The year in photos

 

Before we get too far into this new year let's take a look back at the last year, with pictures! Oh, not pictures of anything relevant to anything much that happened last year, just... pictures, I took... of stuff.

To prepare for the year in review in pictures I went through all the three million eleven hundred thousand pictures I took this year and chose just 74 to show you.

Oh.

74 is too many?

That's okay. I thought maybe it was too many too.

Maybe.

So how 'bout one picture for every month of last year, like a calendar. This is all about last year, but it can be your calendar for this year. 

All I have to do is to get rid of 62 pictures. 

But don't worry about me. 

Most of what I do here on clerkmanifesto is get rid of stuff.

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

The ice trilogy

 

Let us begin the New Year with...

ICE!

Ice ice ice, beeeeeautiful ice!

Hey, what is it with you and ice, you wonder?

Ice is the new flowers!

"I don't understand." I have now quoted you as saying.

Let me explain.

In the late Fall, the World slowly bleached of its color. And I would go out and take pictures of it. Then I would come back home and open up the pictures on my computer. And I would say "Oh look, tree bark and squirrels. Look at all these nice pictures of tree bark, and black river water, and tree branches, and a gray squirrel on a tree branch over tree bark drinking black river water."

But one day I accidentally opened up some photos from July.

Oh.

It made me a little...

Wistful.

Yes dear collaborators, I felt wistful.

Maybe even sad.

Until I found ice!

Ice is colorful!

Wait, no, not that one. This one:

Or this one:

And even if maybe it's not quite as brilliantly colorful as flowers, I find it as endlessly interesting and beautiful.

My camera likes it!

Plus, much like flowers, things happen around ice.

Pull back sometimes and it's interesting:

But come close and it's endlessly fascinating and photographable:

And so in conclusion I'd just like to say, 

Ice!

I think I need a warm drink.

The year in quotes

Though I am having some trouble finding any evidence of it, I am under the impression that I memorialize each year here with a selection of quotes from out of the past 364 of my daily blogposts. This serves as a rough way of looking back on this ending year as we wandered through it on clerkmanifesto.

For some of these quotes you will have to infer a bit of the context. Some of the quotes stand freely on their own. And some quotes I'm still trying to work out and so hardly can expect you to do any better with. But whichever of these apply, I present these quotes as is and without explanation.

And so without further ado:

The Year in Quotes, 2020

For every moment we dwell on the flaws of other, we will equally burn with our own.

When one wants to treat everything like a nail, one surrounds oneself with a lot of hammers.

I have my moments. And then I have a lot of other moments.

Time is just whatever happens in between washing our hands.

Every day we know generally speaking what will happen tomorrow. We are accurate enough 99 times out of a hundred. That is an amazing level of accuracy! But fucking hell that one time...

If we can get one book to one person we don't care how many people have to die!

I like to keep my jokes around here at a "modestly funny" level because I can't figure out the trick of making them "very funny"

Pandemic lockdown t-shirt: If you're reading this, one of us is probably in the wrong place

Sometimes people read Clerkmanifesto and mistakenly think I am very critical because I am very critical. So they give up before they understand that I like everything.

The Internet is a place where all human knowledge and all human ignorance are gathered together unsorted in one convenient location.

People die all the time, but almost never the right ones.

A daily library blog so witty, insightful, daring, wide ranging, and brilliant that you will soon tire of it.

When you're close enough, everything is beautiful.

Actually, I know of one, and only one virus in all the great wide world that does not kill. Love. Alas that it is a reluctant spreader.

We should just leave existence alone. It seems to like taking care of itself.

There are almost too many portents!
So if you get a dark portent, hold on. A brand new portent should be coming along just about... now.

I believe we can all learn to accept death, provided it keeps a polite distance.

If something evil is in power its opposite, its opposition, is only in one sense "good".
In another sense the opposite of evil is the incompetence that allows for it.

If the tides go far out, they must come far in.

Just because you crack the code doesn't mean it will do you any good.

One of the great and melancholic surprises of this world is how often nothing can be better than something.

Much like my childhood dog Cashew, promises abhor a vacuum.

Sometimes saying nothing is the most eloquent thing to say. But usually saying something is better. 

A striking view of Saint Minneapolis

 

In my tireless boosterism of the beautiful city of Saint Minneapolis I like to occasionally feature interesting photographs of the city so that people will say:

"Gosh, that Saint Minneapolis city is real interesting!"

I don't generally care one way or the other if these people move here or visit our lovely city. I mainly just want them to say "Saint Minneapolis" because too many people are still calling the city by its old names of "Saint Paul", or "The Twin Cities", or "Bloomington", or whatever crazy expired names people insist on using. This is like people who continue to call Volgograd "Stalingrad" or Alabama "Alabama".

It's unwholesome.

So here are some pictures of a morning just before Christmas Day, in Saint Minneapolis, just after it snowed, when the early sun is lighting the skyline on fire (metaphorically). These pictures are of a Saint Minneapolis neighborhood (borough?) known as "Minneapolis". But what say we don't get caught up in these local neighborhood names. Anyone locally will readily recognize this as:

Saint Minneapolis

Writing advice to change your life!

 

It is late at night. As I often do just before bed I was reading whatever of my old blogposts had been accessed on the Internet in the last six hours. I don't trust that actual humans read these old posts of mine, but something somewhere does because there they are in my blog stats, in the "Now" traffic tab.

