Unethical dot com

Running an ethical, highly honorable blog like clerkmanifesto has brought me neither wealth or fame. So I thought I'd try dabbling over on the dark side of integrity. What if I operated an alternate website, tricking people into my dark web mastery of nefarious deals and shady marketing, all to promote my ultimate plan of taking over the world? I could call it:

WWW.UNETHICAL.COM

The ends justify the means and all that sort of thing.

No. Don't go to unethical.com. 

I went there just to make sure the domain was available.

They stole all my credit card information.

Read this to not die in ten minutes!

You are probably reading this in order to not die in ten minutes. Most people, according to our exhaustive studies, don't want to die any time soon, but the majority of the people we polled picked "in ten minutes" as the time they'd most like to not die in. 

We are here to help!

This web page, called 

"Read this to not die in ten minutes!"

is specifically designed to stop you from dying in ten minutes.

Well, it's closer to nine minutes now. So you might be thinking:

"Arrggggh! Hurry up! I don't want to die!"

Ha ha ha.

Don't worry, we've got this covered. 

We are absolutely sure that we can keep you from dying in the next ten, I mean nine, er, actually eight, minutes. Time sure does fly. That's why you've got to make the most of each moment. I mean, anyone could just drop dead at any time and then what do you have?

Oh, do you want me to answer that?

Yes, yes, less than seven minutes at this point, but now I wouldn't feel right not answering this thing about what you would have if you dropped dead.

You would have one of these four things:

1. Regrets.

2. Unconsciousness.

3. Lots of happy happy times in heaven!

4. Absolutely nothing.

But I'd better move on as we're down to six minutes.

Don't worry. It's all under control.

We just need a little information to proceed. Because unfortunately the instructions on how not to die in the next ten minutes (now a bit over five minutes to be honest) , is only available to subscribers. 

Simply sign up with the "Follow by Email" app on the right sidebar of this page to unlock the rest of this content.

If you're already signed up and subscribed here, or once you have completed your following by email, simply scroll down, and the rest of this informative, lifesaving essay, will automatically unlock.

Well done! And with two minutes to spare. We can still definitely get this taken care of! No one is dying in two minutes around here! I mean, not if they are reading this super important web page:

"Read this to not die in ten minutes!"

Everyone else practically everywhere is probably a minute from death though.

Oh, shoot, did I say a minute? Only a minute left! We better step on it!

But did you confirm your email?

Okay, good, good. Just checking. No need to panic. This will take but a second. 

In order to not die in ten minutes all you...

Ooops. Time's up. You still with me?

You are?

Wow! Excellent. 

 

I guess it worked then.

Tell your friends!

Texas blackouts!

 

The shocking failure of the Texas electrical grid and the massive blackouts sweeping Texas during an epic cold spell have brought to all of our attention the terrible problems of deregulation, the ruinous disfunction of Republican politics, and the calamitous results of the inability of American media to speak squarely to the problems haunting the vast sweep of America. 

But I'm here to step into the fray!

I am here, on the amazing, all powerful Internet, to offer healing to the desperate peoples of Texas.

So come in close.

Huddle into my light, dear Texans. I am in Minnesota. I understand the cold. I can help you. Gather round. Hear the crackle of my fire. Feel the warmth of my weird, unearthly Northern Lights. Take a sip of this meltingly delicious orange cognac.

Mmm, cognac.

So dear citizen of America Texas. Though much divides us, we are one. We are a people. We must bridge the divide between us with love. Now is the time to set aside partisan squalor, past grievances, and ancient enmity. Ice has frozen your world. The power grid has failed you. You are freezing to death.

I have help.

I can save your lives and the lives of your precious pets, children, and perishable items. Read on, and all will be well.

Oh, right, there's a blackout there, you can't.

How to wield power

As a person who has never had much power, I have nevertheless made my study of it. I have tried to take a clinical "all over" view of it, but I must confess that all my best views have been of its belly.

Here are the first two rules of power:

1. To rule power effectively one must disregard the opinions of others.

2. If one disregards the opinions of others one cannot rule power effectively.

I never said it was easy.

 

Picasso's last painting

 

Hello.

Isn't the Internet amazing. 

Here is a picture of Picasso's last painting:

This interesting painting, set in France, and possibly depicting tree roots, curiously seems to hearken back to the work of Van Gogh, both in the layered complexity of its color, and in its writhing, oddly simple, yet complex, forms.

