Easy recommendation

A volunteer I am very friendly with asked me for a book recommendation. We were in the back room of the library with at least a minimum amount of time to attack the problem thoroughly, so I enthusiastically committed. I would find him a book to read or give up library work forever!

I asked a few questions about his reading tastes. In addition to what I knew about him I found that he liked books he could learn from. My favorite book this year so far has been Walkable City, a fascinating tour of urban planning and design. It's about what makes cities livable and appealing, the horrible ways we've messed it up, and the clever things cities have been and are starting to do. He loved it. It sounded great!

We didn't have it.

We only have one copy, and because I've been so fanatically recommending it it's checked out!

Fine. How about that charming book about the guy who decided to try and live off of wild harvested food, It's Only Slow Food Until You Try to Eat It? Charming, funny, illuminating, and with the magical good fortune any kind of bookumentary needs: momentous, life changing events coming along as he's writing the book. They even come along because he's writing the book.

No?

No.

Okay. No problem. How about H is for Hawk. I read it early this year, beautifully written, very int... OH! He's already sold on it. He heard something about this one. He wants this H is for Hawk. It sounds great!

It is checked out with a small waiting list. 

I refuse to speak ill of the librarians, except, well, this is their fault!

No problem. My volunteering friend leaks more information. He likes Young Adult fiction. Ha. Why didn't you say so. Wee Free Men. Charming! Clever! Great-Hearted! Wise! He doesn't usually like fantasy, but this sounds appealing.

We don't have a copy at this library.

Oh, glorious teen librarian, star in our librarian firmament, oh, alas, hang your head in shame today, no Wee Free Men? Well, no problem, you can't win them all. I'm sure he's working on resolving this issue.

Anyway, onto the next one. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. I don't even ask if my volunteering friend is interested now. I just look it up in the catalog to see that we have no copies checked in.

Okay.

The volunteer says "Maybe I should just go ask in the teen room. They're good with recommendations."

Even now this statement hurts me in ways it is difficult to communicate. I pretend he hasn't said anything, which he surely wouldn't have had he been thinking clearly.

As I inquire about mysteries and begin to suggest Rex Stout he says he wants a sweet book. Some difficult, mortal things have recently transpired in his life, and he needs something on the gentle side.

A gentle book of sweetness.

What's with the trickle of information? But, okay.

Sweet.

Danny Champion of the World. By Roald Dahl. Easy.
 
It's in the kids' room. The juvenile fiction and our kids' room come through! It's actually there!

Is there a mistake?

Is a chapter missing? No.

Ha!



So then, is my volunteer friend happy with my choice?


I don't know. He graciously took my book, but I might've seen him heading off for the teen desk.


I should have tried harder.

Answering

I love to answer questions. I like to answer with short answers (the bathroom is right there). I like to answer with medium answers (you go up the stairs, left until you can go no further, left again along the meeting rooms, and the bathroom will be on your right). And I like to answer with long answers (redacted due to bandwidth issues). This makes me very well suited to library work.

But not every question has a firm answer. Besides subjective answers to questions like "What should I read next?", there are open ended questions like "How does a library card work?" that can be answered in a brief sentence or can be answered until we have to shut down the library for the night. I like those kinds of questions too.

What I do when I get an open ended question is I start talking and keep at it until I feel the enquirer is edging away from the desk. Then I stop, usually, if I can manage it. Then as they flee I hope I've told them enough.

I'm pretty sure my nearly 1300 posts here have all been an answer to one original question. 

I might even have asked it.

Ten common shelving errors

Below I have listed the ten most common errors made in shelving.

"But hey!" You cry out. "I don't shelve books. I just come here for instructions on how to live my life."

Don't worry. Everything you ever read here is an allegory for something vastly larger and more important.

The Ten Most Common Shelving Errors

1. Shelving books by placing a stack of them face up on an open area of shelving.


Comments: Books are to be placed in order, on end, with the spine facing out.


"But that's so slow!" You exclaim, gesticulating wildly.

And this brings me to a crucial point:

Shelving is not a sprint. It is an ultra marathon. The key is not speed, but the ability to endure pain.


Whoa! I know there were supposed to be ten, but I think I should quit today while I'm ahead.

