Three views from my day

 

The inevitable occurs

 

After two days of posting pictures here of almost entirely legendary white men (yes, I'm aware) posing for promotional photographs for clerkmanifesto, it was never going to be completely satisfying without posting some random footage of the sessions, and maybe writing a song for it all edited together.

Maybe we were always heading here.

(Click through the picture)

Celebrity madness!

 

What started as a fun lark during a drunken poker game with Bob and Charlie has turned into a stampede of famous celebrities, both alive and dead, calling me to offer to "Help out". The troops have rallied round clerkmanifesto, and every famous celebrity you can shake a stick out wants "pose with a bugheart". 

It is very nice of them. But maybe they don't believe me when I tell them "The same eight readers who were here before you posed with a bugheart will be all that's left after you pose with the bugheart." Then I add: "Except maybe minus one."

"Minus one?" The celebrity asks worriedly.

"Don't worry. That won't be because of you. It's just how things work here at clerkmanifesto."

They are relieved, and they want to help out anyway. They simply don't understand obscurity, except maybe Van Gogh, but he's so quiet and hard to read.

So, sure, the celebrity comes over. We choose the heart. We carefully pick out the beetle, tamping down our squeamishness. We take a few dozen pictures under the lights. And then we choose the one or two best pictures from the group. Voila, Julia Child with a bugheart! 

I awkwardly say "Really the best way to help clerkmanifesto, if you want, is just by reading it."

They all look a little awkward and sheepish when I say that, and reply "I keep meaning to."

More things plopped into hearts made of books

 

I could blame the bronchitis, or a long day where, in the middle of April, it had the audacity to snow from dawn to dusk. Or I may simply be losing it a little while making so many bookworms on hearts made out of books. But whatever it is I have begun adding new... things to my hearts made of books, mainly celebrities at this point.

Whatever it is I guess I decided all of these below needed wings, and hearts, and you can do with them as you will. If you're having trouble staying entertained we'll make a game of it:

Who, featured below, can you name?

I'll start you out:

One of them is a cat.

The silent majority

Dear Clerkmanifesto (a reader writes):


I have recently observed a number of your readers writing in to make themselves and their wishes known to you. This has spurred me on to say there are a great many of us out here, hundreds, perhaps thousands, who steadfastly read your engaging, quirky, sometimes challenging missives and would never write in. I for one consider your work to be literary as opposed to an object of common discussion and would no more "comment" or write in a letter to you than I would to Wordsworth or Yeats.

I mean all this as a point of reference for you rather than any kind of condemnation of the letter writers who have recently been offering their perspective and sometimes making their wishes known.


Thank you so much for your attention.


With fulsome regard, 


G. Markel Wittenberger Esq.







My Dear G. Markel:


Thank you, but is this not, precisely, writing into me?


With all due respect,


F. Calypso (for Clerkmanifesto)









Dear Clerkmanifesto:


Aha! Curses! Caught with my hand in the cookie jar!


Nevertheless, yours truly,


G. Markel Wittenberger Esq.

Bugs

When I started clerkmanifesto seven years ago I imagined at some point I might have a large, engaged readership.

No, wait, that's not right.

When I started clerkmanifesto seven years ago I hoped it would bring me worldwide acclaim, but mostly I suspected it wouldn't, and that it would all be too much for me to keep up with, and I would slowly fade out of writing it over a couple of months until I quietly just dropped it without anyone much noticing.

Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that its level of popularity would remain so tenaciously tiny, all while my dedication to it would be so devoted, involved, and steadfast. My process of coping with my lack of popularity has been a long and complicated road. I started with glimmers of hope, followed by periods of frustration, occasional moments of rage, mildly depressing periods of stunned disbelief, then bouts of mature disappointment, then bemusement, rage again, glimmers of understanding, refusal, acceptance, then irritation, and then, perhaps most helpfully, sections of genuine disinterest. 

At this point if I really, emotionally and structurally, need a larger, more engaged audience I just make it up.

Which is how I came to receive this letter written by myself over the course of the next several minutes:


Dear Clerkmanifesto;

I have been following your interesting and wide ranging blog for a couple of years now, but have kept my appreciation and regard mainly to myself. Your regular posting is sustaining enough for me, and certainly I like some of your whimsies and musings better than others. Every once in awhile, with time on my hands, I delve into your rather deep back catalog, and I have passed a few edifying evenings here or there in such endeavor. 

It rather caught my attention when you began adding photography to your missives, and I am surprised and delighted by how compelling I have found this to be. I mean this as no slight to your writing, which I enjoy, but I merely consider these pictures an added dimension providing more to appreciate as I peruse clerkmanifesto. It is also your photography that has elicited this first letter of mine to you.

A scant few days ago a young gentleman reader of yours (he seemed quite young indeed to be a reader of your rather complicated blog) expressed in no uncertain terms that he was interested in pictures of bunnies. He was very interested in bunnies. He was charmingly passionate about his interest in bunnies! I pleasantly delighted in seeing you so fully indulge the young chap, and it quite got me thinking.

