How we work

 

As with a fair share of truths I have stumbled upon in my workplace, this one came about while joking with a couple of my library co-workers, but it does go a fair way to explaining how we work around here.

To briefly set the stage, all of the printing that people do here at my library works on the honor system. It costs 20 cents per page of printing or copying, and to pay for it, one just drops what one owes in a metal lock box located near any printer or copier. This system does manage, by all accounts, and despite being a tens of thousands of dollars operation, to pay for itself, despite not being monitored or policed in any way.

My colleagues were discussing a former co-worker who was breathtakingly bad. This led to the discussion of other bad co-workers and how one's behavior has to be so bad that it is literally criminal to result in being fired from my library. At which point it dawned on me:

Work at my library operates on the honor system. People are assigned places throughout the day, and they either do work or don't. Some people don't really do anything and some do a lot. Whatever frustrations, or injustice there may be in it, in the end, it is exactly like the printing: 

It all averages out to where it gets done.

On the virtues of rereading

 

Somewhere around here, on the sidebar to your right, is my list of recommended books. Though I think it of interest to the casual reader I will grant the following two things:

1. I am possibly the worst judge of what is of interest to the casual reader in the history of letters.

2. My list is a bit chaotic.

As to the second of these, since discussing the first is like the third rail of clerkmanifesto, I can only say that I make occasional efforts at tidying up. There is some organization to it. And the way that certain book recommendations link to relevant clerkmanifesto posts is almost fancy. But finding a new book to add to the list, or remembering to do so, rarely happens. And though perhaps an occasion should be made out of any new addition, such a thing also almost never occurs.

Nevertheless, today we herald a new listing in my recommended books, Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett. Replete with romance, engaging characterization, reluctant personal growth, plausible faeries, near normal world fantasy, and romanticization of scholarship, I am enormously fond of this book, and, at present, have nearly finished rereading it.

Which brings me to our real subject today: Rereading.

Would I have recommended this book on first reading? Probably. But though there is an irreplaceable thrill to the first reading of a book you love, I believe the second and third readings of any beloved books are the best ones. No longer blinded by the dazzlement of a great story, or wonderful writing, in the reread one still has all the joy and interest of the story, but also the leisure and space to delight in the material. One can poke about in the fantastical corners of the book. One can see the neat stitching, the carefully tied off knots, and the weft of time. One can still be magicked, and yet simultaneously be able to look at all the wonderful ways it was all put together: Double the magic!

There is a sequel to Emily Wilde and I remember it as equally good.

 But, do I recommend it? 

Probably, but I haven't reread that one yet, so we'll have to wait.

Planting the seed

 

When people have something famous in their name, one tries to be circumspect from the point of view that they've heard it all a million times. But not everyone is over-versed in the history of pop culture, and venturing a small joke about someone's name, very carefully, under the proviso that they've heard it all a million times, may, instead of weariness, elicit confoundment on the part of the so named person.

And so it was with Jacob Dylan today when I was registering him for a library card. Granted, he was barely out of his teens, and also that these were merely a first and middle name. But when I mentioned, perhaps too sideways, that his first two names, "Jacob Dylan", were rather Wallflower type names, he took me to be suggesting that they didn't much stand out from the crowd.

I let the confusion stand, hoping that one day, perhaps decades from now, Jacob will hear "One Headlight" and have one of those moments.

"Who is this singer?" He might ask someone. And when they answer, he will fall silent and introspective for a moment, a far past minor mystery suddenly plugged in. And quietly he will say to himself, "Oh." 

Camels! Walruses! Peacocks! Helpful Signs!

 I have some more of my usual click through to the live footage pictures of animals in the library. I like to think of them, especially as I listen to my song lyrics, as kinds of representatives of actual visitors to my library, but, as you see in the footage below, they are so like genuine animals that there is a kind of ambiguousness there. The animals are as if they were real animals in the library, and so are the songs, but still they hint at people by the nature of their surroundings and the suggestive descriptions of them and their issues.

You may note that less than a week ago I posted about my walrus video not panning out, but here it is, more or less successful, with a song by Elvis even! Also, this may be the first you will have seen of helpful signs in the music videos, telling you how genuine and real all this footage is, along with an occasional other helpful note.

 

I didn't eat the bugs

 

All my co-workers with family far flung across the world travel home on occasion. And they are all kind enough to bring back treats when they return. These tend to be highly packaged items suitable to the long journey they must make. They also tend to drift towards the weird, probably because weird really helps emphasize that the food is from a far distant culture.

And so it is, among a selection of snacks varying, much like the items in our vending machines, in level of edibility, we received for sharing in the break room a bag of grubs from Thailand.

I am not horrified. I am open to eating bugs. 

I am even interested in eating bugs.

"Have a bug!" My Thai co-worker urged.

"Sure. Maybe. Do they taste good?"

"Not really." My Thai co-worker replied. "They don't taste like anything. No one really eats them there. But they say Americans like to try them."

I remember being introduced to sushi in the eighties, by my sister. Hard as it is to imagine at this point, I viewed the eating of raw fishes with suspicion.

"It's delicious!" I was informed. "You have to try some!"

It's a reasonable standard.

A small child can shove some dirt in their mouth.

And the moment they can make it delicious, I will be thrilled to join them.

Faith for atheists

 

What about us freelancing atheistic, polytheistic, pantheists? What do we do about faith?

I have never considered the issue until recently, but I realized I was missing out. Faith always seemed faintly ridiculous, with its sanctimonious airs and, well, fundamental inaccuracy. Why have faith in something that doesn't exactly, I don't know, exist? 

And certainly not like that.

I mean, seriously.

But today, after seeing the reference to a biblical quote in an ugly tattoo on the calf of a young man in the library, I realized maybe the faith is the thing, not what one has faith in.

I'm just saying that after decades of faithless suspicions, it all seemed so restful.

There is nothing out there, or there are capricious spirits, perhaps there is a world of trouble, but I have faith. 

What do I have faith in?

I don't know, nothing? But I trust it.

A little bit of not caring

 

Upon my return to work at the library following a short bout with Covid, I found myself rather wrought up at everything. Whether this was primarily due to being tired from a slower health recovery than I hoped I was experiencing, or from a spate of understaffing at work, or from having a lot of responsibilities and not much authority, or possibly due to a combination of all of them, I don't know.

But it was doing me no good.

So I decided to try caring less.

Here I am caring less.

And though I duly noted a dump of irritating transit items left for me in an overnight bin this morning, or the bizarre way that my manager, who is currently inappropriately assigned to the whole back room, keeps coming out to the front desk to answer the phone dangerously close to my personal space, or the continuing problem with the automated check-in machine breaking down over and over in the same way, it is all viewed in the serene manner of a Zen master watching a log drift downstream.

It's just a log.

Breathe.

A burning log.

Breathe.

Full of disease, heading for a wooden town full of innocents!

I can't reach the log!

Oh my god, someone stop that log!!!

All you really need to know about AI

It's not like me to be reductionist.

Wait, let me simplify that:

It is like me to be reductionist.

And so for today let me present everything you need to know about AI.

But first:

As you may know, I am an AI hobbyist. It is full of tools I enjoy playing with in the process of making things. I find that this occasionally dazzles people before they lose interest. This matches up surprisingly well with all of my creative output dating back to 1977. So, curiously, a pattern coincidentally predating AI.

Sometimes I find AI kind of repulses people. And because it is a term that lumps way too much together, and is constantly lied about by hucksters, I am keen to clarify. Here is my clarification.

I post my AI assisted creations to the Internet. And all the massive companies that own and adjudicate the Internet send me notices that say:

"We have detected the use of AI on your account. You may be banned."

That message of warning and judgement is not the product of a person, nor is the message.

I am being told that I may be banned for using AI, by an AI.

Anyway, here is my latest video song, so click through the picture, unless you are Bruce Springsteen, who would probably find it all a bit upsetting, unless he super likes lizards!

 

Work

 

I cannot tell you if this is cynical or full of hope:

In my long experience of a workplace, the library in particular, on the whole, all the working people are compelled to do what is best for them over what is best for the library. This is always true, whatever we tell ourselves. We are driven by our implacable visions. The institution is a vague dream.

But sometimes, by weird chance, they match up.

Nine eleven

 

On this day 23 years ago, two planes flew into The World Trade Center in New York.

It was a big deal! 

Do you remember?

Yes, you do. You remember all about it. You can tell the story of the day without missing a beat. I can tell my 9-11 story like anyone else. But man, it is dusty, and like an old wind up toy that from my childhood imagination was full of life, but now seems tawdry, and barely does anything at all, except maybe whir loudly, and jerk about a bit.

