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.