I am not a tremendous fan of bunnies (though I still enjoyed those pictures). However I am something of a very amateur entomologist. And I couldn't resist breaking my usual silence here to inquire as to whether you might have any photographs in my line. Surely a bug or two must have wandered across a couple of those flowers you so beautifully photograph? If so I would be extremely appreciative if you considered sharing some of those "bug" pictures with us. I don't expect much, but I would be so thankful for anything along the six-legged line. Wings, of course, are always a plus.

Thank you again for anything you can provide.

I remain your devoted reader,

Adley Cameron Brutus Wanderwillow III









How very kind of you to write Adley. I am happy to provide a selection of pictures of insects that I have taken in my wanderings. I am ignorant as to all but the simplest of names for any of these (e.g. a kind of a bee, a dragonfly, moth...), so feel free to identify as you like. As ever this comes from my rare collection of pictures that are "mostly in focus". The last is a shot of pure luck, perhaps even my luckiest so far (yes, he's flying). 

I hope you enjoy them!

Dylan and fame

Bob Dylan and I went out for a cocktail at a new place on Grand Avenue in St. Paul called Hyacinth. The drinks sounded good and we were instantly delighted with how the hospitality was included in the prices. The downside was that because we were new there Dylan's fame caused a small ruckus. He handled the small spate of questions, autographs, and lingering people a little better than usual. To a neutral observer he would have appeared thinly polite, begrudging, and churlish, but there weren't any neutral observers. There never are.

Dylan had a Black Manhattan, black because it was made with an Italian liqueur called Averna. I had an Ultimate Parola, finding the pineapple tequila and Yellow Chartreuse irresistible. After we ordered I said to Bob "I used to want to be famous."

He sort of scoffed "When did you stop wanting to be famous?"  Bob is not exactly my nicest friend from The Iron Range. My nicest friend from The Iron Range would be Richard Tomassoni, who would ask the same question maybe, but without any scoffing. He doesn't drink cocktails though. But I have to admit that either way those Iron Range people are pretty interesting.

"Three days ago." I answered.

Bob looked more seriously at me, like if I stopped wanting to be famous three days ago it wasn't deserving of scoffing. "I used to want to be famous too." He said.

It sounded very poetical when he said it. He's like that. 

"How's your drink?" I asked.

He perked right up, and then he talked about it for a pretty long time.








  

More of the burdens of fame

My wife and I were mildly out and about on the town over the weekend. There were a couple of interruptions to our harmonious togetherness.

The first time we were at a cafe having beer and wine. Kind of a lot of it for us. It was fun. We had the good table. A lady walked by. She was very nice. She said "It's my favorite librarian!" She was talking to me. I function occasionally as a librarian though it's not technically true.

I said "That's very nice of you to say."

She said "You are such a cute couple."

I said "I'm glad you think so."

The next day we were at a bakery. A man came up to me and said "I recognize you from the library. I don't get over there very often lately. I'm reading a lot of e-books, project Gutenberg and all that."

I replied "I recognize you too." Which I did. "Have you checked out our library's e-book collection? It's pretty useful if you like them."

He said no, but that he should check it out.

There is a scene in a movie I have see 20 times called The Holiday. Jack Black is a composer who does movie soundtracks. He is with Kate Winslet who plays a obit writer on home exchange holiday in L.A. They are in a Blockbuster, which shows that the movie is far older than I think it would be. Jack Black is holding up DVD's with great soundtracks he admires, ostentatiously singing the scores to her. He holds up The Graduate and sings a bit of Mrs. Robinson and then informs her that it was written for the movie and so technically is a score. The camera cuts to Dustin Hoffman, who is only in the movie to make this one brief cameo. He mutters to himself "I can't go anywhere."

Totally.

Me and Elton John

This is sort of a book review.



Many times when I am over at Elton John's house, and we're arguing about soccer and playing charades with the terrible charades player Bob Dylan, and Lady Gaga says something funny, I want to ask Elton John to tell me about John Lennon and Liberace and Groucho Marx and Elvis and Katherine Hepburn. But then Neil Young suddenly starts playing us a new song so I don't ask. The Royal Family shows up from out of nowhere and one of the Rolling Stones asks me something, usually Keith, well, always Keith because I don't think Mick likes me and Keith tries to make up for it, and Charlie Watts is real quiet, but before I can answer I find myself in the middle of an argument between Richard Gere and someone in The Who. So I extricate myself from that and see if there's any food around the place, but there isn't a single bite to eat!

Then Elton comes into the kitchen with Elvis Costello and Cher and Ringo and some politician I think I'm supposed to know, but can't for the life of me place, maybe because he's English, and we're having a kind of actually nice conversation. It's mellow. And I'm just about to say to Elton "Hey, tell us about Lady Di and Freddie Mercury and Gianni Versace and Oprah and Simon and Garfunkel and Franco Zeffirelli and David Bowie and Andy Warhol and Elizabeth Taylor and Rod Stewart and Billie Jean King and Yoko and Cary Grant and The Queen and The Band and Aretha Franklin." But all of the sudden I get too shy and the moment passes.