Library morning

The morning sun rises over my county library and I report to work. Each of the wee books must be woken from their slumber. I stroll through the fiction section, removing each of the books' little "sleeping" blankets that keep the books warm and secure through the night.

"Wake up" I whisper gently to the books. The little blue blankets pile up on my cart. I make two piles, those that are still clean and those that have book drool on them. Most of the mystery fiction books drool in their sleep. It's not as bad as it sounds. It's cute.

The books creak and shift in place as they slowly come awake. If you open one up now many of the words will be missing or out of order, but by our opening time all the books should be alert and readable. And so to that end, after all the blankets are collected, I roll around a cart with a bunch of little cappuccinos on it.

"Cafe? Cafe?" I say.

"Gratzie." The books murmur in their throaty way. All the books here know I'm going to Italy soon and humor me.

The romance novels are slowest to come awake. "Arghhh! Just let me sleep in a little more." They cry when I come by urging them awake. Sometimes I do let them doze away the morning. They are rarely checked out before noon, and even if they are, most of their readers are adaptable and willing to fill in their own words as necessary.

Only when all the tiny coffee cups are collected do we turn the lights all the way up. The books grow still and ready.

We open our doors.

Amateur hour

I am a professional library worker. I have decades of experience. I am plying my trade at a library.

A patron has taken a book off the shelf to read and then reshelved it. No, nice try, but it doesn't go there. "As" does not function like "A" or "The". It counts alphabetically at the start of the title. But thank you for trying.

A patron inquires as to whether we have a notary in. No, we do not. I am sorry. A nearby patron suggests they head to the bank. I understand the impulse to be helpful, but these banks are all closed right now. Here are the valid notary options presently possible.

A considerate patron approaches me at the front desk. They inform me that the first self check out kiosk's printer is out of paper. I grab a paper roll and head over. There is half a roll of paper in there. I check the second kiosk. It is not out of paper, but it is jammed. I fix the printer.

But enough is enough.

I sincerely appreciate these good intentions, I do. But this clerking work is mindbogglingly complex. Not just anyone can do it properly. I do not walk into other peoples' businesses and start performing brain surgery or start assembling sprockets or dabble in managing the cleaning staff or try and forecast the weather.

This library is a serious place. Please, leave it to us professionals!

Oh, you work here?

That explains a lot.

Carry on.

Some jazz

I like jazz. I love jazz.

Here is just one thing I love about jazz:

We have a jazz public radio station here. Sometimes I listen to it when I am driving in my car. It is an extremely good station when music is playing. When people are talking it is a mixed bag. The way some announcers struggle to read news copy or to make simple announcements suggests to me that maybe it is a college station. But then another time that I tune in and I hear talking it might be a smooth talking guy who seems to know everything ever about jazz, past or present, and is happy to tell me all kinds of interesting things about it. So I never know. But the music is always, always great.

I love jazz, but I am not well versed in it. I mainly just know the famous parts, and some of the semi-famous parts. I'm always ready for something new and wonderful, some titan of jazz I've never heard of, or some dazzling group that somehow slipped me by. Luckily, on this radio station, I hear artists like that all the time.

I turn on the station. "Oh my god!" I cry. "This is fantastic! Who is it? It must be some great legend of Jazz." So I eagerly await the announcer who will tell me who is playing.

Perhaps it is some gorgeous vibes player, or the peaceful but deep piano music I am always looking for, like Keith Jarrett, but without the grunting. Or maybe it is some group where with each new solo I am crying out "Yes, this one! This!"

So the announcer comes on and says something like "And that was The Jimmy Mystics from their CD, Solitudes, recorded live in St. Paul.

And I'm like "Wow! I've never ever heard of them. How can I never have heard of this famous band that recorded a seminal masterpiece right here in my backyard?" If I can safely write the information down I do, but usually I just have to memorize it. So driving along I keep saying to myself "Jimmy Mystics, Jimmy Mystics, Solitudes." I get to my job and park, muttering the name of the band to myself. I avoid people as I race to a computer to look them up before I forget their CD title.

Nothing. No youtube. No CDs for sale. I dig deep. I find a couple of sideways, abandoned references to them. They're some band from eight years ago or something. Local. That CD was undoubtedly self produced as it exists for sale precisely nowhere. And that's about it. End of the line.

