Dear favorite leftist podcaster

 

Here is a template for a letter I'd like to send to all my favorite leftist, anti-capitalist podcasters (teaser version):

To One of My All-Time Favorite, Anti-Capitalist, Anarchist Podcasters:

This is a teaser fan letter to give you a taste of how much I love your work. I hope you enjoy it!

I love your work. I listen to it all the time. I even listen to the five-minute teasers for the incredibly interesting-sounding subscriber-only episodes that I would have to pay six dollars a month to listen to.

 But I'm not faulting you for that restriction! 

I know that we live in a hard, late-capitalist world, and though you beautifully articulate a better world and urge us to work for it, and present brilliant ideas about the world we might create, and present expert guests discussing the inspiring way forward, we also exist in this world, as is, with bills to pay and groceries to buy. And so naturally if more and more people find your podcast valuable and entertaining, and you want to put more and more resources towards the quality, frequency, and production of it, why not have the community gather resources for you to support what you're doing?

Good on you. 

I still love your ideas of library socialism and anti-hierarchies and belief in the common good, ideas I support and hopefully strive towards in tiny ways in my own life. But really, most of all, what I wanted to do with this letter was write you and tell you something about yourself that you may be too humble to see. 

You offer something so extraordinary and unique that it has amazed and actually astonished me. It is that you are

And that concludes the teaser portion of my fan letter.

Subscribers to my Patreon fan letter page, for only six dollars, get access to the complete text of all my insightful and frankly gushing and ego-boosting fan letters. Subscriber fan letters are also ad-free, because you have better things to do with your time. You also get notifications of special fan letters that might be coming your way soon.

With the deepest respect and regard,

Feldenstein

Dear Editor: The Sample

 

Dear Editor:

At some point, inevitably, after all my convincing persuasion and clever marketing to induce you to publish a book of my work, we come to the part where I must submit a sample.

This is tough!

What single piece of my work is so exceptional, and yet so representative, so convincing to a newcomer, but timeless, rich, and still typical?

Did you know that I have written over 3,700 short pieces from which to draw my sample? That is a lot of pieces. There are sad pieces, and funny pieces, and angry pieces, and wise pieces, and silly pieces, and thoughtful pieces, and inventive pieces, and mind-bending pieces, and chatty pieces, and pieces where I write letters to the editor.

Let me ask you, as a person who sits in judgement professionally:

What tree in the forest do you choose?

What color do you reveal to demonstrate color to a person who has never seen color?

What day of your life is the day that best expresses your life?

I have enclosed an SASE and look forward to your response.

Your Author,

Feldenstein Calypso

Dear Editior: Have you considered...

 

Dear Editor:

Have you considered publishing a high profile insider's non-fiction book about libraries? 

I have one for you and it will knock you off your feet!

Did you know that Libraries are not the genteel, quiet institutions we remember them as, but rather have become hives of villainy, bloodlust, sex and murder? The ultra rich and mega celebrities have been buying private sections of public libraries to conduct dark rites that control the minds of the nation's Senators and Judges. Secret rhino farms operate under the very noses of innocent library-visiting suburban families, experimental limb replacements are conducted willy nilly in study rooms equipped with one way glass taken from crash landed alien spaceships, Republicans are regularly embroiled in brutal fistfights with karate trained librarians, drugs are freely passed around that grant super intelligence to their users, but with temporary, "Flowers for Algernon" tragic effects, cabals of Christian sects are building Pope Robots powered by sacrificed classic novels soaked in the blood of lambs.

All of this is one hundred percent true!

Unfortunately my book mainly focuses on the intricacies of library card registration.

Still, I look forward to hearing from you!

Regards,

Feldenstein Calypso (Library Insider)

 

Dear Editor: Wet your beak

 

Dear Editor,

I know that you are accustomed to receiving book proposals from authors filled with enthusiasm for the importance and artistic vision of their work. But publishing is a business. And no matter how brilliant a writer may or may not be, a book has to make money.

A BOOK HAS TO MAKE MONEY!

We authors send our books to you and ask you to gamble your precious money. It's not our money we gamble, it's your money.

This is so unfair!

I won't do it! I refuse to come here and ask you to gamble your money on my book, no matter how good I think this book is.

That is why I am guaranteeing the first million dollars of income for the publication of this book. 

If I am confident enough to ask you to outlay your money and resources for this book, surely I should be confident enough to simply outlay my own.

