You are probably a genius!

 

As we have dashed off across the country, on a laboriously long train ride, back to one of my favorite cities I have seen, to hopefully look at an apartment we may want to and even be able to rent, I am eager to stuff clerkmanifesto's cheeks full of food to delay the moment when I have to start posting from my phone. 

Posting from my phone is not easy and sometimes looks funny.

And so, what a fabulous time for a...

Clerkmanifesto Classic!

The Clerkmanifesto Genius Quiz

Are you a genius?

How can you trust your own highly invested self-assurance, or, conversely, that your noble humility won't muck up your scientific evaluation.

That's where this test comes into play.

Yes, you may have taken a genius test before. One of two things invariably happened: 

1. They said you were a genius because your qualities and abilities matched the ones that they themselves had and over-valued. Or

2. They said you weren't a genius because they were jealous, jealous of your genius.

Either way they had an axe to grind, a chip in the pot, a cliche nailed up on the metaphor for all souls to see. Oh how I hate them.

On the other hand I don't have an axe to grind. Except against Republicans. And fast food sandwich restaurants. And the rich. And most dog owners. And Kazuo Ishiguro. And the Internet. And Centrists. And the country of Poland. And managers. And the publishing industry. And all the people who don't read my blog. And God. 

And especially those bloody disingenuous people with their damn genius tests!

Oh how I hate them. I hate them more than anything in the whole world! I hate hate hate the genius test people!!!!!

Not for anything they ever did to me. And not really for anything they did to anyone else. But for, well, er, um, actually I can't think of anything right now. And, so, um, maybe I don't hate them all that much. Maybe I like them. I haven't worked that out yet. I have to think this over.

But that's not the point.

The point is, well, it's around here someplace. Hang on while I look.

Oh. I know what it was. It was that you should take my test. 

My god it's hard. Incredibly hard. Awe-inspiringly hard.

No, not the test. I'm referring to writing the introductory comments.

The test is actually pretty easy...

If you're a genius!

 The Clerkmanifesto Genius Quiz

1. The name of this test is:

     A. I'm going to have to think outside of the box for this one, aren't I? Clever!

     B. Ah, you no fool me. Trick question. You tell me what the name of this test is!

     C. The Clerkmanifesto Genius Quiz.

     D. I see, weeding out the weak on the first question.

     E. I'm supposed to expect a first answer to be a "C" or "D", but it's always "E" to throw people off.

2. The most common mistake the blog author makes in writing Clerkmanifesto is:

     A. Its for it's and it's for its.

     B. No, wait, it's it's for its and its for it's. Yes, that one.

     C. Functionally "A" and "B" are the same and so must be a set up for "C" to be correct.

     D. Mistake? But there's never been, oh, I see, wink's as good as a nod to a blind man. Mistake indeed!

     E. I hate to be the one to tell you, but just when Clerkmanifesto has the golden ring in its grasp it gets distracted by the meaning of the universe.

3. The meaning of the Universe is:

     A. Probably around here somewhere.

     B. I just pick whatever letter choice tells me which letter choice to pick. This question doesn't have one of those, but this one is at least closest in spirit.

     C. Oh man, do these get any harder? Who doesn't know this?

     D. People like the "Answer "C"" guy just drive me crazy. Fine, everyone knows, so just tell me for god's sake!

 
     E. Can everyone just settle down here? The answer is "Love", or sometimes "Revenge". Like 90% "Love", 10% "Revenge".

4. How many questions are in this test?

     A. Oh man, this is a mindbender. We, taking the test, can see how many questions there are, but you, still writing the test, cannot. How then will you fill out your multiple choice answers?
          a. Right, I didn't think of that!
          b. b.
          c. How many points do we get for answering the questions in the answers? I'm asking for a friend.
          d. It's not that big a deal, he merely needs to take a fair guess at what the answer will be and then stick to it as he completes writing the quiz.
          e. I'm a friend of "C". Did "C" leave me any messages?