So this is a thing I love about Jazz. That this, THIS, as brilliant and magical as it was, as utterly masterful as the musicians were, can fly that far under the radar. I love this. 

Although I am aware that perhaps all those astonishingly accomplished and wildly unknown musicians are all a bit less enchanted by this delightful aspect than I am.

Me and my eagle

I always thought I would be famous for my writing, which you might enjoy sometime. I'll look around and see if I can find any for you.

But I did not become famous for my writing. There is a quote on a plaque that I pass often at the University I walk through several times a week, and I have meant to tell you what it says. It says:


We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.

-Dag Hammarskjold


If this essay turns out particularly good I am going to print it out and frame it.

That sounds like a joke, but I assure you that that is exactly what Mr. Hammarskjold means. Ask him.

And so, mercurially, I did not become famous for my writing. But I became famous anyway. 

I became famous for my bald eagle.

There he was today, flying over my left shoulder, struggling to keep down with my slower pace. One eye on the river and one on me, he doesn't often like us to be more than 25 feet apart. People in the cars driving by grin and point out of their windows. The bicyclists coming against me on the path cease their peddling and look up, mouths open, and then look over at me, wondering what it is about me. A school child at the tennis courts up above the river road runs to the fence and cries out "There goes the boy with his eagle!"

Yes, that's me. I have an eagle.

The eagle flies ahead for a moment, free on the wind. 

"Where is your eagle going?" Some nearby admirers ask.

"He likes to fly ahead, sometimes, to scout the way. He'll be back."

But he won't be. I will meet him ahead. The eagle knows where I'm going, and so do I.

Optimist pessimist

I looked out the window of my library and noted that the American Flag was at half mast. I fleetingly wondered why, but that was almost a reflex. There were at least three good reasons for it at that moment and a couple of vaguely stale, leftover reasons as well. Life is dark in our United States and rare would be the time these days that I could look out the window, see the flag at half mast, and not figure out a perfectly good reason for it. In truth our flag is at half mast a whole lot of the time.

So I have a new plan.

We will now keep our flag at half mast at the library all the time, but if something really good happens, we'll raise it all the way up.

And if, in some fabulous, unimaginable future, we all grow exhausted from having to haul the flag to the top of the pole all the time, then I will only be too happy to return to our older and graver tradition.

Naturalist

 




You might think that with all my close observations of squirrels and rainbows and eagles and turkeys that I am some kind of naturalist. But though I regard any serious naturalist with great respect and maybe even a touch of awe, I not only have no claim to being one, but I am relieved not to be one.


In all of art and politics, religion and philosophy, in all things of man and god I am a mighty scientist, a seeker, a seer. I study, observe, theorize, and test. Look at me here. On all subjects, day after day, I am plumbing the secret depths of our hearts and tracing the bizarre machinations of our world. I stand here in testament to Dr Seuss's beautiful quote "Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple." So it is to me. This is my orchard. And the answers are ripe fruit, fecund in the sun. When it is time to write you there are ever a thousand beautiful answers to choose from, to sink my teeth into. Why not? It is all so simple. It is only the difficulty of the question I must take into account when I sit down to compose.


But nature alone defies this. A turkey sits on a wall. A cat watches me from a window sill. In careful rapture I follow in detail the flight of a butterfly. Out my bathroom window two sparrows cram grasses and plant fuzz into a joining of wires and my house. Besotted at my close view of the little birds I watch them day after day from the blind of glass. No nest, no eggs are produced by these birds, just a giant mass, a clot of packed vegetation. Out on my lawn I see a rabbit and wonder over it, charting its paths. In a lawn chair I examine the movement of clouds for an hour.


And I have absolutely no idea what's going on.


I'm not sure I really care, but I like to pretend I care.


Here's one for you Dr Seuss: Sometimes there are no questions and no answers. 

But you probably already knew that one too.

Two amusements

Not wanting to skimp on anyone's entertainment I have two amusements for you today. Both made me laugh out loud, but I have learned that when it comes humor, taste can be so changeable and individual that we barely find the same things funny as our own selves.

So I'm doubling my chances here. In a year and a half when I stumble across this once again perhaps I will find one of these funny. As for whether you will I have learned much on the futility of guessing.