That is why I am sending you one million dollars to publish my book. This million dollars will serve as a guarantee for your first million dollars in earnings for my book and will stand as your minimum earnings. You can still earn more if my book makes more than a million dollars. But you cannot earn less. 

If you run this by your accountant your accountant will say "This is a good deal!"

Then you will look at each other and say, at the same time, "But what's the catch?"

There is no catch!

Except that as an unpublished author I don't have a million dollars.

Can I borrow a million dollars?

I am so looking forward to working with you,

Yours, etc. etc.,

Feldenstein Calypso

A reader writes in...

 

I received a letter this morning concerning yesterday's blog post.

Dear Anonymous Denizen of the Internet Known only as Clerk Manifesto:

When I read the title of yesterday's blogpost, "If a tree falls..." I got quite excited. I rolled my sleeves up. After years of following your blog, which is a lot of work because of your frequent posts and your refusal to write in the easy to read style that even our best writers now employ, and after reading post after post about all that stuff you seem so very very interested in, finally you were going to discuss philosophy.

That's all I wanted!

And though I only read your blog for work, looking for mentions of my company's foot powder, I nevertheless did hope that one day my reading would be rewarded, not with a mention of our foot powder, but with a philosophy discussion!

I love philosophy!

Name any philosopher and I can tell you their birthdate!

Name any philosopher and I can tell you their height!

Name any philosopher and I can tell you their preferred brand of foot powder (if they had one. Interesting note: Some philosophers did not have a preferred brand of foot powder. Look it up).

So when you suggested a classic philosophical discussion on the lines of "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear, did it make any noise?" my whole being tingled.

Finally your occasional wit, your every once in awhile moments of actual perceptiveness, were about to be put to some usefulness!

But no.

It was about dead trees.

All about dead trees.

I

Was

Heartbroken.

Your Reader,

Hilden Folps

Marketing Research Associate

Beauvoir Foot Powder

Tune in tomorrow for my response!

Poking through the mailbag

 

As we relax with a bottle of zinfandel, endeavoring to keep up with clerkmanifesto during our chilled out vacation, we turn inevitably to our mailbag. Driven, as we are, by our own mercurial muse, we sometimes neglect the many letters that come into the clerkmanifesto offices that are faithfully forwarded to us from our publishers offices on 32 Internet Way in Silicon Valley.

What better time than now to catch up on our mail!

So let's grab a letter right off the top of our bag.

Hmm, this is an advertisement for discount oil changes. 

Let's grab second off the top!

Dear Clerkmanifesto,

I am really enjoying your unusual take on library work. I am surprised to find there are over 200 blog posts that you have already written! I've read seven so far, so I have a few more to go (ha ha)! 

My favorite post so far is: "My clerking career as Stephen King's The Long Walk.

I was wondering what your most popular blog post is so far.

Thanks. I have enclosed an SASE.

Roy

Roy,

I hope you don't mind if I just answer your mail on clerkmanifesto, which you will surely see as you are such a faithful reader! Also, your SASE didn't have real stamp, it was just drawn on.

First, I have a lot more than 200 blog posts. I have published 3,500! When is your letter here from?

Ah, I see. 

Roy's letter is postmarked 2014.

Roy is gone.

Also, inspecting it through an electron microscope reveals it to contain no Covid 19 germs, and disproportionately few Trump cooties as well.

Ah time and fate...

Nevertheless I will answer this person's question, such is my largesse!

Also I don't have any more mail to respond to after this one from Roy (not his real name, not his real letter). It turns out the bag of forwarded mail only had two items.

According to stats my most read blog post of all time is called:

"Request Hunting"

It has 10,500 views. It's not particularly good. I mean it's okay, just probably more of a statistical fluke.

Actually, at this point, I've come to consider any view of any of my blog posts to be a weird accident.

Except, of course, yours.

Request fulfilled unsatisfactorily

 

Dear Life is a Fountain or Clerkmanifesto or whatever the hell you are these days:

Lately I have been reading in this space an awful lot about you reorganizing your photographs. Perhaps you are writing about this so much lately because all you do all day is reorganize your photographs. 

You do you. 

I'll just nap for a bit.

But I was interested to hear that you deleted over 22,000 photographs. This gave me the impression that there were 22,000 photographs I had not seen. 22,000 incredible treasures from deep in your archives. 

That's a ton of photographs.

Can I see some?

Thanks.

Huge fan, never get enough content!

Beauregard Sheppard the Third

Dear Beau,

Thanks for your interest.