But I'd kind of like to know, so I say strongly to myself "Next time I'm going to ask!"



Now I don't have to.

I am the Internet

I am well acquainted with the famous artists who never look at or listen to their work after they're done making it. 

"I never listen to my albums, and if a song of mine comes on the radio I have to turn it off."

"I don't reread anything I've written after it's published. I just see the mistakes."

and

"I never want to watch my own movies. I'm only interested in the next thing."

are all representative of the kinds of things I have read and heard notable artists say about their own work. And that's fine for them. But I don't have that luxury. They have millions of people to look at their artwork for them. Millions.

I just have a few.

So, thank you by the way.

But while Cat's Cradle is (fair enough, deservedly) being read somewhere every second of every single day, the vast, vast majority of my own handcrafted 2,500 plus blog posts are floating in the black, anonymous space of the great, sleeping Internet. At any given time it is likely not just that no one is reading any given essay of mine, but that no one is actually reading anything I ever wrote. And while I genuinely count myself fortunate to have had ten or 15 readers of any of my posts, for some of my posts that moment of light might have happened five years ago! Some of even the nicest things I have written have been wallowing in absolute Internet darkness for half a decade now.

And so that is why I regularly, constantly even, go back and reread my old posts.

Or wait, let me put it an entirely different way:

I am on the Internet a lot! I am on it slightly more than I can get away with at work. I check it out regularly at home. I shop on it, watch movies on it, and play games on it. I check the weather on it. It is not accurate but I keep trying. I even work on the Internet! But in all that Internet time I am often dissatisfied. I have a lot of problems with the Internet, a great catalog of problems, many of them exhaustively articulated here, on this blog on the Internet. Sometimes I come to my senses and turn off the Internet. But sometimes I go round and round until I come, in desultory fashion, to my blog.

And I look at my traffic.

And I see that some weird bot in Russia that I don't really understand went to Saturday, October 3, 2015. It's one of those letter to the publisher posts, First Follow Up Letter to Editor. So I go there too. Just like the bot. But unlike the bot, I read it. Maybe the first time anyone has done so in years.

I like it! 

So, as the right sidebar of my blog lists the other blog posts in nearby sequence, I choose one by title, October 6, 2015, My Friend Bob Dylan.

I like it too!

How about October 1, 2015, Dear Jerome Foundation?

I think, "Hey, I should send this letter. I could use $250 in stamps!"

And I realize, this is all I want the Internet to be. I just want it to be this good. And then I read some more of my old posts until I get tired of them and stop thinking they're so great. And then I go to Reddit and watch some cats fall off couches.

He's back!

There are always a few famous people at my library in any given time frame. These aren't simply the library patrons that visit nearly everyday, though they too can have a small measure of notoriety, but rather they are the ones who also interact heavily with the front desks or bring so many disruptive issues to the public space that they can't go unnoticed. One of these people, Bag Man, was a mainstay of this "famous" class for several years. He was a full time patron, meaning he generally managed to be in the library for all of our sixty some open hours a week. He ate noisily, had some problematic hygiene issues, and carried with him six plastic bags of possessions that, from a cursory look at them, appeared to be perilously close to simply being garbage. We saw him every day for years.

And then he was gone. 

He stopped coming to the library.

Of course we discussed it, as a staff, because we discuss everything, but in the end there's not much to say about someone whose only new feature is, and continues to be, not being there. So we talked about him less and less. And when one gets to where the only thing to say about someone is "remember so and so" one is inclined to say it less and less often. And though I can't quite say he was forgotten, after all, I can still remember the phone lady, circa 1998, who used to have loud phone conversations with her imaginary boyfriend, he did start to rather fade away in all our minds.

But then last Wednesday he came back.

It was electric. I didn't even see him, but at least six different people told me about it within 45 minutes. Everyone was so excited. "Bagman is back!" Was the joyous cry that ran through the library. Everyone seemed so happy about it. 

I kind of was too. Then I remembered.

"Hey," I asked. "Wasn't he a total asshole though?"

"Oh yeah." My co-workers said, subdued. "I guess he was."

He was recalcitrant, noisy, demanding, churlish, and took up a lot of space, usually taking over a study room or a suite of four chairs. He also demanded a breathtaking amount of hand sanitizer.

On my way to shelve I went to look for him anywhere in his usual haunts in the greater fiction section. I just wanted to see with my own eyes. Did he have shoes? Was he making loud noises that he refused to stop making? I don't know. He was already gone. 

I heard a report that he waved at one of us staff members. This was something he never would have done in the past, and the real piece of good news in the whole thing. Maybe he got his life together. Maybe he stopped being an asshole. There's always hope.

We may never know. But perhaps that would be for the best. I think it's time for the library and him to move on with our lives. 

It always was.