 
     B. Three?

     C. On the 4th question it's almost always "all of the above" or "none of the above". Look for one of those to show up as a choice and choose that. Don't worry, they won't both be in there.

     D. It can't be many more now as most of the thematic and narrative elements have played through.

     E. I'm going to skip this one and come back to it later if there's still time left.

Scoring:


We have automatically scored your test. Well done. Your score is:

43



What your score means:


1-10:


Yes, congratulations! You are a genius. But more the garden variety type that hangs out in the four corners area of the U.S. mistaking train themed murals for the real thing and unsuccessfully hunting flightless birds.


11-20:


You are a hard core genius who, well, you've already deduced the rest of what I was going to say.


21-30:


Hello Albert Einstein!

(This zone range is reserved for Albert Einstein. If by error your test result fell into this range and you are not Albert Einstein please double check your results, resubmit or, if still in the 21-30 range, send an error documentation report to our trunk office. We apologize for any inconvenience).


31-40:

))(__+|\+?>>><&^^^%&$><.<.


41-50:

I'm kind of embarrassed you read my blog, but, like, honored.

More attempted fun

 

I used to write a really proper, pointed essay-like post nearly every day. Serious stuff like, I don't know, this one from 2019:

On Tuesday nights I work the front desk with a Buddhist co-worker. Sometimes reincarnation, monks, and light Buddhist themes come up in discussion. This Tuesday she came across a copy of The Four Noble Truths: A Guide to Everyday Life, and she was pretty interested in it. So she showed it to me. I looked. I'd seen the book already.

So I handed it back and said:

"In my past life I was a Buddhist. In this life it's my only one."

Wait, that's it?

Hmmm. That doesn't seem so hard. But I've always got so many pictures to get posted here. So writing a proper three paragraph essay like that is often out of the question. I just write some introductory comments and before I know it,

BAM

The whole thing is way longer than my proper essay might have been.

I am not paid by the word!

I AM NOT PAID BY THE WORD!

Actually, I'm pretty sure I do this for fun.

Writing publishers

 

I used to write publishers here. And finding this old post sort of makes me want to again, though I don't know if I still have the same fire of the grievance of undiscovered genius churning with weary acceptance that these letters were often about.

Anyway, as I am off travelling, or searching? yet again, I hope you will accept one more repost so soon after another just a couple days ago. This one is from five and a half years ago, and called:

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

Tourism reconsidered considered again

 

What better time for a repost than when I am heading out on the road! And I have found one that came from the perspective of an occasional traveller some years ago (the traveller being ME) providing an interesting (to ME) perspective now that I am a person who sort of lives in the situations described below. Though with more time than I have now I might have a few small notes and plenty of embellishments on this, I happily enough am willing to stand behind it. 

I think it was called something like "The Disneyfication Venice":

When the cry goes up that some storied vacation destination is being ruined by its visitors I have some sympathy, but I am also skeptical. My sympathy for the residents of said places, Florence, Bruges, Venice, Barcelona, is tempered by the fact that those people do get to live there. Those are beautiful, interesting places! I am also wary of this impulse to blame the visitors to begin with. While visitors have a huge impact on these cultural wonderlands, they don't actually have very much power as to how they are run. That power lies more with the local government, which, hopefully, in democracies such as these, are chosen by the people who live there. The tourists don't get a vote. The impact of visitors is, I believe, almost entirely controllable by the cities themselves.

Now the elephant in the room is that there are some people making an awful lot of money in places like Venice or Florence. And if there are dire problems with the disappearance of Venice as a real city it probably comes down to them far more than to their largely goodhearted and well-heeled tourists. But for the sake of brevity and simplicity I am all for setting that aside here. Perhaps we'll revisit it some other time. But today we are simply taking a practical look and are making our first steps towards fixing problems.

And as our test city we will use Venice, as it is the most impacted, decultured, and Disneyfied city in all of Europe. Also the fact that it's an island works easily with our plans.

Before I go any further I want to say that this is probably going to horrify you. So brace yourself.


