seventy-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:

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". We have over the course of these eleven days now shown, with this below, the entire series, which comes out to a complete course in writing. Although it may only turn out to be a course in writing for a very particular kind of writer.

Me, probably, as it spurred me on to writing 5,000 or so more essays all a bit like these. 

But if you are interested in launching your own writing career, its advice is unlikely to do much damage to you.

If in my travels I am able to throw anything current onto clerkmanifesto it will be down below today's passage. Supposedly I am in Tokyo now and the Japan trip is nearly finished, a mind boggling thought to someone standing typing at my kitchen counter while we say goodbye to our couch, which we loved. Anyway...

This is the eleventh of eleven secrets:

11. Write what you love.

Okay. Do I start now?

Traditionally this one has been “Write what you know.” And though it might behoove me to get all humble and dissembling and say I don’t know much, I actually know gobs of stuff. Most of it is not going to cut it on the written page. Somewhere along these lines Henry David Thoreau said  “How vain it is to sit down and write when you have not stood up to live.” which greatly impressed me as a young man and freed me up to watch a lot of television. I have followed in the great Thoreau’s footsteps not so much in defiantly standing up to live, but in occasionally saying pithy things that diss others and elevate myself. See, I just did it now to poor Henry David Thoreau? Unfortunately I have learned that this isn’t a terrific life strategy, and when I say “Isn’t terrific” I mean it’s the soul’s equivalent of cigarette smoking: it’s addictive, can look stylish and sophisticated and produces malignant interior cancers with magnificent facility. You’d think it would also make people like you less, but it doesn’t, so much, unless a little like with the cancer, tending to appear as you get older.

What does all this have to do with writing what I love? Wow, nothing, really, except, I’m thinking, if I’m not tearing too much down there’s enough that I love that generally it just shows up when I write. Writing sort of makes a space for it. What I start out writing hardly comes into it. And the same with what I know and with what I’ve lived. It all just shows up. Writing is a party! It’s a feast! It’s a tiger pit trap. Wait, where did that come from, but, yes! Writing is exactly like a bunch of pretty leaves scattered on a sunlit forest path, all in the most natural, random way possible, and you innocently step there and, wham!, right through the ground into the deep tiger pit trap you go. That’s exactly what writing is like, but a little more in a good way, but only a little. Which explains why I am out here roaming these woods, looking for tigers and carrying my shovel and my ladder. And my ladder has eleven steps, and they are the secret secrets of the secrets of writing. Come on up.

On sub level 3B, Clerk Manifesto is reporting now live from Tokyo. While I have plenty to say about Tokyo, that may have to wait for another day. For today, we will suffice with a selection of photographs in a new style that I have been working on the whole time I have been here in Tokyo with my darling wife.

It is perhaps a way to express yet again the density of Tokyo and sometimes its strangeness. All of the pictures I am showing you today have an eye toward that, especially in the sense that, and this is the wildest thing to me, they are all taken within probably a kilometer of each other. Everything you see in these pictures today is just a short walk from anything else you see in these pictures today. 

Oh, also it should probably be noted that while there is all kinds of lighting and coloring hijinks going on here the subject of these photos are basically unaltered.