The Clerk Manifesto

There is a hill I regularly see where doomed souls come in the Winter. What are they doing? Why do they come? Up they toil over the ...

Once again time is mercurial at work. For an hour I am scheduled on "Project time" which is a pretty good gig wherein I...

A library colleague and I were on our way up to shelve at the exact same time. We also unavoidably had the same subsection of fiction...

I was walking along the Mississippi River, which I learned to spell as a youth in Southern California and has really come in handy o...

In an unfortunate choice of titles the other day I presented to the world my "Three State Solution". This referred to three...

There are greater sins against books than writing in them, but not many. And the few that there are, like banning, or burning, a...

You have probably heard of the one state solution and the two state solution, but I am a firm believer in the three state solution. ...

As a dedicated amateur birder (life list: 27 birds) I know that when one steps out the door into the wide world one should kee...

There, I look out everyday on the tallest building in the world, Foshay, the mighty giant Foshay Tower of Minneapolis. Only, I must sa...

I have been writing about library work life for well over five years now, and though I have covered the vast array of stan...

It is a feature, or a bug, of our library culture that occasional extracurricular work activities are seen, managerially at least,...

I have only recently embraced the longstanding fact that I am a birder. Indeed, as I type on my computer right now I can look barely...

Next year my wife and I will go to Florence, Italy, for the first time. We have, as you would know from reading this blog (wait, you ...

I quite fancy how they talk about floods. There are 20-year floods, or 100-year floods or just... floods. It all comes down to just ho...

I was off with my wife on a Saturday night to see some chamber music at the Ordway in St. Paul, Minnesota. We entered the hall early...

On Black Friday my wife and I were out at The Mall of America. "Why?" You may ask. I answer a lot of questions here on ...

You have to order the Universe or it will be ordered for you. There I was with my wife at a concert of the St. Paul Chamber Orches...

It's not even December yet. It's not even, technically, Winter. And while we haven't gotten any of those extre...