1. Admit that Venice is a Disneyland of sorts, and start treating it more like one.

Venice has long since been subsumed in its tourism. Instead of trying to manage all the greedy cash grabbing of businesses and the tourists seeking cheap and easy thrills all while trying to pretend Venice is a real Italian city, Venice needs to lean into what it actually is and leverage that to make it more what it wants to be.

2. Charge an admission fee.

I like a couple different scenarios here. On the one hand a flat rate of 100 euros per adult to enter Venice seems reasonable and especially effective with what might be Venice's biggest problem; day visitors. I like even better a larger entrance fee, 250 euros or so, that would make all transportation and museums free to anyone in the city, which would further benefit locals. A flat fee is essential, having the effect of encouraging longer visits and taxing short ones. Making the entrance free or cheaper for young people, students, and locals should be worked in as well.

3 Tax policy

This could get complicated and be applicable to a far broader array of cities than just the heavily touristed ones. But we can start with the more businesses a person or company owns the higher their tax rate should be. If an owner does not live in Venice they should also pay higher taxes. Air bnb's and partially unoccupied second homes should further be taxed at special, higher rates. The main goal here is a capitalism that hobbles big businesses and corporations and all that is generic, lowest common denominator, cookie cutter culture, but, in the best spirit of capitalism, invites small, unique, clever, and quality, local, mom and pop businesses to get modestly rich.

4. Spend all that money!

All of this creates a lot of new money for Venice while also easing the crowds a bit. This money still needs to be spent properly. Here are a few ideas:

     A. Subsidized high minimum wages and housing for people who work in Venice.
     B. Lots of very good, well tended, free public bathrooms. An excellent plan for any popular city that doesn't want to smell like pee.
     C. More civic employees working unexciting jobs at very good wages in an extraordinary place: garbage pickup, vaporetto drivers and mechanics, janitorial work, information kiosks, first aid, customer service, inspectors, and security. This will not only make the city safer, cleaner, and easier to navigate and enjoy, but it will help contribute to a local economy and community of people working and living in Venice.
     D. Longer museum hours. Spread the joy.
     E. Grants, opportunities, and tax breaks for both local craftspeople and artisans, and for more practical shops and stores.


And that's my plan for a start. What does it do? It makes Venice a little less crowded due to some people not finding the steep admission worth it just for a day or two. It creates or encourages a middle class local culture that lives, works, and is invested in the city. It encourages a more inventive tourism culture. It makes the city better kept, easier to enjoy, better spread out, and more like a natural city, even if it isn't one.

It's worth a try before it sinks.

Clerkmanifesto classics: Peer Pressure revisited

 

Trying to buck up clerkmanifesto for while I race off to look for a new apartment somewhere across France, I have been posting my glorious new photographic style.

But because I got excited and posted them at ten or twenty at a time, I am now out!

Which means it's time for a clerkmanifesto classic!

This classic is from, well, I don't know, I didn't look. Let's just say it's from the days of yore.

It is called...

Peer Pressure

Rarely does a day go by here at the library wherein one of my co-workers doesn't come up to me and say "Hey, want to go out to the parking lot and do some meth?"

I have heard meth can be unhealthy for you, so, though I'm glad they asked, I am compelled to say "No, thank you."

If only they would leave it at that. But there's always the "Oh, come on, it's fun and it makes you work faster."

So then I mumble "Sorry, but my body is a temple." Which I immediately regret as i watch them roll their eyes at me and walk away.

I was reading a bit of a nice book of poems here by Baudelaire when a co-worker came up behind me. "Oh, hey." They said. "I love that poem!"

"Me too!" I said, delighted one of my co-workers was also a Baudelaire fan.

"Can I have it?" Asked the co-worker.

"You want the book?"

"No, can I just have that poem?"

So I shrugged and started copying out the poem for this person.

"No, just tear out the page." My co-worker said impatiently.

"Oh." I responded. "I can't. It's a library book."

"Pff." The person said. "Like anyone will notice."

"Sorry, I can't." I mumbled. And my co-worker walked away disgusted with me. Later I saw them whispering with someone and pointing at me.

It's hard to find a friend around here.

