The experiments begin

 

A few months ago I found myself confronted with a period of photography in which I was positively obsessed with filters. I used all kinds of special effects filters on my pictures, making them look sort of like paintings, or kaleidoscopes, or maybe heightening the reality of them like they were in the sway of hallucinogenic drugs.

Alas that most of them weren't as good as I thought they were at the time. This reconsideration happens to me with my artwork so often that I have been compelled to admit that the throes of creation can lead our judgement astray.

Well, not your judgement. You seem to remain pretty level-headed about the virtues of all the things I make. MY judgement is the one that goes a bit astray.

Actually, I think it might be permanently askew. It's how I persevere.

Anyway, I saw all those old effects layer photographs and resolved then and there never to mess with that stuff again. 

And everything was fine for a couple of months. But then I was working one of the sidelines of my "Spirit Animals of the Library Workers" series, where I was trying to get them to look like paintings, and I realized:

Oops. I'm working with weird filters again.

But by then it was too late.

Still, I am chastened by past failures, and so perhaps I can keep this particular moth to a flame tendency to a respectable level. After all, I am all caught up in the work on my portraits, that is I have completed my basic portrait pictures of everyone I have photographed, and so until I can scare up some new pictures why not spend several obsessive hours messing with them by using complicated, arty filters?

So here then for your edification is a selection of this aspect of my portrait project. I won't show you too many here, a half dozen, trying, as I do so, to remember that these aren't as amazing as I think they are.

 

The Christmas miracle

 

As I may have mentioned, I am not good at marketing. Indeed, I am so profoundly bad at it that I am immune from the accidental virtue of "being so bad at it I'm good".

And that's okay.

Partly it's okay because while marketing isn't necessarily, or by its very nature, worthless and evil, its overdeveloped primacy in a late capitalist system makes it unkillable, like a runaway fungus, and as such it is literally 

GOING TO DESTROY THE WORLD AND EVERYONE YOU KNOW IN IT!

So, I mean, at least I won't be responsible for that, even if the price of my absolution is to have never had more than eight committed readers of my life's work at any given time.

IT'S A PRICE I'M WILLING TO PAY!

Although honestly, it wasn't really up to me.

But even though I'm not into marketing except in making doomed, deranged spasms at it, I am not averse to statistical analysis of the reach of my creative output. 

Like, for instance, I was thinking I might not want to put anything too excellent up on clerkmanifesto because it is Christmas Day, and, I assume, no one reads clerkmanifesto on Christmas Day.

But is that true?

I decided to check.

I checked.

There have been eleven previous Christmas Day posts here.

I probably like the cat one best of all of them. It was called "Old Friends", and was from Christmas, 2015. It had 89 views. I don't link it here for your convenience because we are strictly interested in hard numbers here. You looking at it will only mess up our stats!

Other counts for Christmas posts are 53, 37, 53(again!), 84, 178, 91, 115, and 256

The most views on any of my posts was for the post the year before the cat one, on Christmas 2014, that had a whopping 501 views. 

Picture, say, a large ballroom filled with 501 people. That's pretty many readers! And if some of those readers are actually cardboard cutouts of people, or possibly just me, over and over, what of it? 

Remember, we have eschewed fame here so as not to contribute to your death.

My least views on any Christmas Day post so far is for this post, from the Christmas of 2023, my twelfth Christmas Post. It is also the least views I have had for any post ever out of 4,044 posts!

No one has read this yet, not even me, though I have read significant parts of it. 

Actually you have read significant parts of it too.

I think we can ascribe much of its low readership to people's lack of interest in statistics. 

Although possibly it is down to my original suspicion- Christmas Day is not a time when people read a lot on the Internet. 

But if we're really going to get scientific about it, the reason for the phenomenally low readership simply has to be that the numbers of readers for this column are so low, lower than any other posting in the history of the Internet, simply because I haven't even finished writing it yet.

Although, 

how can that ever explain you?