In the first incident I was faced with a fly. Though I have in the past made friends with flies, that has only been in exceptional cases. My usual relation to flies is to endure, to hopelessly and ridiculously try to kill them in impossible, self injuring, ways, or to hunt the wee creatures with meticulous effectiveness. This fly was in my kitchen and was loud, fast, and large, and I went for the third option. I got out my trusty fly swatter. But as I did this the fly shrewdly disappeared. So I set my fly swatter carefully down at arms length and cleaned dishes. No sooner had I started than the fly flew into the kitchen and landed on the fly swatter. It made me laugh, thinking "Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer."

The second is maybe straight out funnier, but I really had nothing to do with it. I was biking with my wife through our neighborhood and I saw a sign high on a telephone pole that said "Luke 5:34". Underneath that sign was another sign tacked up. It said "Fred 6-ish". 

Oh, hell, no matter who I become I don't think I'll ever find that not funny.

The evolution of Charlie Brown

Once upon a time here I had a tradition where the Sunday blog post functioned as casual day on clerkmanifesto. On Sundays I would write casual posts/essays. You may not know this from the perspective of being a reader, but as the writer, I, at this point, only write terribly formal blog posts, blog posts that are carefully crafted, rich in theme, and for the ages. Do you know what it's like to write 1,250 meticulous essays for the ages and have the ages not even glance once in my direction?

Yes, that's right, you do know almost exactly what that's like. Most people do know, one way or another. Some of us just go on about it more than others.

I would actually enjoy every day being casual day around here, but man, I see that football just sitting there and I start to think "I'm gonna kick this one a mile!" 

And then I do. Which just makes me have to walk farther to get the football.

Who am I

I am just me.

But even I have to acknowledge the differences. 

There is the me that walks the world, flesh and blood, and talking talking talking. And there is the me that writes here. The same but different. I thought we should try to be clear for future reference.

In praise, I am the same.

In analysis, likewise, though perhaps I am clearer here, and more ready to stop when it is time to stop.

In vanity I am here more so.

And in bitterness?

In life I look for the biggest club I can find. A bludgeon so large I can rarely even lift it. Here I look for one tiny screw to undo, and so to make the whole thing fall apart on its own.

Gold that ends in rainbow

Feeling the blues, ragged, beset by too many things to do, I had no ambitions for last night, Thursday. Thursday is a common day for escapades for my wife and I in these twin cities. But it was enough, worn down as we were already, that we had to drop our car off at our mechanic, two or three miles away, and find our way home. And so that was the whole of the plan for the evening; deliver our car and find our way home. There were storms rolling through, construction everywhere, and we were running late, racing the darkness.

So we drove our car over and parked at our excellent mechanic's place. I shoved an envelope with our key through a slot in the garage wall as per arrangement. Then we came back over the half closed bridge, over the Interstate and down into the St. Paul neighborhoods.

And there was a rainbow.

Oh sneer all you want at stories that end in puppies and flowers and sunshine. In tales that conclude with ponies and rainbows. I saw a graph the other day that showed the emotional trajectory of all stories, collectively and individually, and it turns out that even the happy ones, like Pride and Prejudice, don't end in rainbows, but rather in a subtle downbeat. No one is going to read blog post number 1,239 and say "Yes! Yes! This one! The one that ends in a rainbow" because how is that supposed to blow your mind, or speak the secret unvoiced murmurs of your heart? That sort of thing is all too complicated for rainbows.

But it was fabulous, the stream of bewildering light. On one side of all the colors, opposite the yellow, was a violet that disappeared when one looked right at it, but when one looked away it came screaming back until it was the most brilliant color in the whole dazzling array. 

And then the rainbow grew brighter.

The fleeting nature of success

A couple of times every week my boss draws a cartoon on the big, dry erase A-frame we see just as we come through the employee entrance of the library. I like these drawings. Sometimes they're caricatures. Sometimes they're reworked old New Yorker cartoons. And sometimes they're all of my boss's own design. I like to break out my old art school training with him on quiet nights and give long, only a bit tongue in cheek in their grandiosity, glowing critiques of the cartoons I fancy.

But no matter how good they are they can't stay forever. And after one or two or three or four days he has to erase them and start thinking about the next one.

