Ok, yes I am Jewish

It is a historical fact that I have been forced to face in the course of writing this blog that many readers come and go. Through some freakish, bizarre accident of the Internet some reader may stumble upon one of my posts and have the lightning strike. "My god!" They cry out. "This is fantastic. This is the writer of my heart who I have been searching for all my life. The writer who expresses my humanity, understanding, enlightenment, and graciousness of vision. I am made better and more whole by this genius. His shining wisdom inspires me! I shall subscribe and read his every blog post forever and ever!"

And then the next day they read my post and say "Oh! I didn't realize he's Jewish! Unsubscribe! Yuck!"

Or something like that.

Oh, you didn't realize I was Jewish either? Well, not theologically, or religiously. More mechanically. More like if someone says something about Jews my ears start twitching.

Also I feel faintly chosen.

Also anytime my co-workers have an idle question about Judaism I am the go to person because this is Minnesota and they don't know anyone else who's Jewish.

"Isn't there some kind of Jewish Holiday going on right about now?" They ask me, thinking that they're pretty sure I'm Jewish because I seem faintly chosen.

"You got me." I reply. "I'm an apostate."

"It had something to do with people planting trees." They say unperturbed by my fancy words I only barely understand.

But this sparks something in my brain. "Oh, it must be Tu BiShvat. The New Year of the trees." I say, though I'm not sure if I've ever celebrated the day before. Maybe once on Kibbutz Yahel, in 1982. So I know almost nothing. But I like being able to answer questions. So since I won't be able to answer anymore on the subject I hope they don't ask them. But they always do.

"That sounds interesting." They say brightly. "How do you celebrate this..."

"Tu BiShvat..." I say, instructively pronouncing clearly.

They nod. "How do you celebrate this TuShibav?"

"Well, um, I think there's tree planting, and maybe we eat dried fruit?" I am stretching out so far to the very limits of my knowledge that I think I might hurt something.

But what I say is never enough!

If only people quizzed me like this about the Barcelona Futbol Club!

"So would your family come together and celebrate this when you were a kid? Do you go to, what's the word..."

"Temple?"

"Yes. Did you go celebrate this with praying in a Temple?" They ask hungrily.

But the strain of ignorance is too much for me, mostly my own. I have had enough. "A nar ken fregen mer frages in a sho vi a kluger ken entferen in a yor!"* I cry out.

To my surprise the face of the person I'm talking to turns white. They seem to collect themselves, and in a dignified, soulful tone they reply "Der tsoren iz in hartsen a doren."**

Oy. Who knew they spoke Yiddish!




*A fool can ask more questions in an hour than a wise man can answer in a year!





**Anger is like a thorn in the heart.

The true story of Batman

There is an Internet motif I think of as "The dream and the reality". It is generally presented as two pictures. The first is the idealized form, let's say a great warrior, exquisitely muscled, covered in becoming and authentic armors, and wielding a mighty and gleaming sword. The second picture is reality, the punchline. It will feature an unshaven, overweight man with crude cardboard facsimiles of armor absurdly strapped to his body with duct tape, wielding a foil sword in what appears to be a badly lit basement trying awkwardly to hold that same heroic pose.

I am not very fond of this motif. I too have dreamed, and it's not like one has never run away with itself on me.

Nevertheless, I have been thinking of this motif. And I have been thinking of Batman.

Certainly Batman is an ideal. A billionaire with amazing gadgets, glamorously fit, stoic and clever, possessing everything he could possibly want, and yet despite that he is a restless fighter for good, a rogue knight of justice in the night, standing outside of the law but ever on its side. So taking that Batman as an ideal, or our first image, I have wondered what might be our appropriate and telling second image. Who is our punchline dreamer?

Donald Trump.

Think of it. Rich. Wielding his special tweeting phone. Dreaming he is a hero to the oppressed, an unshakeable fighter, but posing ridiculously before an army of cheering toads. Bloated, absurd in self satisfied conviction of his own heroism, he is a delusional joke tearing apart the world in a fever dream.

No one thinks they're the villain.

This is not about Donald Trump.

This is about Batman.

Be careful what you dream of.



Batman is deep in me. I loved Batman and I don't regret it. But the story of my love is not how these comic book hero stories usually go. Comics were nothing to me. It was all, from the earliest possible time, the TV show that spoke to me.  It was said in my family that the first word I ever said was "Batman". This checks out if the first word I spoke was at a slightly late 15 months, which is about when the show and its catchy song started.

I may have said plenty of things earlier than that, but if I know my family, they weren't listening.

So Batman. It would have been repeats of the short lived show starring Adam West as Batman that made its later, deeper impressions on me. And despite my early love for him it would never have occurred to me to read a comic of it. I would have been disappointed anyway. That TV sensibility was unique. Indeed, all these hundreds of Batmans later, in comics, TV, games, and god knows how many movies, and still that first instance of Batman's mass media triumph, that silly show with Adam West, was the only piece of art I credit. It was the only one that ever understood, the only one able to apply Batman to what he was properly suited to: Satire.