I was watching something on the Internet about Picasso, who was one of my favorite artists. It said he lived to be 91 years old and that he painted right into the day of his death. He was extremely prolific.

Interesting.

I thought:

I wonder what his last painting was?

Roughly speaking, Picasso made something roughly like 50,000 works of art.

As to paintings, there were almost 15,000 of them.

That's like five times the number of blogposts I've written! So, a lot.

I learned all this on the Internet.

But when it came to Picasso's last painting the Internet didn't want to tell me what it was. 

I occasionally try to alert you to the terrible limits of Internetland. But here it is not just that it doesn't want to tell me what Picasso's last painting was, but also that it wants to tell me, over and over again, in a series of articles repeatedly stolen from each other and dominating the search results, what Picasso's last well known portrait was, painted less than a year before his death.

It looked like this:

Weirdly good, yet again. That Picasso was really something. I wonder what his last painting was.

Picasso, when he was in his 90's, worked on art 11 or 12 hours a day. It's inspiring, even if he was an asshole.

Despite the fact that Picasso was 90 or 91 when he painted this above painting, there were tons of paintings he painted after it.

Imagine going to a Doctor and saying: I am so concerned about this tingling in my thyroid. Just tell me, do I have cancer?

And the Doctor replies:

Your knee is weirdly swollen, but that swelling is probably not cancer.

As I did the ten minutes of research on the Internet about what Picasso's last painting was I came upon a fascinating, possibly perfect and built for me, book:

The Final Painting: The Last Works of the Great Masters, from Van Eyck to Picasso

by

Patrick De Rynck

This book is coming out in September of 2021.

But before you start getting excited about the absolute triumph of books over the Internet check out this subtitle that casts shame on the publisher of the book: Ludion Publishers, and of course the author Patrick De Rynck, oh, and certainly the publisher Peter Ruyffelaerre, and possibly the whole city of Brussels, where Ludion Publishers is located:

"A selection of the last paintings of 30 of the greatest artists- Not the last painting- as that is often uncertain- but several carefully selected works these artists have made close to the end of their lives."

What kind of monster would do something like this?

I would never call a book writer or publisher a monster.

Hey, wait a second, you interject. If the Internet has nothing to offer on what Picasso's last painting was, how does this blog post start with a beautiful painting of Picasso's last painting?

Oh, that. It's by Van Gogh. 

They say it's his last painting.

But who knows?

I mean, except for me. Look for my expansion upon this theme in my next book, coming soon, called:

Trust Nothing.

I think Ludion Publishers might be interested. Belgians love that sort of thing. It's description can read: 

An important book about how you should trust absolutely nothing. Except, of course, you have to trust some things, like this book!

It will be my final work.

Except for the ones that come after.

All in how you put it

The headlines, as I have generally found them, run something like this:

Former President Acquitted in Senate Trial

And watching someone manifestly guilty be acquitted, especially when it involves their fomenting the violent overthrow of a Democracy, is some pretty dark sauce, slathered all over our Big Macs, which have been left sitting in the sun for a few years now. 

But you know we could have gone with a different, slightly more optimistic headline for the conclusion of this business:

Bipartisan Majority of Senate Finds Trump Guilty!

They're both true. 

Mine's prettier.

Doctor's office

 

The number of words for Winter:

Four.

The number of words for snow:

Seventeen.

The number of words for feelings:

All of them are for feelings,

and none of them too.

The number of words for love:

For me? Besides "Love" itself?

Just one small name

of the early night.

King of the Library: The 14th decree

 

Over the vast eons of clerkmanifesto I have dreamed of a great library where I am King. And as King, in this fantasy, I have piece by piece built a library as I think it should be, all through the use of decrees, kingly decrees, written here, whenever I am seized by a vision of this ideal library. 

These decrees are whimsical, innovative, rebellious, practical, fun, revolutionary, efficient, generous, and silly, all in their turn. So far there have been 12 of these decrees. No public library has yet contacted me to say:

Dear Mr. Calypso:

We have read with interest your innovative series "If I Were King of the Library", and we were fascinated. Our small library system would like to offer you a five year appointment to run our library entirely as you see fit. We feel that you could make our library a beacon in the world of libraries, or at least a laboratory for new ideas that could invigorate both our small community and the wider community as well.

We hope that you will be interested in this unique opportunity and look forward to discussing this compelling project with you.

