sixty-seven

 

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 fifth one of eleven secrets:

5. Don’t be afraid of writing badly.

My understanding, probably based on television shows, is that if you are afraid of spiders and no longer want to be an arachnophobe, you go to see a kind, gentle person who keeps just loads of tarantulas in their spare bedroom. There, in that spider wonderland, you gently acclimate to the spidery presence. Since I am afraid of spiders and have never undergone this delicate cure, the very phrase “Spidery presence” give me the absolute willies. However, supposedly, if I went to this beneficent, saint-like spider herder and spent regular hours with these miraculous eight-legged creatures that I shouldn’t fear because they are our friends and help control the number of nuisance insects in the world, if I hung out closer and closer with these spiders, I would, before long, be letting them crawl all over me while I blithely sipped cappuccinos and made Indiana Jones jokes.

Since this works, theoretically, so well with spiders, I thought I would take it as my model for helping cure my possibly damaging fear of writing badly. The idea would be to carefully jot down just a line or two of terrible prose and then breathe a lot and have warm drinks and tell myself kind things. Unfortunately it turns out that I am incapable of producing bad writing on purpose. No matter how wise and pure my intentions are the moment I sit down to write all my plans dissipate. It’s like a fever that seizes me without warning. I suddenly want to be funny, graceful, expressive, winsome and clear-headed. Yes, when I write, I can be boring, pedantic, egotistical, maniacal, cumbersome and obtuse, but I can’t do it on purpose! It just sort of jumps out at me, like a spider, causing me to shriek and flail and go hide in my room for a couple days trying to soothe myself. If a spider herder professional tried to cure people of their arachnophobia by waiting until they were feeling calm and comfortable and then  flinging spiders at them they would be disbarred from the Arachnophile Professionals Association faster than a black widow spider can eat the head off of her mate.

Coincidentally that’s just about how writing something awful makes me feel, the same way thinking about one spider eating the head off of another spider makes me feel. Nevertheless I do understand that both these things, cannibal spiders and bad writing, are part of the natural order of things. They are the way of the world, they happen, and I should not fear them, but instead should embrace them. Not literally though as I would get web and poisonous oozing spiders all over my shirt.

Hello again from the present. This is Clerk Manifesto down in the cave system below the already completed Clerk Manifesto posts composed back in August. I am even a little ahead of myself in these posts now, putting up some images that try to express the breadth and variety of Kyoto.

This is my third day doing that, so I may be scraping things out a little bit, and unfortunately repeating images. I do not know. So this may be it for this section of reporting the breadth of Kyoto through diverse pictures. Even as this posts, I think it is possible we will be leaving for Tokyo, so soon there may be new things to show.

But for now this is one last day of our variety of travel photos from Kyoto, a city of wonders, prettiness, and fantasy all at once.

sixty-six

  

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, to my surprise, made it to my October posts! For me putting these posts together it is August 27 and we are still furiously preparing to leave the country.

"What country?" You ask.

Oh, the super weird one in North America. 

It has Minnesota in it.

Anyway, I have managed to get to my extra posts this far ahead thanks to this series that already has an introduction, which means this post has, count 'em, four introductions, an all-time record!!!:

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 fourth one of eleven secrets:

4. To be a good writer you must read! Read, read, read!

To be a good bartender you should be a heavy drinker. A good Police Officer should definitely knock over a few banks, and if you go into marketing or Public Relations it would be best if you believed everything, all the time, no matter what. If you want to be a writer you have to read; the printing on grocery bags, tags on clothing, peoples’ post-it notes that they’ve just left lying around where anyone can see them. Read license plates and the ads that come in the mailbox. Read missing cat posters in your neighborhood wishing they included more text because it is exactly when you are walking around your neighborhood that you are most likely to suffer from a paucity of the written word. Besides, there is always more to say about a cat who made a run for it! Read your phone, your blender, your espresso machine. Read kids books, mystery novels, door signs, smoke detectors, bumper stickers and food packaging. Read T-shirts and things scratched into walls and trees exploring their subtext if they have any which they don’t, but if you can find a book that goes on and on about how they’re actually loaded with subtext then read it cover to cover, twice.

And why, as a writer, should you read, read, read? Some say it is because to become a better writer you must study how others do it, but no one said anything about studying. No one said anything about studying! I’m reading, not studying! Hemingway said you read so you know what your competition is. I’m comfortable with that mostly. For instance, I am a much better writer than the person who wrote my espresso machine. They couldn’t even formulate words, it’s all just faintly confusing symbols. But the secret secret about this one is that it is no more a should situation than if I were advising you on how to have a really bad cold. If you’re going to have a really bad cold, you should cough, a lot.

This is Clerk Manifesto reporting in the sub basements of our posts once again from Kyoto in the present. The days left here are running very short as I put this one together, and soon we will be in Tokyo.

What I was doing yesterday, and what I will do for maybe another couple of days, is give a collection of photographs that express a little of the breadth of experience and the variety of the feel and look of Kyoto.

And here is today’s set.