The colorful and cartoon villains interested less in power and more in anarchy, the endless company men henchmen, the hero's impossible invincibility, the glorification of tech, and the absolute, tortured righteousness of the good guy were all so divorced from how the world really is that they were silly. Batman the TV show didn't try desperately to patch over that dissonance. It didn't try to lie to us about evil and good and power. Instead it opened those gaps wider and reveled in their nonsense; villains making absurd, slow acting destruction devices for the dynamic duo and then leaving them alone to escape, utility gadgets of hilariously convenient specificity ("Quick, Robin, these BatEarPlugs will turn the maddening sound to gentle music!"), and a goodness code so relentlessly observed that it leaves Batman unable to dispose of a ticking bomb because not only does he keep running into nuns as he tries to save the day, but also baby ducks!

This was a show teaching lessons, but not the banal ones about good and evil so much, rather about image and narrative and ideology. Suddenly in the light of a show like that the President of the time, going on TV and talking about how good he was and how righteous we were as a nation, had to take on his share of cartoon silliness. We saw these speeches on Batman! The Viet Cong were not the Joker, ridiculously just wanting to cause mindless trouble. After laughing at it, this simplicity wasn't something we were so well trained to believe anymore. Batman the TV show, deconstructing, exaggerating, and emphasizing for fun the structural flaws in heroism narrative suggested that we might want to open our eyes and look.

All of modern Batman, and most of the modern, bloated, popular superhero oeuvre dates from this fun and silly TV show. But not in kind. Rather against. Now that the absurdity and comedy of Batman had been laid bare Batman was compelled to react and to face reality.

Batman doubled down.

Not with more reality. All the holes were left more or less as they were, but rather with everything looking and feeling and sounding more real. A newly darker, more troubled hero for the gravity and authenticity of it. Scarier, wilder villains. Perfect costumes (no cardboard and duct tape here!), amazingly authentic feeling contemporary gadgets, stunts, actors, cars, and explosions. All with a real world earthiness, in a complicated world that seems like our own.

Yes, there is all the same nonsense; those bespoke gadgets saving the day, good triumphing over evil, miracle after miracle to preserve heroic invincibility, a cartoon pretending to be Shakespeare. It is still a rich gentleman, harnessing the powers of night, virtue, and his station in life to be a savior to us all.

Close your eyes.

I know my small readership is hardly likely to include anyone looking up at President Trump and seeing Batman. My vernacular is even harder to read with eyes closed than it is with eyes open. And I know that one small facet of mass culture, meant mostly for fun and entertainment and profit, can only be a thin slice of who we become as a people on the grand scale of the world. But there are tens of millions of people out there who do not see Donald Trump as a kind of dim-witted Joker, or Penguin, but rather despite everything screaming the contrary, they see Batman.

I think seeing the world clearly comes naturally.

Being stupid takes practice.



Here. I have a Batman for you:

Gotham is owned by a few small families. They've leveraged their inherited wealth to take more and more and carve every law and thought and practice and philosophy of the city to favor them. They own all the TV Stations and ISPs. They own the newspapers and businesses that employ people. They even pay the scholars in the universities. You hear some stories a lot. And you hear some stories not so much at all.

And except for these small families, the Waynes and the like, life is getting worse. The poor grow more hopeless. The working peoples' place erodes and they become hungrier, paying their taxes not to the betterment of their community, but to heedless profiting businesses. The city crumbles except for its glamorous and perfectly kept enclaves.


But wonderfully, as people get poorer, and life on the streets of Gotham gets more desperate, a band of strange and brave heroes arises. Hiding their identities to protect their families they become The Joker, Catwoman, The Penguin, Two-face, and Mr. Freeze. If you live in Gotham you might know them. They might have slipped you a couple hundred dollars when you were at your lowest. You saw them deliver bags of food to your hungry neighbor that, you, working two jobs, could not yourself help. They are Robin Hoods. Stealing in myriad brave and clever ways from the wealthy and helping the poor, they are reviled and demonized on Television as ruthless terrorists. Their crimes, mainly humane ones of theft, are magnified, manufactured, and twisted into ones of chaos and wanton destruction. They are presented as agents of meaningless evil.

On the streets people whisper of them. Too many people know them and they are too good and too colorful for the news reports to destroy. So the smartest man in Gotham's hierarchy, no doubt one of the rare few who is at least somewhat self-made, comes up with a counter narrative. The city needs a colorful hero of its own to compete with these all too colorful heroes. A hero to make the real heroes into villains. 

Batman is born. 

They dress up one of their popular, millionaire playboys. He can't really fight or solve crimes, but while the police crack down and slaughter and wantonly arrest in the streets, they march him in carefully, and they and their papers and movies and news shows construct stories where he saves the day.