The one up on the board right now is quite possibly my favorite ever. It's a large, charming portrait of Vito Corleone (amusingly holding a famous cartoon cat my boss likes to include in drawings). The Godfather is saying: "Someday, and that day may never come, I may ask a favor of you. Until then accept this waive as a gift of your library."
 
Outside of the delightful art, which, alas, you can't see, (but know that my boss is a far better cartoonist than he thinks he is) it captures some tiny elegance about library circulation work, the small powers of our favors, and of course blows that quality up into those ridiculous Mafioso proportions. It even speaks to our old school nature here, one that we still cling to and manage to maintain, our independent anarchic calculating humanism, more Vito Corleone than Michael Corleone.

It's just a great cartoon. And in a day or two it will be erased.

Isn't that just how it is?

Yesterday I almost wrote a great blog post. Oh, as I'm writing this one, several days ahead of time, I'm still working at that one. Maybe it'll get great, but I doubt it. Yesterday's will likely have ended up as just being 'very good'. But looking at my boss's soon to be erased magnum opus it's hard to get too sad about that. Always here in this world we're on to the next thing. You spend the whole summer trying to capture lightning in a bottle. Then, finally, with great luck, inspiration, and skill, you do. And then, seemingly as fast as that lightning itself, the fizzing bottle finds itself sitting on a shelf in your basement.

Five years later someone's down in your basement.

"What's this?" They ask.

"Lightning. In a bottle." You say with a twinkling of old pride.

"Wow." They exclaim, awestruck.

They look at it for a moment, and then they look away. "What else do you got?"

Country folk blues

My wife saw him first. He emerged from the Metro Mobility Bus, struggling slightly with his guitar. Metro Mobility is the door-to-door bus that helps the infirm or disabled get around these twin cities. It was good news to see him, this old man, walking slowly, but ably enough. It meant that The Open Mike Night at the Riverview Cafe would be a good one.

Fairly speaking, Open Mike Night at the Riverview Cafe is always pretty good. And despite the old man's auspicious arrival, this Open Mike was one of the least interesting I have seen in awhile. Always suffering from an old white man syndrome, Thursday's Open Mike was at its worst in this regard. I don't have anything against old white men, especially as I'm working my way to aging into one, but we were wall to wall with them here. We might have been two hours into the show without an exception to the demographic, and for the whole of the night "fiftyish" would have qualified any singer as a mere babe in the woods.

That might not have been so bad if it weren't for a problem of musical sameness rearing its head too. Start to finish was crowded up shoulder to shoulder with songs of deep Americana: Country Folk Blues. Dirge music, rust belt Union Songs, sad tales of broken down cars, lost dogs, and love gone wrong. This was dusty stuff, and though a notable proportion of the songs were written by the performers themselves, there was nothing in them to show they weren't all songs from the 1930's. I'm not saying this music doesn't interest me, but a little emotional variation, an occasionally different genre or tempo, can exert a powerfully refreshing quality on the listener's ability to absorb, to feel, and to see.

Poignantly, things started steadily improving only as the crowd thinned down, better music to a smaller crowd. We were a little looser with wine and beer, more forgiving, and clearly bettered by a dwindling count of audience members who were anxious about their own upcoming performance. By the time the old man came on I doubt there were more than a dozen of us out watching on the cafe floor. The old man hooked his guitar up just like everyone else did. The night's host set the sound for him, and the old man sat down and played. It was every bit Americana; Old folk blues just like we'd been hearing most of the night. But here it was suddenly revealed. Split open. This was how it was supposed to be done. The lyrics were all heartbreak, but so was his voice, beautiful, cracked, burnt hard in an old fire, but clear. No dirge these songs, because on the refrain that voice of pain and age and sorrow turned. It soared up piercing and giant and sharp. The feeling filled up all the pain so high that for a brief second it floated into heaven, up to that place where something catches in you and your heart leaves the room. For one weird, soaring moment it leaves the world and it leaves all of time.

Then it comes back, drifting down. The old voice again. The old man, no polish or fame. No following. Everyone taking it for granted. This is how art usually is.

Nothing to see here. 

He finishes up. We applaud. He unplugs his guitar and shuffles off. Just another one of the night's performers. Maybe in another world, a world more just, roadies are packing up his guitar for him. The limo waits for him backstage at Carnegie Hall or at the old Ryman Auditorium. Maybe in another world he got everything he deserved, and so did you, which, at the very least, is a little more than you have now.

