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.