The trustees of the Camden Public Library

Shakespeare once wrote:

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Which I bring up here because it says, in effect, that my genius is wildly underappreciated precisely because people are absolute morons!

Oops. I think I've digressed.

Because my real point is that I soldier on, crafting this dream library despite the fact that it is just we few people musing over it while the rest of the world slumbers.

And so we come to today's decree, the thirteenth. It is a very simple one, largely economic in nature, and it is inspired by two basic things.

The first is a quote I read only this morning by Bertrand Russell:

Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?

The second inspiration for today's simple, but dramatic quality of life decree is based on my longstanding belief is that pretty much everyone in any library (and in most work settings) only does effective work 50% of the time at best, a point I have made thoroughly in the history of this blog and so will not rehash here. To put it simply: The pins we're making these days in America are at least twice as easy to make as they once were.

And that is why my 13th Decree is this:

Everyone working at the library shall be paid twice as much per hour, and everyone's hours shall be cut in half.

And so it is decreed on this day etc. etc., by the King.

The centrist Springsteen

 

Bruce Springsteen made a bit of a splash last week by starring in a long, expensive Super Bowl ad for Jeep. The crux of the ad was that there's a chapel in Kansas at the exact middle of America, and how we all need to meet there in The Center. America apparently has grown dangerously apart, Red and Blue, North and South, City and Country, and we need to come together at a common ground, in the middle, in a chapel, ideally with us all driving there in Jeeps.

In the short time since that ad aired Jeep has pulled it from circulation and off of all its social media. It turns out that the Boss was recently arrested for drunk driving. This is not something a car company is going to be keen to associate with.

How did the police catch this drunk Bruce Springsteen?

I guess he was driving dangerously down the middle of the road.

One more Murphy's Law

 

I suppose if this were a less sunshiney, stop-and-smell-the-roses kind of a blog, I could have devoted myself here to all Murphy's Laws all the time. The library I work at is the perfect breeding ground for the development of Murphy's Laws. So is the county my library belongs to. So it the country my county belongs to. So is the world my country- well, you get the picture.

So I try to ration my disillusionment. I employ new Murphy's Laws stintingly.

But the good news is that I have saved up enough of my precious disillusionment points for one new Murphy's Law. So today we rejoice in the presentation of this small bit of rueful despair.

This Murphy's Law was illuminated by a busy session on my library's phones, but it is not merely the result of a few brief, anecdotal examples. It checks out in the analysis of decades of customer service.

 Here it is:

The complexity of a customer's problem on the phone is in direct proportion to how bad the connection is.

American plenty

 

Here is a strange observation about America. It says a number of things about our culture, its wealth, and its impoverishment. I'm not going to spell out any of that. It all just struck me as I saw it.

This observation was made at the library I work at. There is a pandemic going on and our services are limited. One or two people were, at the moment of my observation, here picking up requested items, but the other 15 to 20 people were here, by appointment only, using our old, but functional Internet connected library computers.

They had all driven here.

Their insured, gassed up cars were almost exclusively SUV's and compact SUV's.

None of these cars were particularly old or in poor condition and many were nearly new.

And so almost every library patron was a person driving alone, in sub zero weather, during a pandemic, in a $10,000 to $30,000 street value car, to use a nearly valueless, but Internet connected library computer because they did not have such a thing in their own home.

If they had a home.

Just some strange cat things

 

Mark Twain said:

If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man, but the cat would be diminished.

What this has to do with this post I am writing I do not know yet, but I must carry on as if it will all be connected in the end.

If I were a musician instead of a writer, everyday here you would find a piece of short, sad music played on an almost in tune piano. 

But I am not a musician.

If I were a writer and not a musician, I would write a short piece here everyday, and it would almost make you smile.

I am not a musician.

If neither a writer or a musician I were instead a cat, I would purr.

Requests

 

 

 

 

Despite having written close to 3,000 blog posts, the largest number of which have to do with working at a busy, near urban library, it suddenly occurred to me that I have yet to write a single post about pulling requests.

This, finally, is that post!

But first let me explain what "pulling requests" is. It's pretty technical, so bear with me:

 

People request, on computers, materials that they'd like (books, DVD's, CD's, etc.). We at the library print out lists of them. Then we pull them off the shelf.

 

I hope I didn't lose you in all the detail there.

The problem as I see it with pulling requested material, as opposed to shelving returned material, is that these are items people want. This makes them unavailable and appealing in a much more concentrated way than those books that people have finished with and don't want anymore.

