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