Industrious

All day I have been industrious at work. It was busy out at the desk, but even so I attended to all the little details. I handled the small, easily deferred chores. I set things up for the next person. I kept busy. I have answered ringing phones that weren't even mine to answer. And in the lulls of the day I mostly looked for productive things to do. When I found them I did them. Then, about an hour ago I was upstairs shelving. I just had an hour scheduled there, but already I was well into a second cart. It was there that the oddness of it all dawned on me.

"Why am I getting so much work done? What's going on?"

I didn't decide to work hard. I wasn't forced, tricked, or obligated into it. Indeed, today was the sort of day where no one would even care what I was doing. I am usually a mercurial worker, high and low by mood and immediate necessity. I am usually adjusting for grievances, leveraging my powerlessness with moderation and self entertainments. I am not generally industrious and dogged. Something must have happened.

And then the truth came from behind the clouds. I understood why, so far today, I have unconsciously, simply worked.

No one at my workplace has irritated or offended me all day. 

I am only a little sad to say that this alone might be the weirdest thing that has ever happened to me in 22 years of library work.

Our country is great

For reasons I can't recall I was poking about in the aged recesses of my work email, and I came across a July 4th ready poem I wrote 15 or 16 years ago. It might have had something to do with a patriotic poetry contest my library ran, but regardless of that I feel that this, and some of the other detritus I came across, clearly indicates I had the blogging impulse long before I started clerkmanifesto. I'm pretty sure I've had the blogging impulse for 40 years. But let's say I started clerkmanifesto 16 years ago. Can you imagine? Go ahead and imagine.

I have. And here is what I decided:

All the same people would be here right now, but we'd all be a very tiny amount more tired.

And so, with only a small amount more further ado, here it is for you, from the archives. Happy Fourth. This goes out to the great, rambling list of victims:

Our Country is Great

Our country is great,

There's no doubt about it,

I'm often inclined,

To go out and shout it.

Our country is great!

Our country is great!

I shout it quite early, 

I shout pretty late.

I blow a big trumpet,

That's red white and blue,

I shout from my rooftop,

My dog does it too.

The neighbors don't like it,

But what can they do?

It's three in the morning,

And it's their country too.

A Cosa Notra approach to blog marketing

 



If you are reading this online, or through a version delivered to your email, this won't apply to you, so you will not be receiving this letter (for reasons that will be made clear in the text of the letter itself).






Dear Friend, Close Associate, or Co-Worker:




As you may know I have been writing a blog for over three years now. It was originally much concerned with my work life at a large, near urban public library. But as there is new content every day it freely roams far afield from this initial subject matter to cover virtually every other subject imaginable, all of it touching on my personal perspectives, and almost certainly including issues dear to your heart. In the past I thought my blog might be of interest to you. Perhaps I have quietly recommended it to you. It is not unlikely that I have even given you the address of it at your own request.

But I understand that it is an idiosyncratic string of essays. My blog is strange, sharp, irreverent, complicated, absurd, and occasionally uncomfortable, and as such it is not to everyone's taste. Indeed it is to very few people's taste. And as much as we might like the idea of a rich, multi-layered Internet that deepens our intellectual and emotional perspectives, we're not really all that keen on it in practice. That is why I have not bugged you about taking that first look at my blog. That is why I have not reminded you to give it one more chance either. And, also, that is why I have not let you know when I am writing on a subject that I think you would find particularly interesting. I have respected your choice, regardless of how flippantly or seriously it was made, to not read my blog, clerkmanifesto.

But in the past I have not written so specifically about you. And now that I am preparing to write specifically about you I felt it would be a minimal courtesy to let you know. 

I have been preparing to write a new series on my blog. This new, upcoming series is called:

Friends, Co-Workers, and Close Acquaintances: A revealing, no holds barred, person by person look at all the people I know who do not read my blog.

This is a warts and all view of their (your, actually) strange habits, private demons, and personal failings. These are character studies that won't shy away from naming names and looking at the sharp truths of real people, their (sorry, your, again) financial information, dark, unholy secrets, politics, relationships, and grooming and eating habits. I think you would find it interesting.