Maybe I should have torn the page out. It just didn't seem right somehow.

Later that same day a group of us were at the front desk and one of my managers said in a grand invitiation "Who wants a coffee?"

"Me!" I cried out excitedly.

A couple of other people more reservedly expressed interest, and my boss opened up the cash register and took out a couple of twenties.

"Ka-ching." My boss said.

"Can you just take money from the library like that for coffee?" I asked.

"Oh, c'mon, who's gonna care?"

"No thanks." I mumbled embarassedly. "Don't get me one."

The manager shrugged and said "More for us." But I'm pretty sure one of my other co-workers muttered "killjoy" at me under their breath.

Then I had to jealously watch everyone drinking their super fancy coffee drinks while no one talked to me for the rest of the day.

Finally, at the end of the day, when a big group of us were leaving, someone loudly said "Who wants to go downtown, get drunk, and make fun of immigrants?"

Everyone cheered, but I said "Sorry, I can't." in a low voice. 

And someone said "Like we were even asking you." Then they all left together. 

I got in my car and listened to Keith Jarrett on my stereo and maybe cried a little.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying I'm better, or more moral than anyone. I'm not saying I'm right and they're wrong.



I'm just different.

Magic boxes everywhere

 

Oh, I'm long back now from Genoa, technically speaking. But as I write this I am just finishing preparing posts for the time when we are gone. And yesterday, for the last of these, I decided that pulling up a classic from clerkmanifesto's history might be nice. I found one to make me feel a bit better about the world cup and soccer in general.

But while I was looking around for that I also found another really short post. And why not give myself one extra day to gather myself for the next, post Genoa, work of clerkmanifesto?

This short one still feels sort of personal to me and contemporary, though I can't say why without ruining it.

Anyway, I wanted to share it with you anew.

It's called:

Magic Box

Imagine if you will a box.

Every time you open the door of it something different is inside. Open it one time and there is a crumpled five dollar bill inside. Open it again and there is a silver ring with a Celtic design. Open it a third time to find an espresso cup, or a chunk of Parmigiano Reggiano.

Now imagine that that box is so big that you can get inside of it. 

You walk in through the open door of it. You close the door. And when you open the door again you find that something entirely different is outside; a room with a table of flowers for instance, or a party. You close the door and open it again to find there is a bright hallway there that leads to where you live.

This is why I love elevators.

Revisited despite the h8ers

 

Sometimes I like to go back into the history of clerkmanifesto and share something again, feeling that given five or six years to marinate the right sort of clerkmanifesto essay might really be ripe for the world. I especially like to do this when I am going to be away for a bit and need to set up a lot of posts to play out while I am... busy gathering new material.

I also like it because it seems like it will be an easy way to come up with a really good post!

Ha!

First of all, I always end up involved in writing some elaborate introduction for the old post. Like, look at this. You've been reading for hours already. "I wasn't expecting a novel!" some of you may have already muttered while reading this, and we haven't even gotten to the previously written stuff yet. We are still on the fresh writing! Which I am writing right now! 

I thought it was all gonna be a bunch of copy and paste and gleeful chuckling pride in my rich history!

Not that I don't like fresh writing. It's just that I was thinking I would be onto other things like an hour ago.

Second of all, going on a treasure hunt through the history of clerkmanifesto can be a mixed bag for me.

Sometimes it's like: But I'm so delightful, how do I pick just one of these?

And sometimes it's like: No, no, no, no, no, super fast and uncomfortable no, no, no.

And often it's a weird mix of the two. Which is hard to explain.

And third of all even when I find a nice old gem from the past, and I'm all excited about it, it just doesn't seem relevent to anything recent in my life.

At which point I might be inclined to complain to myself: "By this time I could have written two new clerkmanifesto posts! Or, realistically speaking, watched a man eat a twelve pound hamburger with fries on youtube."

But, fortunately, I persevered, and found a soccer post.

I haven't been able to talk about soccer since we made it through the glorious semi finals of The World Cup. At which point everything that happened at the world cup just kind of depressed me, and I didn't want to talk about it. 