Some of this might explain why I have stood here in the library stacks reading an interesting book about cocktails, and one about the secret gardens of Kyoto, for at least 15 minutes, and how, after half an hour of "pulling requests" I have pulled less than a dozen requested items.

Although writing this didn't help much either.

 

 

 

 

Little known facts of olden tymes: changing ears

 

 

 

Did you know that in the olden days of yore people's ears used to grow continuously, like hair, or fingernails?

Many people don't know this, but there are many clues to it hidden in ancient cultures. One of the oldest songs known, "Do Your Ears Hang Low", which is said to date back to Babylonian Culture, and later morphed into a classic 16th Century Italian Madrigal, and was finally modernized as the playground song you will be very familiar with, is expressly about overgrown, or "untrimmed" ears, ones that "hang low" and "wobble to and fro".

Geneticists say that the end of continuous ear growth, commonly referred to as CEG, is the last identifiable discreet event in human evolution. Between the years 1000 and 1600, for reasons not fully understood, human beings stopped having continuously growing ears. Until this faded out of humanity's physical makeup, people all over the world regularly trimmed their ears.

I know that this sounds very weird to us, and even painful. But I assure you that a thousand years ago it was taken for granted. Also it wasn't painful (unless one cut too close), because the excess "ear", which could be so prodigious as to be tied "in a knot", or tied "in a bow", had no nerve endings and was not reached by the circulatory system, and so could be easily and safely trimmed and clipped, sometimes even pounded off with rocks. 

While the famed playground song refers to ears "sticking out" and standing high, most references in the song have to do with the dropping. They "hang low" and they "dangle". This is because the primary excess growth tended to be in the lobe, growing down, as shown in this statue of a Buddha.

But there was, especially as we go further back in human history, extra growth, CEG, all around the outside of the ear, which is why there are references to waving them "at your neighbor" and "flapping" them, and, not least, to the exaggerated ability to use them to "fly around the town". But outside of a few very exceptional cultures, ear trimming was standard, and it is unusual to find representations of people with untrimmed ears.

Which, perhaps, is why this children's song's most complete version has a final verse that ends with "Do your ears fall off?"

Which, in the olden days, they sort of did.

Rock and hard place

 

Sometimes, after I get tired of being called Ma'am on the phone at my library too many times (simply because I have a higher voice), I remember that I can answer the phone with my standard boy name. It's not perfect, but it takes care of most of the Ma'am problem.

So I say "Good afternoon, Lilyvale Library, this is Feldenstein."

And after that introduction people almost never call me Ma'am, which is great. 

But what they do a lot is say something like "Hi Feldenstein." In a really familiar feeling way.

And I invariably think: 

Wait. Do I know them?

Then they say "Can you help me renew my books Feldenstein?"

And I realize, no, I don't know them! And they don't know me. At all!

But then I think in confusion:

But how did they know my name!

Like a rat through a snake

 

I have long envisioned the workings of the circulation department of my library to be like a snake consuming prey. This is because, like a snake swallowing a rodent, my library taking in library materials, both returned by patrons and sent by other library branches, results in a slow, methodical absorption of said materials that is visible by its bulge as it works its way into our system.

Though this graphic, uneasy simile has always been true of my library, it seems most true now. The rate of things coming into our library has always been somewhat uneven, but before the pandemic we processed a higher regular rate of returns. A large bulge of incoming books might be more hidden by a constant influx of items. But under our current pandemic rhythms we have a more pronounced boom and bust cycle. We feast and fast. And as the days pass we can watch our weekly engorgement work its way down our library's snaky system.

Monday is the day. 

Over the long weekend, though we are open, we receive no deliveries from other branches. Our hours shorten. And for whatever strange reasons the pandemic has, we are a little less busy as well (not at all something that ever happened before the pandemic closings). Through the end of the week we grow lean and hungry. All our shelving gets done. The items on our request shelves thin out. We practically hibernate.

But then Monday morning comes. End of the weekend returns pour in. The public returns to the library and with them come their items brought back. Lists of requested books are printed, searched for, and piled at the check in machine. And above all the delivery arrives from half a dozen branches. It is a triple sized delivery. Three days worth. At least a dozen large push bins and dozens of full to the brim boxes stand poised for processing. 

We start to feed it all through. 

It is our rat.

And we're hungry.