Here are the 22,000 photos you were interested in.

Oh no.

OH NO!

I deleted them!

I knew I'd need them some day! Why have I deleted them? Oh my god!

Let's see. What do I have?

Ah, here are three photographs I almost deleted because I had carefully retained 20 copies of them that were cropped or edited with minute variations.

Thank god I kept them!

Dear Clerkmanifesto: a request

 

A reader writes in:

Dear Clerkmanifesto:

Yesterday you wrote about flowers. There was a lot of talk about photographing flowers. You went on about cultivated flowers vs. wildflowers. There was quite a bit concerning flower gardeners, their virtues and their hard work. The nature of flowers came into the discussion. You also specifically mentioned daffodils, dandelions, magnolias, tulips, and cosmos.

I'm just saying there was an awful lot about flowers and taking pictures of flowers.

Then, after all the talking about flowers you showed 47 pictures of robins!!!!

So my question is: Do you have any pictures of turkeys?

Thanks,

Leroy

Dear Leroy,

Thank you for your request. Funnily enough when I was out taking pictures of robins I saw three turkeys! I got one marginally decent picture of one of them, then, cleverly, I went up the street and crouched down in a secret place anticipating their path, camera at the ready.

They decided to disappear into someone's backyard instead.

Leroy, never try to get too tricky with turkeys, okay?

Yours,

fc

Dear Publisher: volume four

Dear Publisher;

You will be excited to know that I have finally collected enough material for my next volume of my collected letters to Publishers. This will be my fourth volume of my prestigious "Letters to Publishers" series, and I feel your magnificently large and bloated multi-national publishing house would be the perfect home for this next volume. While my writing skills are slowly deteriorating as I enter into my late 50's, there are nevertheless contained in this collection some of my finest letter to editor moments. I think both you and your readers will particularly delight in "Dear Editor: Seeking Wisdom" which I wrote just 15 minutes ago, and you will keenly enjoy the classic "Dear Editor" from the end of last year. "Dear Publisher: Let Me Explain" is also pretty good, and even much of the filler material in this fourth volume is capable of making your readers chuckle quietly to themselves as long as they're in a super good mood and don't have any other book nearby to switch to.

I know that you will be eager to get going on publishing this book, but there is one small problem, really barely a problem at all, that we must discuss first:

It may be confusing for your readers to encounter this as the fourth volume of "Letters to the Publisher" when none of the other volumes have yet been published. Yes, believe it or not, "Letters to the Publisher, a Book of Letters to the Publisher: Volume One", "Letters to the Publisher, Letters to the Publisher: A Book of Letters to the Publisher About Letters to the Publisher: Volume Two", and "Letters to the Publisher, Letters to the Publisher, Letters to the Publisher: A Book of Letters to the Publisher About Letters to the Publisher About Letters to the Publisher: Volume Three" have yet to be seen by the public, and no book as yet exists of them.

The simple solution is of course to publish these first three volumes as soon as possible. We don't have to make a big fuss about them. Then we can go big on the marketing with this new book "Letters to the Publisher, Another Book of Letters to the Publisher: Volume Four" in which people will find an enthusiastic return to the high form of the first volume, even, unfortunately, if it's not quite as good as that breakout first book they remember so vividly, probably because it will have come out just a couple of months earlier.

If you have any more complex solution to this issue I am eager to hear it! Either way I look forward to getting to work with you on this exciting project as soon as possible. Neither of us is getting any younger.

Almost like I'm your friend already,

Feldenstein Calypso

Dear editor, seeking wisdom

 

Dear Editor:

I have an exciting new manuscript for you to consider for publication. This text represents a unique opportunity for your esteemed publishing house and breaks new ground on hitherto unexplored dimensions of the literary experience.

Naturally you are probably wondering:

"But is it any good?"

We both know that that's not what the most important thing is. We both know that the most important thing is...

Well, as we both know, I'll let you say first.

I look forward to hearing from you soon!

Feldenstein Calypso

Dear sir or madam

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Sir or Madam:

 

 

Please disregard the letter I decided not to send you yesterday.

 

I found myself not saying some things I deeply regret. My emotions failed to get the better of me. And I hope you can find it in your heart to forget, or set aside that which I refrained from saying. 

Sometimes my restraint gets the better of me, and hopefully I will fail to do better in the future.