But this?

This is a delightful throwback to The Women's World Cup from seven years ago.

Maybe healing is coming?

It is called: 

Sam Kerr. 

And having read this post from seven years ago I thought I'd like to catch up on her career a bit, but only want to report this one thing I learned: 

Kerr has stated that she eats a pasta sandwich before every game.

Sam Kerr

We are holding a very fancy betting pool at my library to celebrate The Women's World Cup. Because $20 here bought a person a randomly selected team and an also random Golden Boot Player (that's the person who scores the most goals in the tournament), loyalties were widely distributed and the library fanbase was scattered across 24 teams.

That was until Australia's Sam Kerr was briefly interviewed following a dramatic come from behind victory against Brazil in game two. She said something to the effect of:

"We don't listen to the h8ers. Me an' the girls showed them and they can go suck on that one."

Perhaps curiously, we all became Sam Kerr fans.

Then, five days later, Sam Kerr scored four goals against Jamaica to propel Australia into the round of 16. At this point Sam Kerr hysteria seized the library staff. Yellow and green started showing up everywhere. People were drinking Fosters in the break room at all hours. Walking by any conversation between co-workers here, one could catch the tang of fake Australian accents, and it was a matter of course to hear the phrase "The h8ers can suck it."

Why Sam Kerr? What captured our imaginations?

We library employees are pretty civil people, not overly given to coarse language. And also we are in the USA where our team looks far more likely to triumph in this World Cup than a scrappy, mixed blessings Australian team with one great player instead of, let's see, seven, no, eight!

But here's the thing: These American women are great. They are admirable. They all seem like people who are going to do well in life. The look like they'd make good Vice Presidents, heads of marketing divisions, Directors of College Athletics Departments, big time Head Coaches. They seem like young, successful people, jocks, crisp and apple pie and strong and lean and off into the upper middle classes and beyond.

And good for them.

But Sam Kerr is easy to picture working at our library, angrily shelving away the afternoon, irritated beyond reason about misfiled items, muttering "h8ers!" to herself. One can naturally see her kicking our automated check in bins to get them working. It is no stretch to envision her here in our back room, grousing to her co-workers about some unpleasant patron, or the indignities of management, inappropriately uttering "they can suck it" as everyone awkwardly wanders away.

Media reviews are mixed at best about Sam Kerr's intemperate remarks. There were plenty of commentators ready to call her classless or claim she was distracting her team. But you gotta expect that kind of noise from the h8ers. We at the library take no particular stand on Sam's rustic expression. That's not the point. 

We simply recognize her somehow, for good or ill, as one of us.

Customer feedback from back when clerkmanifesto was hilarious

 

Feeling that I can't in good conscience show you Dr. Seuss style pictures of flowers yet again, but also as yet unable to do anything other than take more pictures and convert them obsessively, I thought it might be a good idea to dig into the vast clerkmanifesto archives.

I quickly found something! It is a laugh a minute riot from another era.

You're going to love this. And it has no pictures of flowers whatsoever!

It's from eight years ago which weirdly seems not that long ago and yet insanely long ago. You know how time is, as you're held in its maniacal thrall just like me.

I've lightly edited this post as it was so close to perfection I could taste it.

Now it is almost as close to perfection as it was before I edited it. Enjoy!

It is time for our annual customer feedback review. If you would be so kind as to fill out this year's Customer Feedback Survey Form we can immediately begin to make the changes to this blog that you have been longing for. Unless you think this blog is already perfect, in which case we won't have to do anything. Which would be nice, because we're really very, very tired.

So tired...

Deeply tired...