We try to swallow it whole. What a lump!

First the bulge of it hits the machine. We run books on it at a furious pace (well, some people more furiously than others). Many of those books are requested by patrons, so the request processing area swells next. Then it all moves to the request shelving, where people's requested books are filed for them to pick up. That area distends with items on carts, waiting to be put on the shelves. Then, as teams of people put the books in their places, the shelves start to get so packed it is hard to fit anything on them.

By Tuesday one can see the results of this gluttony in the areas where we keep our regular collection of items to be shelved as well. The carts start to fill that area where it seems like moments ago there was nothing. But by that afternoon, though still visible, a lot of this avalanche of books and movies and cds is starting to even out a little. One can trace that Monday morning rodent, but it's flattening out a little, starting to conform to the shape of the library, getting crushed and disassembled.

On Wednesday most of the shelving, general and requests alike, gets worked out to feed the shelves of the library, but request lists and patrons coming in for their hold pick ups ease the congestion of the shelves. Only the faintest of bulges is hinted at.

Thursday is almost deadly quiet. The rat is eaten. We sleep.

Friday is cruised through.

Saturday we start to get hungry again.

And Sunday? Oh Sunday. Sunday we dream of gerbils, hamsters, and mice, rats, a big rat, oh god, maybe a rabbit even. I think we could do a rabbit, if we really tried.

Metaphorically of course.

  

A short, almost pleasant, rationalization

 

One of my great virtues is my extreme generosity in letting other people win.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear sir or madam

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Sir or Madam:

 

 

Please disregard the letter I decided not to send you yesterday.

 

I found myself not saying some things I deeply regret. My emotions failed to get the better of me. And I hope you can find it in your heart to forget, or set aside that which I refrained from saying. 

Sometimes my restraint gets the better of me, and hopefully I will fail to do better in the future.

With sincere regret that I may reconsider at any moment,

I am yours truly,

Feldenstein

 

 

 

 

Dear publisher: the confidence

Dear Publisher:

I send you this query in full confidence that you will be astounded and thrilled by the quality of my writing. You will adore all 3,000 of my witty, heartfelt, and interesting essays. You will cry and laugh and then whip out one of your golden contracts, the ones that you keep in a hidden drawer in your desk and only offer once or twice in a decade. Brimming with praise and enthusiasm you will send me this most rare and generous of contracts, and we will embark on a publishing journey full of Pulitzers, money, Pulitzers, more money, Publishers' Weekly starred reviews, bestseller lists, and, maybe, if everything goes right, a Nobel Prize or two. 

Oh, and also money.

At this moment in time I can pull up any one of my 3,000 essays, at random, and swell with pride at my brilliance. And I send this letter with the absolute conviction that you will feel about them as I do.

Unfortunately, in two months I will stumble upon this letter to you, and I will feel embarrassed. I will delve into the backlog of my work, read from it extensively, and find none of it anywhere to be as good as I remembered. My cheeks will burn. I will say to myself "What have I done?"

My god, what have I done?

And so that is why I am not sending this letter to you.

With a touch of rare pity in your heart (rare because you are a mostly merciless, slightly embittered big time publisher), you say to me "But why not just try? Nothing ventured nothing gained." Or you might say "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take." But you'd probably stick with the 'nothing ventured nothing gained' thing.

But on the plus side you can't really say any of that if I don't write you. So there's that.

Also, if I'm really honest, at this point I can't really tell the difference between the success rate on things I venture and the success rate on the things I don't.

That's fine, I guess.

Thank you for your time, hypothetically,

Feldenstein Calypso

Magic

 

 

 

 

Do you believe in magic?

I do. 

I at best barely believe in god, mostly not at all, but magic? Sure. Absolutely. With conviction.

But it needs to be said that magic is a wily sucker. It is untraceable by science. It is completely unusable for any practical purposes. As brilliant at times as rainbows and lightning, it hides at any possible moment, randomly, and in the very midst of its illumination, posing at any moment as science or imagination or chance or inevitability or nothing at all, whatever it takes.

Because magic does not belong to the physical laws of the Universe it must run from them. And because it is so wonderful and sought after, even by people who don't believe in magic, it must be dedicated to its elusiveness, to its own private reality. Otherwise it will be pulled into the observable universe, where it can only disappear.

And so magic has an axiom. Let's call it the first rule of magic:

 

All magic will be as little like magic as possible.