With sincere regret that I may reconsider at any moment,

I am yours truly,

Feldenstein

 

 

 

 

Dear publisher: the confidence

Dear Publisher:

I send you this query in full confidence that you will be astounded and thrilled by the quality of my writing. You will adore all 3,000 of my witty, heartfelt, and interesting essays. You will cry and laugh and then whip out one of your golden contracts, the ones that you keep in a hidden drawer in your desk and only offer once or twice in a decade. Brimming with praise and enthusiasm you will send me this most rare and generous of contracts, and we will embark on a publishing journey full of Pulitzers, money, Pulitzers, more money, Publishers' Weekly starred reviews, bestseller lists, and, maybe, if everything goes right, a Nobel Prize or two. 

Oh, and also money.

At this moment in time I can pull up any one of my 3,000 essays, at random, and swell with pride at my brilliance. And I send this letter with the absolute conviction that you will feel about them as I do.

Unfortunately, in two months I will stumble upon this letter to you, and I will feel embarrassed. I will delve into the backlog of my work, read from it extensively, and find none of it anywhere to be as good as I remembered. My cheeks will burn. I will say to myself "What have I done?"

My god, what have I done?

And so that is why I am not sending this letter to you.

With a touch of rare pity in your heart (rare because you are a mostly merciless, slightly embittered big time publisher), you say to me "But why not just try? Nothing ventured nothing gained." Or you might say "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take." But you'd probably stick with the 'nothing ventured nothing gained' thing.

But on the plus side you can't really say any of that if I don't write you. So there's that.

Also, if I'm really honest, at this point I can't really tell the difference between the success rate on things I venture and the success rate on the things I don't.

That's fine, I guess.

Thank you for your time, hypothetically,

Feldenstein Calypso

Dear Publisher: Me and Emily

 

Dear Publisher:

When Emily Dickinson died they found a bunch of poems stuffed in her desk drawers, or her mattress, or her pockets, or whatever. Then they were like, "Wow, look at these amazing poems. They are some of the greatest poems ever written!" And then hundreds of millions of people read them and were all "These are great, but what's a purple host?" 

Oh Emily, I can hear the purple host right now.

When I die maybe they'll find a sheaf of my unsent letters to the publisher. And they'll say "Wow, look at these amazing letters to the publisher. They are some of the greatest letters to the publisher ever written!" And then people will read them and love them and take them to publishers like you. And they will brandish them before you and say "You should feel ashamed of yourself!"

To which you would respond "How on earth is any of this my fault!"

To which I can only reply now, ahead of time: 

"Good point."

Yours,

Feldenstein Calypso

Letters to a young artist: Your choice

 

Dear Young Artist:

In my last letter to you I outlined the three types of artists:

1. One who conceives of wonders and executes them faithfully.

2. One who just acts and yet produces wonders.

3. And one who conceives wonders but is unable to fully manifest what was in the fullness of their imagination.

The good news is that you can choose which of the three types of artists to be!

But the bad news is that if you're the third type (and even the greatest artists are sometimes the third type!), your choice will not go according to plan.

Letters to a young artist: The three types of artists

Dear Young Artist:

There are three kinds of artists:

The first kind of artist imagines fantastic things and somehow executes them faithfully to their vision.

The second kind of artist just does stuff, but somehow it works out magnificently, full of sheen and glory.

The third type of artist conceives of brilliant, majestic pieces of work, like the first kind of artist does, but somehow their work never seems to come out like planned, or with quite the power and wonder that was in the artist's head at the start.

I'm the third type of artist.

This letter was supposed to be way better and more helpful than it is. 

Letters to a young artist: Fame

 

Dear Young Artist:

Let us talk about fame.

Because of the nature of the market, some measure of fame is required for a person to be a successful, full time professional artist.

You might think "That's okay. I am ready to be famous. I am even eager to be famous."

Oh young artist, fame is not all it's cracked up to be.

Or so I have heard. Somewhere. Though who knows from who. It's not like I know anyone famous, aside from Bob Dylan, who never talks about it, like, ever.

Also, I'm not famous.

"Hey!" You cry out in disagreement. "What about those two times you were featured on the front page of the Metro Section of the second biggest daily newspaper in your midsized American midwestern city?"

That's very sweet of you.

But we're here for you, young artist, to help guide you.

So here is what I say:

Go ahead and be famous.

Not that anyone will likely offer it to you. Sorry, but as Davy Crockett said:

Fame is like a shaved pig with a greased tail, and it is only after it has slipped through the hands of some thousands, that some fellow, by mere chance, holds on to it!

And if you do become famous these probably aren't the letters you'll need.