Anyway, please do fill out our form:

Clerkmanifesto Customer Feedback Survey, 2026

My number one concern with clerkmanifesto is

A. None. I think it's perfect! Or like, perfect 30 percent of the time.

B. I'm concerned with how tired you are.

C. Ho boy, concern. Plenty of concerns! Pull up a chair. But I mean it in a good way.

D. There must be some mistake. I'm supposed to be here doing the Taco Bell Customer Survey.

E. The narrow and highly particular range of options on your multiple choice surveys.

I read clerkmanifesto

A. Yes.

B. Er, will I still receive a coupon for one of Taco Bell's delicious chimichilangalaquas?

C. EVERY SINGLE FUCKING DAY!!!!!

D. Answer "C" is making me uncomfortable.

E. Sorry I'm late. Has the survey started yet?

My favorite part of clerkmanifesto is

A. When you pretend you're joking.

B. "Favorite" is a very strong word in this context.

C. Its profound obscurity.

D. Is this clerkmanifesto? It's kind of cute. Do you have any flower pictures?

E. I'd really rather not be pinned down to a single letter choice answer. Oh, foiled again!

My least favorite part of clerkmanifesto is

A.When the hilarity dies down and I am left sadly and wistfully looking at my computer wondering painfully what it's all about.

B. The free kittens. But not so much the crippled ones. I know that doesn't speak well of me but I must answer honestly.

C. When it awkwardly inserts mentions of its corporate sponsor Taco Bell.

D. When it starts going on about how great it is, even if it totally is great, maybe the most amazing thing ever written for the Internet, a work of towering genius and a shining light in a dark world. It is a masterpiece of beauty, vision, and wisdom, and a gift, truly a gift to humanity like no other. I am ever humbled and inspired by it.

E. Yeah. Same as "D" for me. Or maybe "A", although I thought about "B" too for awhile. What was "E" again?

In conclusion I just really want you to know that

A. A customer feedback survey that is functionally impossible to fill out or submit is hardly likely to be a great font of improvement for your little blog.

B. You are undercharging for clerkmanifesto the blog, but overcharging for your wonderful (but expensive) Clerkmanifesto Tea Cosy.

C. Answer "A" is not a nice person, in case you wondered.

D. Your failure to institute any of my suggestions from your last eleven customer feedback surveys only makes me more optimistic that this one is finally gonna be it!

E. All my favorite answers were "E" up until the last one when, oh, curses! Foiled again!

In tribute

 

Yesterday I meant to post this as a sort of tribute, but my introduction to it turned into an elegy that instead I let stand on its own.

But it started from watching a bit of Messi magic, and thinking curiously that it would be nice to post the oldest Messi discussion from clerkmanifesto that I could find. And though my wee essay was a little bit more about me, and about clerkmanifesto, than it was about Messi (though it was about us both), I thought it would be nice to share it nevertheless. 

It is more than ten years old, and though it feels like it might not be my very oldest about Messi, it marked the point where I created a subject tag for him, which was perhaps my way of getting serious.

In as much as I get serious.

Which is only kinda.

This is from March of 2016 and was called:

Mellow like Messi

"Just" You ask "What kind of Library Clerk are you?"

"What's that?" I reply. "Have you read my blog clerkmanifesto? Roughly ten percent of my posts are all about what kind of library clerk am I. Twelve hundred posts, ten percent, so that's 120 essays on the sort of Library Clerk I am."

"Yes, I've read them." You say. "What fun! Tell me again please?"

"Okay."




The greatest soccer player who ever lived is Lionel Messi. The teen librarian Marcus, who among the one billion fervent soccer fans in the World is the only one I actually know, might say "How can you really say who is the greatest player of all time?"

To which I might reply "Like this: Messi is the greatest player of all time." But only because, well, sometimes I can get a little like that, which you might have noticed.

And here's how the great Messi plays soccer: 

Economically.

There he is, jogging easily up the side. There he is, studying the game, pacing himself, laying back, only doing just what is needed, a spectator, enjoying the Spanish sun, quietly stalking the game, resting up.

And then he is needed. He is called on. He is essential, and he rises up fluidly from a kind of snooze mode to perform absolute miracles and magic. Practice, training, time on the pitch, and two full games every week, but as for pure, heart stopping soccer, greatest of all time soccer, we get about 15 minutes of it every week.

That's just exactly how I clerk!

