Just a cathedral

 

Sitting here in the shade under a cathedral that started out a thousand years ago, but where most of the work was done about 800 to 600 years ago, and where a woman named Eleanor was married to a king, becoming the Queen of France, who later became the Queen of England after getting her marriage annulled and marrying the King of England, I find my usual difficulties in photographing these extraordinary Gothic cathedrals.

Here’s the best of what I have managed so far.

City falling apart

 

This city is falling apart.

It's also a city in great shape.

Money pours through this city. Though as money does, it flows unevenly, surging through its open veins while other arteries are completely blocked. Grand and detailed, expensive repair jobs scramble to maintain buildings on every street. Meanwhile buildings in some of the most sought after locations in the country seem to be hanging on by a thread, with walls peeling and post apocalyptic shutters hanging outside of every crumbling window.

Which, by way of introduction, is a little of what I tried to photograph today. 

And though maybe these are merely an indulgence in abstract photography, some working better than others, they are also an opportunity taken from the old city here, where what sometimes looks perfectly and charmingly maintained is really built from 300 years of crude, but effective, patch jobs. And as I took these pictures, looking closely at window frames and walls, no new repair seemed to have ever entirely occluded the old ones, and most of the new ones had a clock already ticking on the due date for the next.

More library murals

 

Out at the front desk of my library I look up and around at all our giant, lonely, unadorned white walls everywhere, and my mind starts to wander...

There's nothing wrong with minimalism but...

If it offers the invitation of unused space, it probably hasn't been done right.

Cathedral

 

I have been working with these cathedral pictures for the past two days. These started from some detailed photographs I took of other pictures of cathedrals in books, but the images then go on a very long journey after that. With all the filtering, AI, mirroring, and object additions I use I'd actually think they would look less like cathedrals than they still do.

There may be more tomorrow so I hope you like them.

Further along the aisle

 

You head down the apse looking at photos of water, printed on giant panels of metal, and hung between marble columns. There are a bunch of tree branches scattered on the cracked floor under your feet. You step around the debris.

Is that a dead raccoon? 

Ew!

Fourth from the end of the row is this picture:

Art exhibit

 

Okay then, here is another picture from the wall of the apse of the church.

See, you go into the church. One door is gone, the other hanging half off. A hole in the roof lets light in. You can hear birds in the rafters. A lot of the stained glass windows are blown out. There are pews still along the nave, but some of the floor is torn up, although some of the floor is solid and stone. There are rows of columns in pretty good shape on both sides, and past them, along the outside walls, there is panel after panel of giant paintings, on massive sheets of metal.

No, not paintings. Photographs.

Is that water?

Yes, that's water.

Inches from a new name

 

There is news to report in the development of my new website, known here, temporarily, as Clerkmanifesto 2.0.

Big news!

But first let's catch you up. Clerkmanifesto, where you are now, has gotten to be a little too small of a box for me. I have also had cause to worry about the support for its meager features. So, like a wee caterpillar, I have sewn it into a chrysalis and promised to make us an exciting, new, full featured, giant website. It will be so rich and full of content and wonders that it will REPLACE THE VERY INTERNET!

And it shall emerge from its metamorphosis as a DIFFERENT CATERPILLAR!

So the big news is...

The new website, Clerkmanifesto 2.0 (I swear I am mere hours from revealing its actual name) is, well, um, it's not that great. Wordpress, the ubiquitous web tool I am working with, is far less intuitive, easy to use, and flexible than I hoped. And I have always been, I'm afraid, an unhappy student. 

BUT

But

It is almost in full working order, almost.

The front door can almost be unlocked. Except it's not really unlocking, more like prying off the boards.

You see, this Clerkmanifesto 2.0 is like an old, ramshackle house, on a distant planet. Only it turns out to be on Earth, but it's in a slightly altered timeline from our own.

No, that's not quite it. 

Though "ramshackle" feels pretty accurate. "House" isn't bad either. "Altered" works as well. And you can explore it. There are a lot of rooms. Some are even curiously decorated. Occasionally you will find an old wardrobe, open it up, step through it, and find yourself in a field of wild flowers. 

But mostly you will just find yourself in another room.

"Wait. What room is this?" You will ask. "And why is everything crooked?"

I DON'T KNOW WHY EVERYTHING IS CROOKED! IT WAS STRAIGHT WHEN I PUT IT IN!

So in the end it is kind of like Clerkmanifesto, but more twisty, and everything is kind of rusty, and it all works slower.

And we learn once again: We cannot escape ourselves, so we might as well lean into it.

I know, I'm pretty excited too.

King of the library: The tenth decree

Oh if I were king of the library!

I have mused on this a few times in the course of this blog. Eight times to be precise, and you can find the links to them over on the sidebar to your right.

But inspiration has struck again, revelation, imagination, dreams, visions, longings, hallucinations, castles in the sky!

I have a decree!

The Ninth Decree:

The main room of the library shall be elaborately redecorated according to a theme every year.

I understand that this needs a little explaining.


A vast rebuild of my library was done about eight or nine years ago. It was done in the style of cutting edge minimalism, on a budget, circa 1979 Berlin (going by a photograph I saw of their library). I'm not complaining, exactly, but it's a sort of design that over a very few years becomes bland. But because it is also minimal, with a vast gray floor and even vaster, soaring, white, unadorned walls, it begs for expression.

Now let me also say that, despite this main room being a featured and even essential space for my library, this is also an almost throwaway space. It houses the front desk, several little featured kiosks of mini collections, many many Internet computers, and our vast AV collections. It is a noisier space, leading to Teens, Children's, the work room, and the coffee shop, and it is a more social space where people pass through and get things done. It is not our study spaces, our quiet spaces, our main adult book collections, or our traditional library space. It is not our essential library. It longs for fun!

We will make it fun. It will have a theme!

For our first theme we will begin with: 

A Plush English Drawing Room. 

The massive walls will be draped in great banners of rich velvet, overhung occasionally with large Manor House type oil paintings; grave portraits, hunting scenes, rustic and bucolic cows, whatever. We can throw down some shabby oriental rugs, they only have to survive a year, and then we will carefully set up little two to three people conversation areas with heavy leather arm chairs and small, richly draped tables with charming table lamps. In the evenings waitstaff from the coffee shop will take your orders for cocktails at these very tables. A large, very quiet and well-behaved mastiff will more or less live on the premises. Amid all the DVDs and CDs we can probably squeeze in some nice towering oak bookshelves full of dated, leather bound classics and loads of oddball and obscurely fascinating period ephemera.

And that's merely for year one. So if you don't like it just go upstairs and wait a few hundred days.

 Future options include a pirate ship theme, a Science Fiction Spaceship, Enchanted Gardens with a central fountain, a Traditional Japanese Tearoom, the undersea world, Mayan Civilization, and  an African Safari. The possibilities are endless, and our space, while bland and a bit formless, makes the perfect canvas.

So it shall be. And so it is decreed, this day, etc. etc.


The King.