In real Gotham they can't catch these beloved figures of crime, The Joker and the like remain too wily, and too protected by their slummy homes, but no matter. Batman can always fake catch them until the time that the villains reappear mysteriously again. Some people will know the truth, but they won't be very important people, and some people will fully believe the papers and endless news stories about this striking new hero, Batman. But either way, enough people will be scared enough and uncertain enough to create a stasis in the city, which for the powerful of Gotham, is enough to go on with.

Outside of Gotham? Batman is a great hero. How would we know different? And the real heroes, Riddler, Catwoman, sneaking starving old ladies a month of food and some nice medical marijuana, are merely mad, frightening, and entertaining villains as they play out through the rest of the country and the world.

But still they fight on. Penguin, Joker, Poison Ivy, and so on, invading mansions, cracking safes, looting warehouses, and robbing banks, spreading money and goods and hope to a struggling city. Yes, to most of the world they are the worst of villains, or maybe not even real. But only justice matters to them, and empathy, and truth, always truth. 

For they know that the truth of the thing is far more important than the image can ever be.








 

An introduction

I don't often launch into a long, analytical polemics around here. Or, perhaps I should say I launch into them all the time, but as soon as I can end them and/or turn them into something completely different, I do. I see myself more as a thief of truth. I catch a glimpse of the truth and then I try to dash out and grab it and then get out as quickly as possible before anyone catches me. I occasionally like to fool around a little bit here by calling myself a prophet of the gods. But it would be closer to the truth to say that mostly I just swipe stuff from them.

Nevertheless, every once in awhile, I dart out from my hiding place, low in the weeds and brambles, make a grab, and all the lights go up. I am caught, surrounded by antlered and anthropomorphic figures and firelight. At this point, for ritual reasons I don't understand I am then compelled to write for three or four raving pages. These aren't generally the most popular posts I write, even to me, but I assure you such a thing is not under my control. If you open up a post about Batman, for instance, like you will tomorrow, and you see that it scrolls down your screen much, much farther than usual, you are always free to pass it by. I will be grievously wounded by this, but there are two important points you should nevertheless consider despite that.

1. I will never know.

2. The experience of being this blog's writer consists of three parts:

          A. Stealing stuff from gods (see above).
          B. Chortling in glee like Dr. Frankenstein as electricity courses down from the ceiling.
          C. Being grievously wounded.

I'm just saying, don't let it put you out too much.

But this here, curiously, is an introduction to tomorrow's post. Tomorrow is one of the long discourses I described above. And for me the really challenging thing about writing a long post is that in my holy mission to essay daily, writing a long, difficult post over a few days puts a crimp in my need to keep up and maybe even get a little ahead on my writing. So I figured, cleverly, this time, that to even things up I would write an introduction. This is that introduction! I shrewdly reasoned that the small device of producing a preceding day's preparatory remarks would give me a free and easy extra post. Ha!

Unfortunately I have been working on this for some time already and it's getting quite long. This has defeated its purpose.

Please refer to point 2. above, subsection C.

So then, tomorrow's post is about Batman. And the TL;DpR (Too Long; Don't plan on Reading) of it is:

The Sixties TV Batman comedy was the only good Batman. By mocking heroic tropes it challenged authority and invited critical thinking. The Batman since then has only been reactionary, mirroring the rise of wealth inequality, the unhinged right and their detachment from scientific and moral reality, culminating ultimately what amounts to a clown president fever dreaming that he is Batman.

If that's plenty for you then, yes, take tomorrow off with my blessings (see again point 2. above, subsection C.).

But if my above summary is TS;WM (Too Short; Want More) then, ho boy! Tomorrow is way better and funnier and more illuminating than my summary, and everyone who took the day off is totally going to be, um, er, blessed, by me, I guess. Crap.

Seasons change

Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall are for amateurs. This is Minnesota. Our seasons cannot be constrained by a paltry handful of prosaic terms used by inferior climates. Our seasons are kaleidoscopic, ever shifting and altering, recurring with sudden ferocity and then peeling away to reveal something never seen before and yet... familiar. Run through our seasons with me:


(This list would start sometime in September usually)


Is it over?
Wicked
All the colors are burnt
Haunted wind
Dead and Ugly
Cold
Holy Fuck!
Fairyland
My nose froze together
Watch what happens when you throw boiling water in the air!
It's 20 out and I'm comfortable in a t-shirt
I don't understand, is that a color?
Look, a flower!
I didn't wear enough clothes
It's so beautiful, does this always happen?
Flooded basement
Basement still flooded
I can't believe it's light out!
Look, a bug, how cute!
Ahhhhh, bugs!!
It's perfect out
I'm sweating
Argh, the sun!

Of course, this is just a selection of common seasons. Some of them don't happen every year, and these certainly aren't all inclusive, but they do recur with alarming regularity.

For our current season we have:

Even you can see this is unpleasant

I hope it will moderate soon to another season because I don't like hot weather. That might be an understatement. Every time the heat and humidity rears its head I get furious. Today as the temperature started cranking up I found myself reflecting on the apocryphal story of the old Eskimo. The story goes that the old Eskimos, when they got really old and did not want to be a burden on their people, would climb onto an ice floe and float off to sea. 