I hope that doesn't sound self-aggrandizing. If you think about it at all you will likely come to the shrewd conclusion that it isn't, really, self-aggrandizing at all. After all, clerking is not soccer.

"So," You wonder. "Is that how you write clerkmanifesto as well?"

Oh no. For that I run flat out until I collapse, panting and vomiting in the grass.

Fat greek weddings revisited

Finding some pictures I was working on for today's missive coming along rather slowly, and with A VERY IMPORTANT SPAIN WORLD CUP GAME ALMOST UPON US! (sorry, I don't know how my capital letters got activated), I thought it might be a nice day to take one of clerkmanifesto's treasures from out of our vast vaults.

So I went looking.

And I found a post from several years ago where I experimented with taking pictures of cheap crafts in Joanne Fabrics and having them recreated in AI to make them alive and magnificent, or something like that. So then I immediately started taking those pictures and doing the same thing again to mark the vast advancements in these last years. And as I was working on the first of these pictures I thought:

WHAT ON EARTH AM I DOING?

I have a soccer match to watch.

So then I found another post from around that time called "Big Fat Greek Wedding's celebration of love" and I thought, "that doesn't sound very interesting or good."

But it kind of was.

I'm sure any longtime reader will be aware of my passionate arguments on behalf of the romantic comedy, and this one kind of makes me want to write some more of those.

Big Fat Greek Wedding's celebration of love

When talking about great romantic comedies it is easy to overlook My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Modern film culture has a long standing disdain for the romantic comedy, and much to my chagrin whenever they trot out a "respectable" example of the genre it's invariably When Harry Met Sally. I'm always wishing they would have the sense, knowledge, and brio to bring out instead one of the greatest movies of all time, Moonstruck, but I understand any anti romantic comedy bromide is going to be dead at the start if one goes in with Moonstruck.

But if they must bring out one romantic comedy as a poster child for their war, why not My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the Star Wars of romantic comedies, landing in theaters and becoming an absolute sensation. (This isn't the flimsiest comparison: My Big Fat Greek Wedding is the biggest grossing romantic comedy of all time, and it has spawned TV shows and sequels (My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 is coming out this fall!). Because unlike When Harry Met Sally, which appeals to non romantic comedy people by taking cues from more complex relationship movies to soften its romantic comediness, Wedding burrows into the deepest, most lovely heart of the romantic comedy, diffusing some classic elements of the romantic comedy to both invent something new, and yet emerging to capture the secret soul of the genre.

The romantic comedy is full of tropes. But they are just tropes, an assembly of rhythmic accents to the movie. The essentials of a romantic comedy are merely:

Two immensely charming and likeable people amusingly fall in love and get together. 

Nevertheless the traditional romantic comedy usually comes along with a variety of barriers to the love interests getting together. This creation of uncertainty, friction, dissolution, difficulty, and disappointment is not just widely considered essential to most narrative plotting in a romantic comedy, but is also generally considered so for all fiction everywhere. My Big Fat Greek Wedding largely eschews this convention. Our main characters, Toula and Ian, meet cute (sort of), experience love at first sight (sort of again, Ian might need the love to be at second sight), date, and get married. The main problem and impediment to their relationship is that they come from different cultures. This causes tension and comedy, but unlike the impediments of other romantic comedies it never keeps or drives them apart. This mildness and warmth of relationship is the secret success of the movie as a romantic comedy.