Missing the last one

 

The Library Workers' Spirit Animals is part of my every quarter century work portrait project series. The last portrait series I did was actually about 23 years ago, but I like that "quarter century" line. Believe it or not there are several people who are taking part in both projects. I guess 23 years isn't all that long. Tammy was in the first one and actually was the very first portrait I did in this one: Tammy's Tiger. I did that first one quickly and used it as part of my early sales pitch to take pictures of other people. 

Then, later, I did some extra work on it to neaten it up to raise its standard:

In the process of this project I have added some extra styles, and I guess skills, so I have been going back to most of my earlier portraits to do some supplemental portraits. Here are a couple of new "Tammy's Tigers":

Though for all the work, I still like that first one best probably.

I have had people from the last series decline to take part in this one. And there was one person who declined to take part in the last one whose I am working on now.

Some people just barely missed appearing in the last portrait project. Cathy's was probably the closest miss in that series as she arrived after all the rather formal photography reference parts were done. She's here in this one with her turkey though. This is an early favorite of these portraits, but I'm not sure how happy Cathy is with it. I might try something else and a different animal for her, but I quite like this one myself, and can't imagine it not featuring in whatever future display. 

This is Cathy's Turkey:

Jennifer was also a near miss on the last project timewise, and also the only one to ever express any regret on that. She's also the only co-worker ever to ask when the next one was.

I didn't know there was a next one. So I guess some credit goes to her for planting the seed of this.

Alas that her portrait attempts have been okay, but not great, and I don't think she is entirely satisfied either. She's offered a few different animals.

We started with a Barred Owl:

Then this week we did a quick reshoot with the possibility of the new animals: Warblers. 

Hopefully I may have cracked it with this one. We'll see.

Here then to conclude today's pictures, Jennifer's Warblers:

Eulogy

 

She was at the library when I started working here, and I worked with her for almost 20 years. She was exactly the age of my own parents. And when I first met her she was about the age I am now. 

So why not write her eulogy here, while I'm at the front desk of this very library she worked in for 30 years? It might be her only eulogy. She requested no memorial service, which, in my best guess, would accord with a funny lack of fuss she had. So let's let this one be a plain eulogy, neither glowing nor condemnatory. I just knew the scraps of her anyway. That's how we know our co-workers, endlessly, in close-up detail, and then in a weirdly distant overview, but never holistically. And it's been a decade too since I spent three days a week with her in the vaguely common cause of library work, so all I'm really left with, despite the thousands of hours, are a few handfuls of anecdotes and impressions anyway.

The first thing I have to report then is that she was always healthy. Indeed, she was notorious for it, a hearty, athletic person who aged without ever seeming to get ill or have any physical problems, at least that I knew of. I would get every cold and flu, and burn through vacation time with back problems, but she was always there in perfect fitness. A half day of mild sniffles for her seemed a pure and outrageous exotica. It was only long after she retired, very late in life, and after becoming a library patron for many more hearty years, in her mid-eighties, that she somewhat abruptly became a little old lady.

And then, like that, 88 years old, she dropped dead outside of her house.

Her biographical data was in some newspaper someone here made a copy of and put in the breakroom. It listed the two sons, the grandkids, the long dead husband. I'm not here for that. 

Here are the bits I'm here for:

1. She was wild about F. Scott Fitzgerald. Strongly convinced that The Great Gatsby was as magnificent a piece of literature as could be written, she went so far as to attend many conferences, some over multiple days, concerning Fitzgerald, and even, occasionally, loyally, Hemingway, perhaps as much for the relationship between the two, as in admiration for his work.

2. She had the almost spooky ability to cause technology to break in spectacular ways just by her presence. This was perhaps a liability working at a library, and was compounded some by her sense of trepidation around technology, which further caused her to break computers and their like through quietly panicked, unhinged actions.

3. She really wouldn't approve of me sitting at the desk of the library writing this, though she did approve of my writing in general. Her solution to her disapproval might be to try to hand me work to do, or just shove it significantly in my direction.

4. Twenty-three years ago, when I took pictures for my portraits of all my co-workers at the library, she camped it up and scowled meanly at my camera. When I called her bluff and painted her just as she posed, she made me promise never to show her portrait to anyone.