I finally understood this story from the inside. The old person is not seeking death. Merely it is Summer, which they can no longer bear, and they are casting off north,  searching for one small cool breeze.

Target Bag Man

Though I have written a post or two about him in this space, I don't believe I have ever properly named him. At most I have called him OCD Man, wandering our library, getting other people to open doors for him, and demanding ever more of our anti-bacterial gels. Resistant to our codes of conduct, hygiene preferences, and general ideas about how much space any individual should take up in our library, he spends nearly every day here. He chews food loudly, eating things out of hidden packets for a third of the time he's here. He sleeps in a suite of 2 to 4 chairs another third of the time he's here. And he wanders about using our stuff for the last third of the time he's here.

I'm pretty sure I've heard his real life name a few times, but I've never managed to remember it. To myself and the rest of my co-workers he is faithfully known as Target Bag Man. He is known thusly because he at all times camps here at the library with, or travels around with a group of six loaded up Target bags, filled, as far as I can tell, with stuff I would characterize as falling somewhere between garbage and the nuclear codes of Uzbekistan.

So imagine my shock and consternation today when I went upstairs to shelve and found Target Bag Man yes, sleeping, yes, smelly, yes taking up multiple chairs, and yes, with six stuffed bags full of stuff, but, today, after years, the bags weren't from Target. Rather they were from Cub Foods!

Holy Mother of God!

What happened? I started freaking out a little. I started freaking out a lot!

Is Target Bag Man okay? Do we still call him Target Bag Man? Has something horrible happened to Target Bag Man???!!!!

And then I remembered; 

I don't care.

TL;DR

You've probably seen it around often enough, but maybe not; the Internet term TL;DR. TL;DR is one of the most clever and useful acronyms of the Internet. Standing for "Too Long; Didn't Read", it's a popular introductory device to a brief summation of a longer block of text, or sometimes even of a whole article. I think TL;DR is so perfect because it's a kind of microcosm of the Internet itself, which sometimes feels like a TL;DR of, well, everything. It's everything in existence reduced down to a more poppy, palatable, easy to digest form for all of us who can't be troubled to study, engage, or take the time to understand properly.  It's so easy that it encourages us to learn about things we don't care about, but to not learn them well enough so that we truly understand them or remember them. Nevertheless, my small digs aside, TL;DR is a useful Internet communication tool to clarify, simplify, and give people options in their level of engagement with a point.

Too long for you? Here, I will give you a TL;DR of it.

TL;DR is a useful acronym meaning "Too Long; Didn't Read". It introduces a brief summary of the content usually above it on a webpage.

How's that?

Still too long?

Okay, I'll give a TL;DR of my TL;DR.

TL;DR (Too Long; Didn't Read) helpfully introduces summarized content.

No?

A TL;DR of my TL;DR of my TL;DR then:

TL;DR is good.

Still less? Okay, but last one for sure!  A TL;DR of my TL;DR of my TL;DR of my TL;DR:

Mmf.

Finally! Excellent! Tweet it out.



But the truth is, as much as I appreciate the TL;DR it does not satisfy my personal orientation. What I would like to actually see, over and over in my perusal of the Internet, is a TS;WM, meaning "Too Short; Want More". As in:  "Okay, you've got my attention, now let's get down to... what? It's over? Already?"

It occurs to me that my daily missives here run pretty short themselves. Maybe one or two among you sometimes wishes for a TS;WM of my blog posts. So perhaps I should explain how it all works here.

Clerkmanifesto is produced modularly. Each individual post is a TL;DR of the entire breadth of the collective project. So, for instance this blog post, though any other I've written will work as well, functions as a TL;DR of every blog post I have written as a collective unit. And then, contrawise, the entire collection of all my blog posts, roughly 1,600, is a TS;WM of any individual blog post. And so, if you need elaboration here, and need a TS;WM, simply go to my first post and read through all 1,600 of them that I have written, one by one, without stopping.

Still not enough? Need more than the 1,600? TS;WM? 

Well, I'll be here tomorrow...

Blogster

The hostility of this blog towards Cat Fancy and Dog Fancy magazines is longstanding. It is largely based on their being owned by the same company, which is much like the NAACP and The Brothers of the Southern Confederacy being run by the same umbrella organization. "Well, naturally they are housed in two separate but equal offices, with separate staffs, except they share a CFO, and Human Resources, and a Marketing department. Did I mention we're a for profit corporation? Would you like to invest? Among other things we own the two largest Kosher Butcheries in the world and the second biggest chain of pig farms in the Americas. We're also the publisher of The Ethical Vegan." 

And if you're grimacing as you read, clucking your tongue and thinking "That makes me feel uncomfortable. It's so unnervingly unwholesome." Then you have perfectly hit upon my feelings about the dog and cat magazine situation.

The publisher only made it worse when they changed the name of the magazines and decided to alternate publishing them each month. They are now called Catster and Dogster magazines, apparently to reflect their more wacky and playful and hip coverage of pets. I just see a bunch desperate capitalist mercenaries with no convictions. No doubt they'll add more pets to their increasingly thin magazine coverage, using the same ridiculous "one size fits all" naming scheme. Rodents, yuck, are probably next. 

I suppose they'll call it "Hamster".

I mean, unless that's the one about pet pigs.

The Internet club

It's a very famous quote, and one of my favorites, but its ubiquity makes it hard to surprise anyone with it, or delight them, the way such an amusing quote can when it's fresh to someone:


"I don't want to belong to any club that will have me as a member."

-Groucho Marx


One can still probably amuse someone with

"Time flies like the wind; fruit flies like a banana." 

or

"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."

though it's an uphill battle, and, with the second, pretty much impossible to do anywhere near a library due to the familiarity problem. Both of these latter quotations are heavily attributed to Groucho, but likely they aren't actually his. That first one though, about the club, that's Groucho. And like any great quote it's special because it so succinctly captures something.

I'm not claiming it's a one to one analogy, maybe not even close, but for me what it captures is this:

As I romp around on the Internet with my blog, nothing quite shocks and horrifies me so much as that my blog, clerkmanifesto, is not enormously popular. That 30 people subscribe to it and occasionally read it instead of 30 million is perplexing to me in the extreme. On a day where I feel I've written a particularly amusing post the fact that it hasn't made it to the front page of Reddit or stormed like an out of control wildfire through Facebook is nearly impossible for me to take in, so strange and counter intuitive it seems. I firmly, perhaps even fanatically believe that nothing should be simpler and more obvious than that my work should own the Internet, that people should find it hilarious and profound, and that they should want nothing more than to read everyday, study it, enthuse over it, and share it insistently with every last person they know. Agents should contact me, seeking to represent me, Editors should beg me to write for their notable publications, and publishers should inquire as to my interests.

While I don't believe all this evenly, I believe it wholeheartedly and often with a wild-eyed fervor.

And yet if one single person is kind enough to comment on one of my posts something like "I loved this one" or "That was so funny!" I invariably think that either they're saying it sarcastically, or, with a touch of pity, they're trying to be nice to me.

Star Tribune daily columnist

Star Tribune Newspaper:



Dear Editor:


Yes already, yes! Fine. I can't take it anymore; your hounding, your constant pursuit, your desperate beseeching, I relent. I give in. I will write a daily column for your newspaper.

I had higher ambitions, you know, more exalted schemes. I have been much in contact with The New Yorker, I must note, and the Nobel Prize committee and myself have been in frequent communication. I have thought of myself as more a "Treasure of the Nation" kind of writer, a Mark Twain sort of figure whose any wee essay would cause any magazine, newspaper, or website in the land to drop all their plans in excitement and immediately plaster me all over their front cover in a burst of greed and pride. 

But the squeaky wheel gets the grease and boy have you squeaked, Star Tribune. My ears are bleeding! I think you might have pierced something. And while the New York Times Magazine and Rolling Stone and the MacArthur Genius Grant people all dillied about in their slow embracing of me, dragging their feet and wasting my best years, there you were, begging me to write whatever I pleased for my own hometown paper. You flattered me. You cajoled me. You appealed to my civic pride. You bribed me, begged me, and wouldn't leave me alone. You sent generous conditions and fell to your knees in supplication on my doorstep in a mortifyingly embarrassing way.  I spurned you over and over, but your entreaties never stopped. 

I closed up my ears. I pursued my other ambitions. But you never moved on. "Yes, save the world." You cried. "But save the twin cities first. Save us! We, who have ever believed in you, who never doubted you, who never ceased to be your ardent admirers."

So, fine. I give in. I will write for you. After 999 "No's" I answer "Yes". I am your new columnist, the daily columnist for The Star Tribune.

I have enclosed my first 100 pieces for publication. If you feel you must change a word or two, go to it, but tread lightly. You can send my checks to the above address. I look forward to our partnership. 

What's that?

You weren't pursuing me as a columnist? You were merely hoping I might take home delivery of your paper at your introductory rate?

Ha ha ha. Very amusing. But why don't you let me handle the "humorist" duties here. After all, that's what you've hired me for.


Looking forward to a long working friendship,


Yours,




F. Calypso, Daily Columnist for The Star Tribune Newspaper

How we write

Because writing is so privately done I am always interested in how other writers manage it. So are a lot of people. The Internet is full of articles and lists of famous writers' schedules. But because the Internet can be a bit of a race to the top with whatever low-hanging fruit is available we find a great number of articles reiterating the schedules of the same 15 or 20 writers who managed at some point to set their routines down elegantly, or at least with elan, or, if famous enough, merely at all. 

Kurt Vonnegut, Maya Angelou, Ernest Hemingway, Haruki Murakami, and Toni Morrison are among the dominant contingent of dedicated early morning writers that get trotted out over and over. These industrious writers are up at 4:00 a.m., or whatever, and they're writing away before the sun comes up. Maybe I read that this is what it takes to be a proper writer some 35 years ago and, confusedly, went into the visual arts. What a sad loss! I was not destined to become an unacclaimed painter, I was destined to become an unacclaimed writer! Who knows how many years of writing ignominy I lost to painting ignominy! But I shan't blame these writers, many of whom I've read and like. They're just doing what they need to get by. Rather I blame the irresponsible and preachy magazine writers who fawned over them and confused me, and I blame my English Teachers whose enthusiasm for me wasn't quite enough, and the reading public in general, of course, and all Publishers, and God. But not Kurt Vonnegut and the like, who should feel free to rest easy in their graves.

Of course, if you dig deeper, it doesn't end with the morning writers. There are the write all night types, Kafka (sounds more glamorous than it is) and Orwell, when he was on a roll. I'm writing at night right now, so that's not so bad. But it's only 11 and I'm probably almost finished with this as it is. How much more of this were you thinking there'd be?

Having become quite a cocktail drinker I was keen on Vonnegut's (remember him from the pre dawn writers?) affection for Scotch, but it didn't seem to figure into his writing, coming in the early evening. Hunter S. Thompson's inclusion of gin and Chartreuse was faintly thrilling, assuming it's Green Chartreuse, because of my fondness for same, but it has to be taken with a grain of salt as it was a writing schedule mostly taken up with snorting cocaine, and was way over the line into satire and his own personal mythology.

I'm particularly keen on comparing myself to James Joyce, mostly in the hopes that if I make no sense whatsoever people will only become more enthusiastic about my work. He woke up around ten. That's it! That was his schedule. I like that one, but that level of discipline was widely derided. The commentators almost invariably followed up on his writing schedule by saying that it took him 15 years to write Finnegan's Wake. This seems like it's a good point until you ask how long it's supposed to take to write Finnegan's Wake. Did Hemingway, up at dawn, working away on a typewriter while standing up, write Finnegan's Wake more quickly?

Of all people though it's E.B. White and Jane Austen whose writing habits seem most close to my own. They both appeared to have worked in common areas, prone to much distraction and interruption. There's even a story about Jane Austen and a creaky door to her room that she liked because it allowed her to quickly hide her writing at the approach of company. It may or may not be true, but it does seem clear they both worked out in the middle of things, with people coming through and all too many distractions. Tonight I may be down here in my basement studio, but tomorrow I'll be writing illicitly, a sadly open secret, out in the middle of the library I work at, wishing desperately for a creaky door or squeaky shoes that will warn me someone is coming up behind me so I can hurriedly pretend I'm not a genius writer but just a regular, approachable guy it's a pleasure to work with. Not for me the recommendations of Flannery O'connor or Stephen King that I work some regular hours every day. I have to grab desperately at inspiration any and every time I can. It's the desperation itself that's a key ingredient for me. I'll write a sentence while on a walk, cram a paragraph in between two people who need help at the library, sweep my post-it notes under the keyboard if someone inquisitive comes around, or I won't do it at all.

Keep in mind I'm not suggesting such an approach for anyone else; just me, and E. B. White, and Jane Austen. You know, that sort of writer.

A note to other writers

There are few things more delightful than a witty, charming romantic comedy novel, I mean, if one is in the mood for it. I am! So let us saunter over to our mighty bookshelves, these magical ones, holding every book known to human kind, and grab a really good one. Let's see, Quest novels, Realism, ah, here we are, Romantic Comedy Classics! 

Wait!

Why is there only one book here?

Did someone raid the section? Was there a filing accident? Is there a category mistake going on?

No, no, no, these are the dream book shelves, utopian and perfect, and so, only of an ideal world they are by nature a perfect representation.

And there is one great Romantic Comedy Fiction novel? One!

Granted it makes a firm argument for being the most perfect and lovely novel ever written, an eminently coherent argument for being the best of all novels, but, that's it?

Didn't I make some joke the other day about the fantasy genre consisting of Lord of the Rings, Terry Pratchett, and filler? Oh, my bitter mouth! I can think easily of half a dozen other wonders of that genre. What about Earthsea, Name of the Wind, Blue Sword, and The Last Dragonslayer? All great. But here I am looking for a clever, insightful, and charming book about two people falling in love, one of the most obvious sorts of books to try and write, and only one lady, 200 fucking years ago, managed to do it properly?

I think there might be something wrong with us.

Van Nuys

Roaming the Internet for enlightenment  is perhaps a fool's game. But here we are once again. And no discredit to you. I am out here too, seeking the truth, but finding instead wedding parties falling into pools in hilarious ways, finding people falling off of bicycles or having dramatic problems with treadmills rather than finding the visions of understanding I was hoping I'd just sort of stumble on. On the Internet I am vastly more likely to find a cat slipping off a couch while sleeping than I am to find the answer to any important question. In real life the chances are closer to fifty-fifty.

And what is an important question?

