over from that series and may still be making more. But I wanted to take the more pure and consistent approach with the first set, and these take a little more diverse idea of what a facade is and occasionally dispense with the idea altogether.

So here is a selection of today’s up close and personal visions of Kyoto

sixty-three

  

Clerkmanifesto is going context free for 100 days!

While I retire from 31 years at the Roseville Library, sell nearly everything I own, fly with my darling wife to Japan for 40 days, and then move together to France to start to build a life there, I present a less explained clerkmanifesto, a clerkmanifesto of snapshots and time travel. Below you may see old posts without introduction from my 4,750 post collection. You may see random photos, brand new or years old. I may write a passage about Japan as if of course you know I'm in Japan, I may make a simple observation or joke, but whatever it is, I won't be explaining it. You'll have to take it as it comes.

For more context you are welcome to read this longer introduction.

And if this is all too confusing I welcome you to investigate our thousands of fully explained historic posts from the past 12 years, though I'll be the first to admit, hours later, you may still come away a little confused.

Here, however it works, is what clerkmanifesto has for you today:

Now we're really moving along by virtue of reposting, though I still haven't managed to let go of these explanatory notes, which makes for a better clerkmanifesto experience, at least I hope it does, but they are surely slowing me down too.

Today, curiously, isn't exactly a repost though. Before clerkmanifesto started I was writing some sort of pre-clerkmanifesto series. One was called "The Secret Secrets of Writing" which did much to help establish my tone going forward. I thought maybe I put these in clerkmanifesto at some point, but it doesn't look like it. Maybe I just linked to them in the early days? There are eleven of these, and though today is only the first in the series, I am right on the fence as to whether to run the whole series here. With ten more days of them they would take me almost all the way into our arrival in France! It sounds like a pretty good deal!

1. Writing is hard work

Well, typing is hard work. I don’t like typing. I particularly despise any letter I have to type with the little finger of my left hand. And I find sometimes double clicking on an icon on my desktop that allows me to write can be excruciating. But since I can do that with my pointer finger that’s less physical and more emotional. Likewise if I’m going to be writing in my spiral notebook retrieving my spiral notebook can be a pretty hard-core chore, like an afternoon of ditch digging condensed into 7 seconds. I dug ditches, so I know what I’m talking about. It Was On Kibbutz Yahel in the early 80s. That is in Israel. Not the 80s but the Kibbutz. Me and Jay worked together digging a very big ditch in sand for a tough, wiry Israeli who was distinctly unimpressed with the amount of work we got done. Jay had curly hair and was a bit dodgy just in general but he certainly seemed to me to be a reasonably diligent shoveler. We smoked a lot of hash once we figured out how to acquire it and got so drunk one night on cheap wine that I could not remember what happened that night. The funny thing is that 30 years later I can remember very few things that happened on any given night back then and so now the one night I cannot remember is one of the nights I remember the best. In fact, I’m pretty sure a lot of stray evening events from that time have just drifted over to conveniently have happened on that night.

What does this have to do with writing? Well, it is writing. Was it hard work? No, it was more like an accident that happened while I was planning to do the excruciatingly hard work of writing. Was anyone hurt in this accident? Only you can say.

This is Clerk Manifesta reporting again from the present. I am still in Kyoto with my darling wife. Today I have for you a series of pictures, quite a lot actually, of storefronts and housefronts and sometimes templefronts in Kyoto. I find the diversity and complexity of the building facades to be endlessly fascinating. There are some common styles, and there is an incredibly distinct and charming old Kyoto style too. The temples have a curious and strong consistency to them as well. But for the most part I am struck by the sheer eclecticism of Kyoto.

Kyoto is jam packed with different elements that create sometimes inharmonious and complicated streetfronts and facades. But they always have great moments of beauty, and complexity and simplicity can be right next to each other. I think I could take thousands of pictures happily of the fronts of houses and stores and temples in this city, though I do not know if most people could look at thousands of them.

I have taken these photographs and translated them into a style I rather like, as it simplifies the complex elements of real photography and reduces them just a little to make a nice set of comparable pictures. Maybe that is all a bit too fancy for what is really just a bunch of pictures of the fronts of buildings in Kyoto. I hope you enjoy them. I have a lot more than these, but I thought this would be a good starter set, and we will see if we have more later.