4. Her best friend I have only ever known as "Bunny".

5. If she didn't want to do something at work she would try to give it to someone else to do, flattering them that they were so good at, as in "Oh, will you turn on these computers? You're so good at that!"

6. Her most common and interesting stories were always of the more eccentric of her two sons. The tales of his (and their- they did a fair bit together, notably taking care of a piece of rural land together) adventures were funny, and evenly mixed with her disapproval and engaged amusement. I may have gotten a disproportionate amount of these stories due to her seeing a kind of kinship between me and him.

7. She was whacky, forbidding, funny, stoic, secretly smart, cold, proper, ridiculous, mean, respectful of authority, kind, conscientious, self-effacing, bold, hilarious, and appropriate. I don't know that this string of adjectives says anything at all, and yet to me it speaks of a generation disappearing in a way that spells out all of the disaster and hope for the future of the world. 

And that is my eulogy for my colleague.

If I could see her just one more time, I would ask her:

"What is it like to be dead?"

And she would cluck at me like I am a reprehensible, but maybe slightly delightful, scamp. 

And then she would answer something funny. 

The old guard

 

The old guard came in today.

A somewhat venerable librarian retired and surprisingly few of her contemporary colleagues were at the farewell potluck, but all the great powers of the past at my library came in for the occasion, some looking shockingly older, some looking much the same. At one point the small break room held nearly every branch manager and assistant branch manager from the last thirty years of this library.

My first impulse was one of warmth: these are my old co-workers, great figures in the history of the library that I have worked in for much of my adult life. These were the managers and bosses that shaped the bigger movements and the work environment of my life. I have history with them all.

And then, as they barely said hi to me, and gathered in an exclusive little knot, I remembered.

They sucked.

The week of goodbyes

 

One thing you learn around here, on Planet Earth, is that if you stick around long enough, people get old.

You might think that this is obvious, and that everyone knows this. But that is only because you are old... ish.

Come on now, think back. I dare you.

Once upon a time, this was all just a kind of theory. There were old people, tons of them, but no one had seen it happen.

Now people drop dead before our eyes, they fade like wraiths in abrupt fits and chunks of time, three years, ten, and the indomitable suddenly show up one day frail, bent, bleached, withered. 

This shit never happened when I was 25.

I noticed it, and then soon there was a point where it made me mad. But even that wore away, like mountains dissolved by snowflakes.

Now, like you, when it comes down to it, I am just... wise. Venerable. Still.

We're all just trees here, watching the sun and the night.

One long-time colleague is retiring tomorrow. She liked Italy and spoke Italian. She ran some history courses that were wildly popular with seniors. And she was the librarian who dealt with all the public challenges to items in our collection. 

Our library has never been the sort to be on the verge of being forced to ban books, but it was nice to have someone there for the eventualities.

I am bringing gelato to her farewell potluck, and the following joke to tell her:

Thank god you are finally leaving. Now we can get some of these awful books banned from here!!

The rare and the precious

 

Unlike, for instance, postings to clerkmanifesto, I don't send "all-staff" work emails very often. If I had to average it out I would guess I write two of these "all-staff" emails per year, generally to pass along some fundamental piece of structural work news that I had a hand in implementing. Clerkmanifesto, in contrast, clocks in with messages to you and the universe at the 365 to 400 range most years.

Now one might cry out:

"What could an all-staff email at your library have in common with the crazy columns written at clerkmanifesto!"

I say here that "one" might cry out, because any actual reader of clerkmanifesto (hi!) would probably understand that any email I might send at work would be fully as irreverent, cheeky, inappropriately insightful, and downright unprofessional as any blog post I write here.

So the difference between the two is mainly in the rarity.

Writing on clerkmanifesto, no matter how brilliant I think something I write might be, I have come to fully expect it to sink unceremoniously into the great ocean of the Internet, bubbling as the last breath goes out of it, and then plunging quickly past rare and strange jellyfish into a bewildering darkness on the deep ocean floor, where it then sits for four years until I go check on it in my diving bell.