It is a relic, and sad. It tells us nothing useful. But you can't really get rid of it.

I  would have written about 9-11 here on clerkmanifesto, but clerkmanifesto is younger than you think. I'd like to see those missing posts. What lesson would I have taken from it all?

Maybe:

Be careful not to believe in anything too much.

That was then.

Maybe now if there was a lesson, after 9-11 has become a nearly pointless relic, it would be:

Be careful not to believe in anything too little.

Assistantmanifesto

In what is another meaningless change to my vast library career, I am no longer a clerk, or, specifically, a library clerk. My job title is now,

 

Oh my god, I am breathless with excitement!

 

Oh! Wait, maybe I am breathless with covid? 

No. No, it's definitely with excitement. 

My covid is all better.

I'm mostly sure of it.

 

I am a...

SENIOR LIBRARY ASSISTANT

Muahaha! Beware my majestic power! I might assist anyone. No one is safe from my assisting.

I may even assist you!

And as a Senior Library Assistant, my first job will be...

To help people at the library.

LOOK! A patron is approaching me at the front desk of the library!

"How may I assist you?" I ask.

And with that, my job here is done, for behold,

I am a senior library assistant!

 

Orangutan

 

Sometimes when I am upstairs shelving at my library, or maybe I've run upstairs on an errand, it will suddenly occur to me to take in the library from a fresh perspective. After three decades of work in my library my familiarity with it makes my knowledge of it exhaustive and detailed, but it also can make it all mysteriously invisible. I see too much of the context behind everything, and that can make it hard, oddly, to see the frankness of its direct presence.

What does my library look like to the wandering person?

And because it can be such an excellent focus for this kind of perspective shift, I like to look down at our front desk, so clearly visible from so many vantage points.

I know all the people working at that front desk. Some are vivacious, some cranky, some chatty, some quiet, some industrious, some distracted, some focused, some helpful, some funny, and some friendly. Usually a little bit of all of that, somewhere. But weirdly, when I stand away from the desk, or view it down from the stairs, when I take a fresh look of the collective "Us" at the front desk of my library, from the outside, this, this, is what I see nearly every time!

(as ever, please click through the picture for it to come magically to life. There is also a song that plays!)

The third great thing to feature a walrus!

 

My manufactured video of a walrus in the library is not coming out that well. Like so many of the dozens of multi-piece projects I'm working on, when one of its multi-pronged, complicated parts fails, it leaves a lot of fully articulated pieces lying around.

And there's not a good reason they can't go here.

I mean, if you're okay with that.

I usually take your silence as assent.

First, here's a little walrus picture. If you click on it absolutely nothing will happen!

Next comes the poem!

I know, exciting!

But don't worry, it's not the hard kind of poem. More the silly kind.

Although maybe that's the kind you were worrying about. In which case...

Uh oh, it's just as you feared!

The Walrus

A walrus washed up today.

And soon went to bed.

We hoped it marked good times,

Up ahead.

Treasure chests and mermaids like,

In stories we read.

But the walrus just snored.

And nothing happened,

Instead.

Clerkmanifesto and poetry

 

I've been writing a lot of verse lately, mostly as lyrics for songs for videos, but once I get going with all the doggerel, it's hard to stop. Pretty soon all the poetry kind of collects all around me like dying leaves.

They crunch when I walk.

Here's one one of these poems about writing poetry for clerkmanifesto!

Clerkmanifesto up all night,

Feeling a bit yappy,

I'm writing poetry,

Making no one happy.

The Internet only likes poetry,

When it needs a little nappy,

And the few who like verse,

Find this kind sappy.

Creative labor

 

I like to joke, probably just here, once, in an old post, that it's not the running that's against the rules at my library, it's the falling. 

This may come in handy up ahead.

Recently I posted some bit of highly manufactured AI bewitchery to the cold, cruel Internet (yes, this is the Internet here, but it's so far away from everything that you're probably safe). I think it was a cat that I posted, who was come to life in a library, and the cat was made of rainbows. I thought the rainbow people on Reddit might not be mean about it because it was all about rainbows, and they were all about rainbows, so maybe a couple of them would like it.

It reminded me of a time long ago at our local co-op when the rent-a-cop they hired to deter robberies shot a couple of teenage robbers in the back as they fled the scene. And all the peace loving gentle vegetarian hippies were like: 

"Gosh, I hope Officer Tim is okay after having to murder some people."

There are no hippies.

The rainbow is a lie.

When I posted my rainbow cat, someone wrote something like: "So you just get a machine to do all the work for you, and then you take all the credit." 

It wasn't a question. 

Then everyone in all of rainbow world downvoted me, right in the back, like a bunch of cops.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Internet, downvoting is just like upvoting, only more unjust.

But let's get back to this machine thing. 

Aren't machines supposed to do the work for you?

Like, if someone is gardening with their little gloves and their hand trowel, would it be fair to be like "Sure, your hand trowel does all the work, but you think you're the gardener?"

And out among my vast readership, a hand trowel is silently thinking: 

"Well, and why not?"

Great, now I've boxed myself in a corner.

Maybe it's my keyboard's fault.

I'm kidding. It can't be my keyboards fault. Keyboards are not sentient! 

And you know what else isn't sentient? Any of what we call AI's, despite the murkiness of their name and ability.

Only trowels are sentient, and whales, and octopus, and elephants, and PEOPLE.

So it's okay to make machines do work for you, but it's evil to make people work for you!

Which somehow brings us around to the distorted, abiding rule of the Internet:

It doesn't matter how much of the Internet is AI, just so long as no one finds out.

In which we revisit the Lorax while suffering the ravages of Covid, and experiment with super long post titles

 

I am secretly hoping that my miserable bout of Covid is turning the corner. But I'm not sure yet. Maybe at the point when I am interested in eating anything other than passionfruit sorbet we can count an improvement. 

In that case, we are not quite there.

So I could say I am not feeling well and that's why I am showing you an old post. But that's not really it. First of all, all of this that you're reading now is new. AND THIS IS QUALITY LITERATURE! I am writing this out of my own head with all the creative labor that comes with that!

I'm not sure I believe in the idea of creative labor, but let's skip over that.

And, second of all, when I went on vacation and prepared a collection of old posts combined with new video projects, I rather liked it. Though I am occasionally prone to bits of whimsy wherein the subject of my million readers comes up, I actually have, er, I don't know? Three to 27 readers? That's my best guess.

And that is a weird amount.

But whatever is weird about that amount, and I don't know why people insist on calling it weird, it does not create the kind of constituency that keeps my back catalog in high circulation, in the way that, say, people keep trying to read Northanger Abbey. So if I'm wandering around in the vast clerkmanifesto history and come upon something that seems... appropriate, I'm no longer going to be shy about offering it up. And if any of you delightful people out there happen to read one of these old posts, feel free to comment something like:

"Oh my god! I've already read this one like a MILLION times!"

At which point I'll probably be delighted, and happy to rethink my strategy.

Anyway, today's blast from the past concerns "The Lorax". And suitably enough it dovetails with one of my many ai video projects where I run little "animated" tableaus of my favorite books. So you can click on the picture, and then come back here to read, for the millionth time, the old post below.

Among the remarkable and prescient work of Dr. Seuss nothing is quite as immortal as his nearly biblical classic The Lorax.

Or, as a regular human might put it: 

I really like The Lorax.

And it's not just for the purity and moralism of its storyline, which reaches so far into fable and fairytale that it ventures into the best of religious literature, nor is it just its astonishing politics that more than half a century later are more flatly and desperately essential than ever, but it's also in the small sweetnesses of its sketch of a storyline, the deep truth of its themes, and even in the touch of its own self chiding awareness.

But let's pull back a little.

The Lorax is a picture book, for little kids!, about a young person in something of an environmental wasteland, who is seeking the story of what happened.

Spoiler Alert!:

What happened is that Capitalism and self-justifying greed destroyed the world. 

It's a small scale post apocalyptic tale as essential and far seeing as 1984, Brave New World, or The Handmaid's Tale. only super short and, honestly, not as unnerving, which is just as well since seven year olds, its intended audience, are no more resilient now than they were when it was written. 

Anyway, a Capitalist, called The Once-ler, comes across an unspeakably beautiful forest which he then begins to cut down in order to create (and market very effectively) a clothing product, the Thneed. He, the Once-ler, is warned about the terrible damage he's doing multiple times by a hectoring mythical figure, The Lorax, who speaks for the trees and for all the animals made homeless by the relentless environmental degradation involved in the manufacture of Thneeds.