But it's nice of you to read them anyway.

Letters to a young artist: Practical advice

 

Dear Young Artist:

I know you're not here.

But I write to you anyway. That is how much I care.

When I was a young artist the old artists did not really take me under their wings as I take you under my wing now. I could say they did not take to me at all. But every rare once in awhile one did, but as like to a cat they saw me as remote and strange and independent, but charming. I wanted a home. Who doesn't? They gave me an old fish and called me cute. And sent me on my way.

In one notable incident a Ceramics teach at Sonoma State University told me I should have a trade to fall back on: Carpentry.

Thank you. But if I were good at Carpentry, the kind of person for whom things lined up, I might have been a notable artist. I might be the sort of artist so good he would be writing, in his middle years, a series of helpful letters to young artists like you!

But that didn't pan out.

Other notable teachers liked me as well. I'm convinced Marc Lesueur did, but not enough to give me more than an A-. Ms Tunick was fond of me in 11th grade, in theory. She liked Grape and me. Everyone else she suffered as fools. She certainly wasn't all wrong, but it's tricky when one is only liked against a terrible backdrop. Michael McClure, who was close friends with Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan, found me to be the only promising writer he ever taught, or I just imagine it that way, even if it wasn't true. And if, by some miracle he did feel that way, he was too cool to admit it, which was astonishingly unsatisfying. 

But when any of these professors really took an interest, they offered practical advice. Practical advice is the most terrible and important thing any young artist (like you!) can learn.

Practical advice is everything for a young artist like yourself! It lights the way!

Alas for you I got F's in practical advice.

But don't worry, I got A minuses in everything else.

Letters to a young artist: Outsider

 

Dear Young Artist:

I was up late last night editing strange, close-up pictures of a burbling stream above my local waterfall called Shadow Falls. And as I edited these pictures, of which I will include one below, because that's how it is for... us, and for people like us, if there are any, ourselves included, I listened to "Outsider" music; Daniel Johnston and The Shaggs mostly. You might want to consider that you yourself might be an Outsider artist. Although deciding you are one is probably disqualifying. As Daniel Johnston wrote:

Everyone and friends and family

Saying, "Hey, get a job

Why do you only do that only?

Why are you so odd?"

But because you are a young artist, you may not have heard of Outsider Art, so allow me to try and explain it off the top of my head without consulting any sources:

Outsider art is Art that is not very good or skillful or knowledgeable or professional or normal, but nevertheless is so earnest, obsessive, innocent, and/or passionate that it ends up being kind of good anyway, all in its very strangeness and by some magical virtue of its unique commitment. But it's usually pretty difficult art, and you have to open yourself to it to like it at all.

You might be wondering:

"Hey, approaching 3,000 daily blogposts to an audience of eleven, with grandiose stories of the gods and of fixing the world, details of working a low level job at a library, inscrutable jokes, weird pictures of creeks, are you an outsider artist?"

You, young artist, will want to pay close attention to this answer:

No. We are here right now at the center of everything. 

It is the World itself that wanders lost in the desert.

Letters to a young artist: The nature of praise

 

Dear Young Artist:

One of my co-workers is a birder. And so if I am trying to identify a particular bird I took a picture of, or if I have a particularly good picture of, for instance, a hawk, I might show him the picture. Other animal pictures come up as well. For instance I showed him a picture of a coyote I took as well. He was so impressed with that one that he said this to me:

You could sell these pictures!

In more than forty years of making art I have heard this comment countless times. It seems very flattering. And I suppose it is flattering, in its tiny, tiny way. It is a comment you may hear many times in your pursuit of a life in the arts.

But it's a paltry comment. It is a paltry comment because it splits the difference between the two comments you will actually want to hear:

That's beautiful.

and

I would like to buy that.

 

And it admits, nor rises to neither.

Letters to a young artist: Prelude

 

Dear Young Artist;

Do I wish, when I was a young artist, that an older artist with more than four decades of experience in the arts, set down for me, in a series of  letters, the wisdom of their experience?

No.

But even though this is just my prelude letter to future letters providing the wisdom of a life in the arts, I am already providing you with your first lesson: 

Don't pay attention to what anyone wants.

I mean, unless you want money and worldly success.

Or let me put it another way for you, young artist: I didn't want an old, experienced artist to send me letters full of the wisdom of their experience, and look what happened to me.

What happened to me you ask?

I accumulated wisdom.

And I'm going to share it all with you.

Resist it if you can.