"Why, it's in perfect condition!" I exclaim.

"And so beautiful!" I might murmur.

I have different expectations for emails I send at work. I expect to wander the library for the two days following any all-staff email and be told how refreshing it was. I expect to see staff members bursting into laughter as they read it. I expect to be thanked for brightening peoples days constantly in the aftermath of my message.

The truth is this kind of thing usually only happens once or twice with my all-staff emails, but boy, compared to writing clerkmanifesto it feels relentless!

"Enough already!" I inwardly cry out the second (and last) time someone tells me my email was amusing. I can't bear it. The adulation is too much for me!

p.s.

Would you like to see my most recent all-staff email?

Oh, I wasn't expecting that answer.

All Staff:

To my absolute favorite Co-workers:

Due to (reason redacted), we are now keeping all requested videogames, from all systems, in their cases, behind the front circulation desk. They are on the green cube where the art kits are also held.

Coming after our recent change to keeping videogame discs behind the front desk, this further videogame change is a reflection of (information not available on unsecured channels). 

If you are interested in more details about this alteration please rely upon rumor, gossip, and idle speculation among yourselves.

Also, as this message has only been sent to my favorite co-workers, please pass it along to those staff members I don't particularly li... er, who accidentally didn't receive it.

Thanks,

Bears and other ephemera

Here are some pictures of Mike's Bear.

Mike is in property management and when I invited him to pick a spirit animal he hemmed a little and finally suggested a bear, in a general sort of way. I maybe steered him into Polar Bear because a lot of people at this point have picked bears- a brown bear, a black bear, and two panda bears. But working on his pictures I felt like I should try, if I can bear it, to not just bring polar bears to the equation. I managed a little.

This is what I ended up with:

Library smells

 

I mean, yes, the library does smell. But I was thinking of a little bit wider discussion about library smells.

Although that wider discussion is sort of about how the library smells.

So I guess I kind of nailed today's title.

Lately, I have found that the library smells of a particular kind of rancidity I associate with things rotting, particularly unclean people, and the work of custodial people who clean the whole, huge library with barely soapy water that they never change once in a full eight-hour shift.

Also, our library patrons, some of whom live rough, even if it's in their own houses, are capable of unleashing some intense odors. Someone just walked by me and the wafting aroma of old urine drifted out to me.

And I'll admit, I am not the most perfectly fastidious person ever. I am no paragon of fresh scents. But I shower every few days whether I need it or not and I sometimes even instigate the doing of laundry at my house. 

So I think this is enough to justify my speaking out.

It smells around here.

But there is something...

Every once in awhile, in some small area of the library, right now it's in a corner of the bookstore, it smells like strawberries. It's probably just a scratch and sniff Strawberry Shortcake book, or one of our old bookmarks, but it smells like strawberries. How authentic is it? Authentic enough!

And so I drift over to the strawberry smell wherever I find it and whenever I can. 

Like the glow of a candle in an endless cave, or a tiny thermal vent rising mysteriously out of the Arctic permafrost in Winter, it is a relief, and, huddled desperately around it, for a moment, there is life.

The loon people

 

Two of the people who work at the library have chosen the loon as their spirit animal. This isn't entirely surprising considering we are in Minnesota and the loon is our official state bird. The unofficial state bird is the mosquito.

No one has chosen a mosquito as their spirit animal.

Yet!

Our state flag and our state seal are in the process of changing as I write, but I don't think anyone is going to mess with the loon. So far the only specifically "double" animal besides the loon is the panda, an example of which we featured here yesterday.

I did not have an easy time with the loon, the AI is not all that clear on what exactly this bird is, and I even resorted at one point to cutting and pasting with actual loon pictures. My earlier loon pictures were finished awhile ago and recently I went back in to try again despite having too few reference photos for both of my subjects, as you will see in the duplicate faces of these pictures.

I'm still not sure if I'm finished. 

Here is where we are now:

Jeff's Loon:

Dan's Loon: