200 Views of Rome: Church of St. Louis of the French (San Luigi dei Francesi)

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟


5 Stars




Very nice French church near a good coffee shop. 

HA! I really enjoy that understatement.

So, actually, yes, it is a nice church well worth peering about at, up the street from the legendary coffee shop Sant Eustachio. But we're here for 3 drop dead miracles of the human experience, 3 paintings by Caravaggio, hung up on some side chapel like they're a footnote. These are not footnotes. This is as great a painter as who ever lived, working at full power. Holy crap.

Why are the paintings obscured by gloom? 

You have to put a coin in the box to turn on the light for a bit.

PUT A COIN IN THE BOX ALREADY!

Oh, thanks, I was just about to put one in myself.

This is absolutely worth flying thousands of miles just to see alone! And yet, if you miss it... no biggie. That's Rome for you.

200 Views of Rome: Palazzo Barberini Cafe

5 Stars


It may be hard to leave a review for The Palazzo Barberini Cafe on TripAdvisor or anywhere else on the Internet because, sadly, there is, as such, no Palazzo Barberini Cafe. Rather there is a sort of empty, large stone vestibule tucked up against Bernini's notable staircase in the Barberini Palazzo. And there, against a wall, is all we really have of a cafe: an espresso dispensing machine.

I love that espresso machine!

My god the hours of fun my wife and I had at that espresso machine. Well maybe not hours exactly. It was great though. It had all these drinks, I mean, espresso, sure, but every weird variation one could think of too, with mochas and cappuccinos and maybe even some fake milks. Dozens of buttons to push. Luckily I often had a pocket full of change and it would be empty by the time we would leave that fantastic machine. Put in the requisite coins, make your selection, and down plops the cup. Weird complicated sounds, frothings, steamings, gurglings, issue forth from deep in the machine, human, animal, espresso bar, mad sounds. Espresso, frothy espresso squeezes out of the machine into the cup. Then, if you went fancy, more things, more whirrings and gurglings, agitating and cajoling. A tiny spoon hilariously spits into the cup. Wild, magical things happen. It is the most entertaining machine in the world!

Once Italian men in suits came and got drinks and walked off with them. One man had a special card that held a credit for the machine. He even tried to get us a drink. He might have been running out of credit. It might have been half successful. It might have been our eleventh drink. What a nice man. He might have been touched by our love radiating so wildly towards the machine.

Were the drinks any good?

Oh no, god no. The espresso could be drunk only with a strong will. Everything else was truly repulsive and absolutely had to be thrown away after a mere sip.

Imagine if they had a real cafe there at the Barberini. Imagine if one could get a really good cappuccino sitting at a small table by Bernini's stairs. What a great cafe it would be in such a place. What a glowing review I could give it! I would give it five stars.

Which is exactly as many as I give to this machine.

Which makes one understand why sometimes Romans don't put in the effort. What, after all, is there to strive for?

200 Views of Rome: Biblioteca Angelica

3 Stars



An old Library Italians use that they will let you peep at. Interesting interior that's fun to see, like a mediocre (for Rome) Church, but happily, for a change, not a Church, and with the refreshing decoration of walls full of mysterious old tomes instead of pious Saints. Plus, what are all those people at the tables studying? At a glance this library does not carry any books published after 1850 or so. I wish my library had a bit of this. We've stopped carrying anything published before 2012. Very much not worth a trip of any kind (Biblioteca Angelica, that is, not my library, which is not in the purview of this review), and yet totally worth the five minutes if you just happen to be passing by (and Caravaggio fans might as it's next to Church of St. Augustine with its Madonna of the Pilgrims).

200 Reviews of Rome: Church of St. Augustine

4 Stars




Dime a dozen Roman Church (Mainly Renaissance, I believe). This means it would be hardly worth the 15 minutes trouble in Rome, but in any American city it would be worth planning half a day around. This church though is elevated up even from there by a middle of the pack Caravaggio (again the relativity thing: worth building a fifty million dollar museum around the painting in other cities, and yet in Rome merely worth popping in for if you find you're walking by it, but don't sweat it).

Nevertheless, for all my off-the-cuff casualness, it's kind of a gorgeous painting (check out those dirty feet, the shoulders...) and it's a three minutes walk from either Piazza Navona or, more to the point, The Church of St. Louis of the French (San Luigi dei Francesi) which holds three more Caravaggio masterpieces. And, if you can set aside that perhaps just recently you've been in nine churches, 4 prettier, 3 about the same, and 2 not quite so nice, and instead trick your mind into this being the only church you have ever seen, the beauties of San'Agostino are capable of burning ice out of your heart.

200 Views of Rome: The Pantheon

5 Stars



Well, what's the point, and it could hardly need another review, another person suggesting you see it, my favorite Classical Roman building, not a ruin, just a building, ever carrying on.

But okay.

This was our neighborhood wonder. Two hundred times in our trip we came upon it in the course of thirty days. Never once did it cease amazing.

Time one: Oh my god, that's The Pantheon!

Time 184: Oh my god, that's The Pantheon!

Sure, go inside. The doorway is good, looking up is fabulous, pretty floor. But once or twice of that and it's enough. No, circle it. Catch views of it. Bask in it. Watch a busker by it. Shop in its shadow. Pick out its hidden details out back, down below. Get a gelato at it. Notice it. Forget it so you can notice it again. It's still there. Is it still there? It's always still there. How is it perfect? No one knows. Is it still there?

It's still there.

The 200 Views of Rome reviews

In the course of four or five years of blogging the question has come up as to what is appropriate for me to write about here. So I answer the question, but the question just sits there, froglike, staring without discernible reaction to anything I answer. So I put the question up on a shelf above my screen where it eats flies and I rarely notice it anymore. Sometimes when I'm thinking of writing about soccer or radical politics I look nervously at it and it says ribit.

This weekend I started writing in my notebook. I started writing two hundred reviews of places in Rome, thinking I would post these on Trip Advisor. Two things happened. One is that all my reviews sounded like they might as well be blog posts. Two is that I realized I will never manage to do all the massive writing of 200 reviews if they can't double as blog posts.

So I came down to my computer to see if this would be okay. And the frog ate a fly and said ribit and peered into space. Good enough for me.

And so now, after 8 months of recovery from the journey, I am ready to review every last thing I can think of in dear Rome, and, by doing so, give a kind of account of it, a literary travelogue. Or at least I'll give it a shot to make it so.

Up these reviews will go here. And for a while the normal rules of the blog will cease. Yes, there will still be at least one post per day, but there may be many more. Rome reviews will go up as they can and, if you are a subscriber, you may find your inbox swamped. This could go on for awhile. There may be breaks. But hang in there; soon all 200 reviews will be written, and you will know everything there is to know about Rome.

Or at least everything I know, minus a couple private things to keep the mystery...

Bob Dylan's prize tips

 

Bob Dylan flew in to have cocktails with me just this last Thursday. Regardless of all his fame and money and such, it's very touching to have someone fly for two hours just to have a drink with me. I think he was coming from New Hampshire and returning to Vermont, maybe? It's a bit odd that he doesn't think of paying for our drinks, I mean after all the trouble and expense he's already going to. But we go dutch. I think it would offend his code to pay. Don't get me started on his code. 

We were at a cocktail house called Du Nord. We both had variations on a drink called "The Last Word". This is a drink built around the French Liqueur Green Chartreuse. Green Chartreuse is a brilliant and beautiful drink made by Monks, Monks who live up near the Mountains. Or maybe it just used to be made by them. They say it's made of 130 herbs and spices. It tastes like it.

"You know what's great about Green Chartreuse, I mean, besides the taste?" Bob asked rhetorically, so I didn't interrupt. "It's twice as expensive as any other good liqueur, and it's complicated. So you know if a bar uses it they probably have conviction."

"Also it's really strong." I added.

"A hundred and ten proof." He said, nodding his head.

"Hey, I got something for you." I said, remembering, and digging in my pocket. "There!" I cried, spreading a wrinkled newspaper article out before him.

"What's this?" He asked suspiciously, not making the slightest move in his chair.

"Songwriting tips!"

"No, I'm good." Bob said.

"There's some good stuff in there." I said encouragingly, pulling back the article. "Look at this one. Number two: Lyrics matter. Taylor Swift says her experience with song writing is usually so confessional."

"You don't say." Bob sipped his drink.

"Number eight is "Don't overthink it"."

"I know how to write a song." Bob said cooly.

"It's been awhile." I responded.

"I've been busy winning Nobel Prizes."

"Oh, yeah?" 

"For lit-er-a-ture." Bob enunciated grandly, swirling and admiring his third cocktail.

"I'd like to win a Nobel Prize." I said.

"Yeah, yeah." Bob tossed off.

"Do you have any tips?"

And Bob just laughed.

My part in global warming

You might think that as the Billionaire Chief Executive of clerkmanifesto I would be above the small maneuverings of politics. What is global warming to me? I who can afford all the air conditioning units I can want. Nevertheless, President Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement caught my attention. While Mr. Trump's tax policy seems terribly levelheaded to a job generator like myself (the people I shout at all day to get me stuff don't do it for free!), I felt a twinge of concern for the planet. After all, I own so much of it!

So even though it appears the ship has sailed on the Paris Climate Agreement, I thought "Hey, that doesn't mean I can't do my part!" So I had my people draw me up a list of earth friendly lifestyle changes for me to choose from. Most of them I had to cross off as being too inconvenient. A couple were so demanding that they offended me and I had to fire the writers of them for impertinence, but a short, brave list of possible actions survived my winnowing, and I have already begun instituting them.

But I can't do it alone. It takes all of us to combat climate change, or so I've heard. This made me think "I am not so different than you all out there on the Internet". What if we all did these small acts of conservation together, our own little Paris Agreement. Yes, as easy as I have tried to make these lifestyle changes, you may find a few of them to be personally challenging. But I feel if we bear down and stick with it together we can save the world!

And so here are my five small actions that I believe if we all do together we can truly make a difference in saving the planet! Or at least, so my staff people seem to suggest:


1. Fly first class.

Yes, I know, horrible to give up a private plane. But some airports are starting to have some very exclusive and adequate VIP member lounges and boarding access. My tip is, when traveling alone, arrange to buy two first class seats next to each other so you have some room to spread out.