The Once-ler does not heed these warnings. Indeed his array of arguments and dismissals of the strident complaints of the Lorax are a pitch perfect representation of contemporary corporate, Republican, and Centrist Democrat ideology. It's more or less the neo-liberal playbook:

1. The Lorax is treated as annoying, moralistic, and a downer who needs to chill out. The Lorax is an SJW!

2. The Once-ler is a job creator!

3. People are crazy for Thneeds. What could be more democratic and right than providing what the people want?!

4. Obviously there are plenty of trees to go around! They're trees, for god's sake, they're everywhere!

5. If a few fish and birds have to pack it in sometimes there's just a cost that must be paid for progress.

6. The discussion is pointless anyway. The Once-ler is doing what it's his right to do; run a successful, tax-paying, people employing business.

The Lorax "speaks" for the trees, but while the very theme of The Lorax might be that seeing and speaking the truth and caring about it, is our only hope, it might be a questionable defense against Capitalism.

The end of the world is coming.

Keep a few seeds by to restart it later.

Care.

Here are a two touches I love about The Lorax:

1. The Lorax himself is not cute or eloquent or charming or smooth or persuasive. He's just this weird, small, cranky, middle-aged or older, slightly magical but not where it's important, speaker of truth. And he is naturally apoplectic to be saying "You're killing everything!" and to have the response be:

"Don't be such a nag."

and

"You've got to go along to get along."

and

"So what? Who cares anyway?"

The Lorax is Bernie Sanders, or most Americans at this moment, voting desperately for Joe Biden, or, probably, let's face it, and don't think he didn't know it, Dr. Seuss himself.

2. The Once-ler may be the ancient mariner of our story, doomed to tell the tale of his environmental crime and devastation, but he's not really reformed. Here's the telling thing about the Once-ler that I love:

 He still charges money for the story of how he broke the world in his pursuit of money!

Ha! Think of Bill Gates here, or any titan of Capitalism who retired to the lionized work of their Foundation.

And so in conclusion,

I didn't exactly notice this before, but,

wow,

The Lorax is a terrible, depressing book.

What was I thinking?

Jesus!

Terrible, terrible, bleak, miserable, depressing book.

But I guess it's good preparation for the reality of life in America. Go to it kids.

Covid's ugly head

 

I have covid

SO STAND BACK FROM YOUR SCREEN!

Okay.

So today we'll just do a little follow up to yesterday's magnum opus animals in the library video. The good thing about todays video is that it rather expresses my feelings. So click through the picture and you're off...

The Animals in your library

 

Perhaps it was all building up to this. But with the aid of the holiday I was able to complete my tour de force "Animals in the Library" music video. It is three minutes long, has a song according to my lyrics and the work of my robot friends, and features 20 to 30 different animals, though I am now thinking I forgot to put in the Mastodon.

Ah well, it's too late now. It belongs to the world now...

As ever, click the picture to the video, though this is not a precise comes alive match up today.

Now with music

 

I have now discovered putting music to my little animal clips. As ever, when I add a new layer of complexity to whatever projects I'm working on, I feel a pull to go back and update every single thing I have done in the past so that it meets my new standard. Once I just had pictures. Then they all had to have animals, and suchlike, magicked into them. Then they had to be able to become realistic live video footage. And now they have to have their own song to go with it.

I enjoy doing it, but going back and updating past clips to my newer standard may or may not happen. There are so many things I am interested in making right now that it's an issue of time. It doesn't take me very long to write a short bit of lyrics. And generating a song is frankly all too easy. All the time cost comes in choosing between the smorgasbord of delightful 30 second songs. Do I choose the one that sounds like Ella Fitzgerald, or the one that sounds like Tom Waits? Whatever I don't choose will never ever ever see the light of day.

Anyway, here are some of my first "Talkies", so to speak. They are all new and not retrofitted. As ever, click the picture for it to come to life, but they have sound too, if you are interested in putting in your headphone, or turning on the volume, or whatever.

Childish humor

 

A small child was walking by the front desk of the library. She was very small. And she was very excited about her new book of jokes.

"What do you call a unicorn with a cold?" She asked theatrically to no one in particular.

I could relate.

But I couldn't figure out a way that the answer could be funny.

Then, as she headed to the exit, I was afraid I wouldn't hear the answer.

"ATCHOO-nicorn!" She cried with gusto in the distance.

She'll get there.

Comedy is hard.