Unfortunately you won't be able to read it.

If you were reading my blog in hopes of finding your profile then there would be no profile of you to find. I am only running profiles of people who don't read my blog. It's a bit of a Catch 22 really. And perhaps it is this very fact that, by its nature, anything I would write about you will be invisible to you, that makes me want to just let you know what's going on.

So, heads up. 

And if you were hoping to help out by sharing with me some striking peculiarity or secret about yourself, don't worry, I already know.

I already know.



With much cordial affection,



F. Calypso 

My artistic integrity

Dear Publisher:



I am hoping you will be interested in publishing a book of my essays. I have long wanted to be a wealthy, famous author, and it is my guess that you aren't averse to earning a million or two dollars yourself, so what say we make this happen?

What are these essays about? There is the beauty of the thing. There are over 1,300 of these widely ranging essays, so they can be about almost anything you want. If you see a gap in the market we can just choose the essays that fit that subject, and we're on our way! It can be a book about cats, or the Internet, or Libraries, Lionel Messi, satire, ethics, food, work, God, nature, urban planning, jokes, or the fine arts. These essays are at your disposal.

Yes, you heard me right. You have carte blanche to make whatever book you think will sell best.

And it's not like these essays are long. On the contrary they are built to work in a modular fashion, like Legos. They are generally just a few paragraphs long. At times they are little more than pithy lists. We can fit them together however we want to fashion a book perfectly suited to the marketplace.

I'm not going to stand in the way of your expertise. I understand that a book is a product above all, and when it comes to products you are the professional. I am merely the industrial producer. Edit as you like. Flip meanings. Cut offensive passages. Adjust and twist to cravenly appeal to whatever audience you mark as most likely to buy. I have no pretensions. I have no illusions about the sanctity of authorship.

Would you like to experiment with product placement? Go ahead. You can insert utterly shameless plugs for the most repulsive fast food products or the most manipulative pharmaceuticals and I won't bat an eye. If I want to feel guilty about stuff like that I can tithe from my profits, because we both know, along with everyone from Carnegie to Bill Gates, that ethics belong over on the far side of wealth. I am a pragmatist above all. Like you I understand this has to be a business first. And second? Once we have the first, we can buy second. Isn't this why we live in America?

So I hope we can work together. With your skill and experience and my verbiage and malleability I believe we can go very far indeed. I suspect you feel the same way.


With all cordiality and enthusiasm,




F. Calypso

Another sterling performance

I have just finished another scintillating performance in the art of clerking. Over the course of the last eight hours I have astonished our library patrons with my knowledge, wit, and graciousness. My shelving was flawless and speedy, my phone manner engaging and attentive, and my machine operating exacting, productive, and deft. I have generally been a pretty good library clerk over the years, I don't mind saying so, but lately I have taken it to another level. My co-workers have been looking on, slack-jawed in wonder. "What amazing feat will he pull off now?" They ask themselves. "Does he acquire the books that patrons want out of the thin air? Can he repair things by looking at them?" 

Several librarians went home feeling superfluous, but as they left they thanked me for inspiring them. They wept a little. 

Patrons kept trying to tip me. And lately some of them have started to ask me to sign their check out receipts. "Just to have." They say. "As a keepsake." Then, with a wink, they try to slide me a large denomination bill.

"No thank you." I say. "I do it for love. If you are kind to someone later today it is all the thanks I need. Keep your fifty dollar bill. It was such a nice thought." 

My co-workers in circulation keep asking me what my favorite cookie is.

"Anything you want." They say. "Just let me bring a pan of it in for you tomorrow. You make everything so much better around here, and we give you nothing!"

"Oh stop." I demurred. "You're embarrassing me!"

And it's true. I need no special reward. I don't need a raise, though they keep offering them to me around here. These plaques of commendation are all charming, and so are the fan letters, but I'd be happy if everyone didn't make a fuss. The smiles I put on peoples' faces is everything I need from my work. I need nothing more.

Well, except, maybe, and this absolutely is not necessary, but if I must have a reward, there is one very small thing. I hate to even ask it.

Could someone please ask my manager to stop coming up to me every six minutes, no matter what I'm doing, to ask me what I'm working on?

I mean, just if someone wants to.