Let me tell you about the time I was five or six, living in the Principality of Van Nuys, California. In the three bedroom house of my family there was a crawl space attic I had never been up in and had never seen made use of. But for some reason my father had to take a rare excursion up into it. So up a rickety ladder he went, through a trap door in the ceiling, to disappear into a mysterious area of our house I didn't even know existed up until that time.

We could hear every movement of my father up in the ceiling, and there was something terribly captivating about how this whole man, surely five times my own size, was over our heads in a secret area. Thump, thump, thump. Was he crouched in there, moving about? What was it like? How it creaked and groaned. And then, as he took one more step that we were all monitoring, fascinated, it crashed. The ceiling split open. My father shot down feet first, half way. But the explosive birth was arrested, and my father suddenly stopped part way through, at the waist. The whole of his legs poked out of the ceiling and wiggled comically while chaos broke out through the house.

I do not know what happened next. But it is best to leave him there, half in the attic, calling instructions, and floating comically above us, legs waving about like dangling branches in the wind. I have carried this vision for almost half a century. I am sure there is an answer to an important question in there somewhere. There always is. So I keep looking.

Genre definitions

We have many of our fiction books at our library divided up into genres. We don't explain what these genre divisions refer to, we just expect everyone to magically understand. Because I have been on a kick of defining terms lately I decided I could put this skill to good use and explain for everyone precisely what these genre definitions refer to. You no longer need to struggle to assume you know. I will lay it out for you in simple terms.




Western:


Any book with lots of horses that doesn't take place in England or in a fantasy world. While this constitutes an entire genre unto itself, taking up significant shelf space, there are only five authors in total who write in this genre.



Romance:


A genre so abandoned and reviled, so desolate, dark, and remote from all respected human culture, and also so full of lone damsels, that it has become recently infested with Vampires and Werewolves.



Mystery:




Stories of men and women whose stunning talent for solving interesting murders is only exceeded by their even more uncanny talent for happening upon them.




Science Fiction:


Once considered the lowest and pulpiest of fiction, Science Fiction is no longer just about rocketships and space monsters, now it's just mostly about rocketships and space monsters.



Fantasy:


Lord of the Rings, the Terry Pratchett books, and filler.




Fiction:


All the books by all the writers who were really mad when Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize.

Devil's dictionary: Internet

It's already time for another session of Devil's Dictionary, with all due respect to Ambrose Bierce, and let's note how clever the phrase "With all due respect" is. Here, we'll do a Devil's Dictionary of it:


With all due respect:

Just the amount of respect someone deserves without saying just how much that is.




Today's Devil Dictionary terms are Internet ones. If anything needs an updated interpretation of terms it is surely those of the Internet!


Blog:

Exactly what you were looking for until you realize it hasn't been updated since 2008.



The Internet:

An overly complicated place to look at pictures of pets. 



Google:

A magical, always available, all-powerful librarian with the judgement and subtlety of a brick.



Comments section:

Where all voices cancel each other out.



Wikipedia:

An online compendium of knowledge everyone is supposed to approach skeptically, but no one does.



Facebook:

A crude webpage used by early humans and confused businesses.

Vampires at library

Well, the vampires came to my library today. Apparently they had permission to pull up in their unholy mobile home, emblazoned with their perversion of the Christian symbol, all truncated to a plus sign and filled with blood. They parked their little castle on wheels in front of our library, spic and span and modernized, but I'm wise. There's bats in there somewhere. The wrong kind of bats.

"Where should I set up our information table?" One of their toadies asks me at the front desk.

"Wherever you want, Igor." I reply.

"Excuse me? My name isn't Igor."

"Oh, give it a break, Igor." 

They don't fool me.

But management says they can be here, so I make them at home. I knock on the door of their little evil bloodsucking mobile home.

"Would you like to give blood?" They ask.

I shudder. "Oh, you all aren't fooling me with your white coats and politeness. No blood for you. I'm from the library. I baked a pie to welcome you."

I see his eyes light up. Maybe he thinks it's a blood pie. He lifts the pie to smell it and grimaces. "What is this pie?" He asks, making a face.

Ha, of course he does. "It's a garlic pie." I say triumphantly.

He blanches. "You should see your face!" I exclaim, and quickly hold up a mirror. He definitely flinched.

"Well, er, thank you for the pie." He says. Vampires are famous for their politeness, right up to where they suck your blood.

"If you're still hungry afterwards I can get you a steak." I say meaningfully.

He pretended not to understand, but standing there, hiding from the sun and my silver jewelry, he understood all too well.

Louise said

A co-worker came into the back room at the library looking for a hot new rental DVD for a patron. Don't ask me what it was. I'd never heard of it, but it was new, and a thriller, apparently with a lot of screeching violins and people in peril. My colleague said "Everyone today is looking for this movie. I don't know why. It is a horrible movie!"


Shrugging ruefully, Louise said "Well, there are a lot of horrible people."

Minnesota culture

Here is a story about what the people of Minnesota are like.