2. You don't have to heat all your swimming pools. 

You're never at the Tuscany House in the Autumn. Why have them keep the pool ready like you might drop in at any moment?


3. Grow your own food.

I'm not entirely sure what this does, and I think it might have something to do with my Estate Manager at the Napa Villa wanting to hire his daughter, an unemployed master gardener. But my Chef likes the idea of extensive kitchen gardens, and I like the Chef. So... benefit of the doubt.


4. Don't let the live-in staff control their own thermostats.

You're maybe onto this one already as a cost saver, but go ahead and crank that thermostat all the way until you hear complaints of discomfort. At that point you say "Don't you want to be able to leave a habitable planet to our children?"


5. Have your dogs put down.

Especially if you're not particularly close to them. The cats can stay, they make no notable difference as long as you feed them fish and mice.



Let's do it. For the planet!

Library fun!

 
Ohhh. Fun! 

It's not all work work work around here at the library. Sometimes there's fun!

A man came to the front desk of the library. "I'm looking to see if you have a movie." He said.

"Sure. What is it?"

"Embrace of the Serpent" He said.

So I noodled about on my keyboard and like magic came up with the essential information that indeed we did have such a movie checked in. "Yes." I said. "We have a copy checked in."

"I looked and I didn't see it."

I got up from my chair. "Well, I'll go take a look." I said.

"That's it." He cried. "You're just going to look where I already looked?"

"Yep."

"But it's not there. Couldn't it be in the back?" He asked.

"No." I explained, not breaking stride. "It would be on a different status if it were back there, one for recent returns."

"But I thought you'd be able to do something different than what I already did." He complained.

"Well, I have all kinds of secret tricks, so we'll see. Did you look down below here?" I asked as we arrived, gesturing at the two underneath shelves people sometimes miss that are below the flip through bins.

"Yes." He replied. "I already looked through all of those twice."

The words were hardly out of his mouth when I pulled the DVD off the shelf. "Here you go." I said cheerily, handing it to him.

"Oh." He said.

Fun!

Hilarious joke concerning minute library policy

As you will see this joke is meant for the oral tradition. So it would be best if you read it to yourself, listening to it and ignoring the spelling. Due to homophones it is less hilarious as written, and possibly slightly confusing. So you may thus not be amused by it in reading, but if you nevertheless bravely tell it aloud to everyone you know you will be gratified by their peals of laughter and their increased conviction, spoken or not, that you make everything in the world just a little bit better.

And so:

We freely give out day passes to people without library cards who want to use our Internet computers. But for reasons way too complicated and stupid and boring to explain a patron had to be 18 or older to get a pass on their own, unaccompanied. Some people abided by this policy. Others, like me, engaged in a dedicated "Don't ask, don't tell" approach. But finally, due to some quality staff advocacy, the word came down from our Management Team: Minors shall be allowed Internet passes anytime they want with no restriction. There was one proviso though. We should ask that they flick their headlamps on and off to prove that they are who they are pretending to be.

You see, it's a pun.

Yes, yes, much much better read aloud. Incomparable.

No, just trust me. Go tell it to a bunch of people. People love puns!

Bike etiquette in Yiddish!

Yesterday in this space I started out by telling you about how readers around here come and go. And then I was going to tell you about how sometimes I say something really important and fundamental, but after a long time a lot of the people here on this blog haven't heard it because they weren't there back when I said it. This is what I think of in the blog business as a "set up". It was going to lead into my ridiculous, obsessive, but very clear-headed and essential reflections on bicycle passing lane etiquette. This is a subject that has been discussed here before, but I felt it could use some freshening up. But as so often happens with my introductory comments, they take issue with being yoked to my preconceived fancies. So, as they often do, yesterday, they ran off in the direction of their own whim. Their own whim, it turned out, had something to do with my being Jewish, which I barely and completely am. And before I could do anything about it the whole blog post ended completely in Yiddish. Yiddish! 

Reflecting on this now I realize that this may have something to do with my blog's curious resistance to becoming wildly popular, and also probably has to do with the "and go" part of the phrase "readers around here come and go". The number of native secular Yiddish speakers has, over the past 80 years, dropped from 12 million to just 22. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally my blog readership is also 22!

So then here is how you pass on a two lane, two way bike path:

If there is no bike in the oncoming traffic lane you go into that lane and, passing on the left, you... pass.

That's all!

You do not say "On your left" unless what you really mean is:



"Haha! I am faster than you by a mile, loser!"

 or

"I don't trust any human being other than myself and I don't care how irritating or dangerous that may be to others." 

or

"Hi! Isn't biking virtuous and fun and just delightful! How I wish I could stop and chat with you even though you're a stranger. I would ask you loads of fun questions and not listen to your answers! But alas I must be moving on. Have a nice day!"

or

"I don't understand any of the subtleties about biking etiquette as I have only been biking for 28 years now and I don't speak Yiddish."

But if you are trying to say any or all of those things, "On your left" is a very succinct way to put it.

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