Of course, it's also wonderfully funny, possibly more so than almost any other romantic comedy. I didn't know this until recently, but apparently our star and screenplay writer, Nia Vardalos, wrote the screenplay, which no one was particularly interested in. So then she made it into a one woman show in L.A. which she performed to small, packed audiences for many months. This reminds me of how the Marx Brothers, before many of their best movies, took them on the road as theater, endlessly improvising and honing their material, testing what worked best and what got the best laughs, before coming back to film it as a movie. As I understand it, Nia Vardalos likewise tested her story over and over and brought out its best qualities. Not only did this provide a tighter and funnier screenplay, but it surely gave her the confidence to stick to her vision for the movie despite a gauntlet of attempts along the way to production to make it more conventional (which is just another word for marketable). Proposed, or even urged along the way, were different star actors, actresses, and ethnicity (let's make it Mexican American instead of Greek, and hire an Italian American star!). But the most telling changes requested were the ones demanding more problems between our main characters- a competing suitor to Ian, or an infidelity of some kind. The brilliant and revolutionary aspect of My Big Fat Greek Wedding is the one where the movie has such confidence in its characters, comedy, and story, that it dares to get rid of nearly all of the usual narrative tensions in the romance genres. It gives the movie a warm, cozy, and open feel, and yet, despite all odds, leaves its romance every bit as satisfying, if not more so, than the romances built under the more standard "will they won't they" structure.

Plots of all kinds rely on narrative tension and conflict. The thriller is most slavishly devoted to this, and it is also why some of the most driven narratives can feel compulsive, addicting, and even manipulative. But the romantic comedy is no stranger to this structure. And yet its most appealing qualities, its warmth, characters, and rosy environments lie underneath that tumult. There is great craft in creating a narrative that is as little beholden to tensions as possible, and My Big Fat Greek Wedding is a great romantic comedy precisely because it does the unusual work of lessening the romantic narrative tension to give us more of the warmer, more loveable aspects that are at the heart of the romantic comedy. When Harry Met Sally may be a nice reference point for a generic film fan for its filmic romantic comedy ambitions,  My Big Fat Greek Wedding would be a better example for real analysis precisely because it looks into to romantic comedy more than it looks out. It is, significantly, less about the catharsis of love, and more about, like in any good wedding, its celebration.

 

In the heat of the summer

 

Here's a repost for you, thrown out from a much too hot France that is tossing fitfully under a giant, continental heatwave, to remind me of... colder times. We do have air conditioning, which struggles a bit to keep up, but I'm not complaining.

Oh, wait, I am complaining. 

And reposting a years old Winter classic.

Nevertheless I appreciate the cool relief of our apartment, which is palpable when we walk in from the baking attic hallway. We recently found out from a neighbor that despite some far bigger and fancier apartments below us, we are the only ones in the building with air conditioning! I think it was put in around the edges of the permissions for the building, and perhaps by virtue of the persuasive charms of our young French/Italian landlord who lived here at the time.

But I'm just guessing.

The other reason I am reposting today is so I could watch the France vs. Norway match, but Norway, in what I consider to be an unwise move from their coach, and a bit cowardly, is "resting" their star player. It takes some of the fun out of it, but, so far the game is not without fun, so I'll head back to it, and leave you to this:

I wandered out into the gritty center of Winter. One might even say I trudged, as I soon found myself in a local, sidewalkless neighborhood, plodding in unplowed streets where the snow had turned to what my wife calls brown sugar and butter. It was a mild day, in the twenties (270 kelvins), and though I had two cameras I had walked a long way without feeling the slightest compulsion to photograph anything.

And then, down a long street, coming from the railroad track's dead end, there were the turkeys. 

It is, after all, the turkeys' neighborhood.

I took pictures of them, dark in the snow and under a dim, gray sky. I came close to them which always sets them on their slow way, though they never linger too much anyway. All day they make their long, stately rotation through the backyards and streets of the neighborhood. I love how it is all a world of humans, with grids and walks and straight ways, but the turkeys move through it as a wild world, a world of turkeys, hilly and flat, grass and snow and cement, but all of it open equally to them, none of it straight or for one place to another.

As I stood photographing, the turkeys strolled by me so close that I could not get a picture, partly from the movement, partly from the limitations of the lens, and partly from my beating heart, thrilling at being all among the wild turkeys.

I do my best not to impinge upon the hospitality of the turkeys. I'll linger with them where I first come upon them. Then sometimes I'll follow around to meet them on a second street. After that I get the sense that maybe they've had enough of me, even if I, not always, of them.

I have shown you many pictures these years of the turkeys, but rarely have I gotten ones of them so grouped together, and so I hope that a couple of those give a feel for the flock, and for being among them.