The other day I told you about how I went to a Russian Ballet and it was bad. But I enjoyed hating it. After the intermission I'd had enough pleasure from despising it and tried to see what virtues I could find in it in the second half. I found a few, a bit of the dancing maybe, a costume, but it was still a ruthlessly terrible ballet, with cartoonishly, over telegraphed expressions, pantomimed dancing and absurdly posed plot points. The choreography was remedial, and there was a curious lack of real dance between the bad posing and false drama.

I watched it in a lovely theater called "The Northrup" along with pretty much every Russian person who currently lives in the twin cities. I only know one Russian emigre, someone I worked with once. She was there along with everyone she knew. The Russians were all Minnesotans too, though, and there were plenty of non Russian Minnesotans as well. It was a full house.

Hating the ballet, as I did, I hoped everyone else would share my good judgement as well. I think for the most part they did. But this is Minnesota, so here's what happened: The curtain went down and the audience applauded politely. The curtain went up for the bows and, then, still applauding politely and without any enthusiasm, our audience proceeded to give a standing ovation.

Perhaps the Russians were confused by this, because they seemed to take it as a cue to run through a long series of bows. Standing and tiredly clapping, the audience struggled through the dancer by dancer bows. Half applauding, at an astonishingly muted level, the crowd, while gathering their things, managed to keep up the appearance of applause until at long last the Russian dancers were finished basking in glory, and the final curtain went down.

Then, this ever so Minnesota crowd shuffled out of the theater, complaining quietly together about how bad this ballet was. 

Yes, alas, Minnesota is where they give a standing ovation just to be polite.

The wound

We were conducting our seasonal deep clean at my house. I was almost at the end too, finishing off by cleaning the bedroom windows. But to open these windows to clean the exterior part I had to push in two tabs and pull the top of the window out. The tabs wouldn't quite retreat enough. I pushed and prodded and several times thought "I'd better be careful. I could easily hurt myself." But I didn't listen so well.

Holding the tab in I tugged hard, and, to my delight, out popped the window from its track. Huzzah! Unfortunately my forefinger was a little in the way and, near the tip, was pinched between two hard, irresistibly moving objects. I pulled my finger away in shock and looked at it in fascination. There was this thick, instant blister on it, white and swollen, and, as I watched it, blood started welling up out of the sides of it like I'd struck oil. Ooooooooo.

I decided this would be a good time to visit my wife. So I made my way across our bed, leaving a bit of myself behind. I dripped blood down the stairs which were very clean and white. The blood looked beautiful on the pure unsullied background of the stairs. I dripped blood across the living room and found my wife.

And I was home again. 

Guy under car

In the latest library development there is now a

GUY LIVING UNDER A CAR

in our parking lot.


I've seen worse. Plus, it's sort of entertaining. His red car has a flat now, so I don't think it's going anywhere soon. We asked the guy if he needed any help. We even have this handy Community Resource Advocate who regularly visits us who could possibly help him. The guy living under the car was offended at the implication that he needed help.

"Just because I am sleeping underneath my car in your parking lot does not mean I need help. I'm fine. I'M FINE!"

He's fine.

Sometimes some of the library patrons are a little concerned though.

"There's a red car out there." They say delicately. "And, well, there's stuff under it, like, backpacks, and... stuff. I think maybe it's been there for a long time."

"We're working on it." We say. And we are. We're batting it around quite a bit lately. It went from the front desk, to the circ manager to the branch manager. It then went from the branch manager to the Police. The Police sent it back to the branch manager who sent it to administration and administration gave it to property management. That's where it is now. Property management is thinking hard about who to send it to. 

No hurry though. He's fine.

The Russians

Whoa all this talk of Russians everywhere. All oligarchs and spies and ambassadors and collusion with our ridiculous President and his multitudinous slavering acolytes. I can hardly keep up with it. My head is spinning. What happened to the Russia of Tolstoy? What happened to the Russia of Stravinsky? What about the Russia that brought us Chagall and Kandinsky? Yes, there have always been manipulative tyrants and credulous, self-destructive masses in Russia, almost as many credulous, self-destructive masses as we have now here in America, but you gotta keep your culture going. 

Artists are my people!

So I went to see a Russian Ballet, by an all Russian Ballet Company, The Eifman Ballet. I went to see Red Giselle.

I will not judge a whole people on their heartless leader and their dark rooms of hackers assiduously fudging the tiny slice of democracy we have left in America. I won't judge them on their B-movie villains, deplorable social policy, or all the mad ways they keep showing up on our front pages. I refuse to judge them on a tiny elite strangling a cowed country and crying out that they, they are Russia.

They aren't Russia.

No, I will judge Russia as they should be judged, by old and gracious standards. I will judge them on how good a ballet they can put on.

So bold of heart I went off in the late Spring rainstorms of Minnesota to see their mighty ballet.

And it was no good. No good at all. It was, all told, a terrible ballet in nearly every way. It was the single worst ballet I have ever seen in my life.



Ah well, as they say in Russia:



Беда́ никогда́ не прихо́дит одна́.



Trouble never comes alone.