I read a five year old post called "Advice". 

It concluded with this line:

Don't hand out advice unless you're prepared to have a couple of bites of the horrible stuff yourself.

I liked my quote so I wanted to put a kind of marker for myself to come back to later. I tracked down the post (now in the 'writer' part of my blog tools instead of the 'reader'), and I made my little fix. Then I noticed right before the post "Advice", was this post, "Writing advice to change your life!",  the one you're reading right now. 

It was written more than five years ago.

However this blog post was just a draft. It had never been published. I opened up the essay of "Writing advice to change your life!" and it had no text.

I thought "Well that's disappointing." How will I get any writing advice to change my life now?

So I figured I'd better finish writing this blog post now.

I recently watched a documentary about one of my favorite authors, Ursula K. LeGuin. In an author talk in the documentary she said, unlike the many writing advice books, she doesn't offer a lot of writing rules to share. She said you make your own rules for each thing you write, she said, but then she added emphatically:

You have to follow them.

What do I believe?

It turns out that I believe you shouldn't hand out advice unless you're prepared to have a couple of bites of the horrible stuff yourself.

But I only know this because once I wrote it down somewhere.

Richard Smalls

I yelled at a library patron today. YELLED. I screamed at the top of my lungs.

No, I wasn't mad.

I was helping a regular named Richard Smalls. He doesn't hear so well anymore. That might be an understatement. It would be more accurate to say he only hears anything in extreme situations, like explosive devices being set off within a hundred feet of him or someone yelling short, declarative sentences as loudly as they possibly can, usually three or four times in succession. An added problem to this situation is that Richard Smalls has become so unaccustomed to hearing anything anyone says to him that he has gotten out of the habit of understanding anything when he does hear it, as in: 

"I need your library card."

"What?"

"I need your library card!"

"What"

"I NEED YOUR LIBRARY CARD!"

"One more time?"

"I NEED YOUR LIBRARY CARD!!!"

"Oh." He said. "You need my library card. I don't understand. What do you mean?"

 

I didn't explain it to him. I said "Yikes. I dropped my pen!" Then I crouched down behind the service counter where I couldn't be seen, lay on the floor, and took a 15 minute nap. I was exhausted.

 

 

 

 

Ice the sequel

 

Despite having written nearly 3,000 blog posts I have never had an Internet success quite so dramatic as the one I encountered with a blogpost called "Ice". "Ice" was the thrilling tale, well, no, it wasn't thrilling, I don't know why I said "thrilling", it was the tale, well not really a tale exactly, it was more about how I went for a walk and there was some ice and I ended up taking some pictures of it.

You really have to read it for yourself, which you probably already have what with it being so famous and everything. Or, I mean, it will be famous when it's released. Sometimes I write as far as a week or two ahead of time in clerkmanifesto, and so my posts are timed to release on a daily basis in the morning. So the thing is, "Ice" hasn't yet "hit" the Internet. I'm just anticipating it being, like, super big, due to its, er, pictures of ice.

So I figured I better get cracking right away on a sequel.

This is that sequel!

At this point you are probably wondering "How on earth do you get away with writing on the Internet such utterly confusing and largely ridiculous things like this that I am now reading?"

Two things:

1. Have you seen how low the bar is on the Internet? You probably haven't even noticed how low the bar is because you are under the ground the whole time you are on the Internet! That's how low the bar is.

2. I can get away with it because I have such interesting pictures of ice to compensate. Today's post has three more pictures of ice I took this afternoon. Three! Much of these three pictures are entirely different ice than the ice in the pictures in the original "Ice", which is a blogpost that grossed over a hundred million dollars!

But we covered all that.

Here is more ice:

Editor

 

Dear Editor, 

Perhaps you are wondering why I haven't written for awhile, proposing that you publish some voluminous collection of my many, many essays.

I haven't had the heart.

You, a publisher of literature, of all these wondrous books I have shared my life with, seem so distant and glorious, like as one among a distant pantheon of unreachable gods. Or better you are glorious and untouchable like the very stars in the sky. You are too far and strange and incandescent. What is there for me but to wonder at your cold, mysterious light? Would I petition the stars? And if, mercurially, I chose to do so, would I take their magisterial silence as an encouragement?

No. I will let it be. I am not called. I will not be the voice of anyone but my own peculiar self. You will run your kingdoms as you will.

But nevertheless, sometimes, late at night, pouring over my work, I will wander out onto my balcony and look up.

And marvel. 

Ice

I was walking along the creek I love in the heart of Saint Minneapolis. It was a cold, gray mid December day, and the paths down below the river road were barely brushed with snow and gloriously quiet. It was bleak down there, but a kind of bleak loveliness, not one easy to photograph, but one I found myself increasingly enjoying.

But finally, as it must eventually be so deep in the city, the spell of peace was broken by two women coming up the path. I politely cleared off out along a side path so that we could avoid any meeting, but I guessed wrong; the side path was where they were heading. I headed then to the stream instead, just above where it plunges over a 30 foot fall, and they passed to my right.

"Getting some good ice pictures?" One of the women called out cheerily, having seen the large camera around my neck.

I smiled tightly.

Jesus, these people, for god's sake! Ice. Ridiculous.

I waited for the women to disappear into the woods. I savored the retuning silence. Then I looked down at the creek. It was, actually, rimmed and bordered by very interesting ice.

I took a picture or two.

These could be good!

So I took a hundred more.