Library inspiration. One day…

Jonathan Lethem runs a used bookstore →

The store, Red Gap, is located in Blue Hill, Maine. It’s also supposed to serve really good coffee. Not that I’m the least bit jealous or anything that one of my favorite authors has appropriated my dream of bookstore ownership. Oh well. (via Maud Newton)

Neil Gaiman’s bookshelves are full of all kinds of amazing things. Maybe one day I’ll have a library like that myself.

Off to a great weekend. (via sealust)

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The idea of brain-controlled wireless digging machines, in particular, just astonishes me; at night you dream of tunnels—because you are actually in control of tunneling equipment as you sleep, operating somewhere beneath the surface of the planet.

A South African platinum mine begins to diverge wildly from known sites of mineral wealth, its excavations more and more abstract as time goes on—carving M.C. Escher-like knots and strange excursive whorls through ancient reefwork below ground—and it’s because the mining engineer, paralyzed in a car accident ten years ago and in control of the digging machines ever since, has become addicted to morphine.

Or perhaps this could even be used as a new and extremely avant-garde form of psychotherapy. For instance, a billionaire in Los Angeles hooks his depressed teenage son up to Herrenknecht tunneling equipment which has been shipped, at fantastic expense, to Antarctica. An unmappably complex labyrinth of subterranean voids is soon created; the boy literally acts out through tunnels. If rock is his paint, he is its Basquiat.

Instead of performing more traditional forms of Freudian analysis by interviewing the boy in person, a team of highly-specialized dream researchers is instead sent down into those artificial caverns, wearing North Face jackets and thick gloves, where they deduce human psychology from moments of curvature and angle of descent.

My dreams were a series of tunnels through Antarctica, the boy’s future headstone reads.

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BLDG BLOG

Geoff Manaugh’s fantastic imagination continues to surprise me. BLDG BLOG may be about architecture but Manaugh’s posts always sparkle with speculative frission. There are a thousand SF stories locked in the blog just waiting to be let out. (See also, and also, and also, and also.)

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I want to live here.

misplacedmemory:

garyoldman | les autres | Ohio Memory | feuilleton

Interior of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County “Old Main” Building, photographer unknown, 1874.

In 1874 the Public Library of Cincinnati took possession of a small building intended to be an opera house. According to John Fleishman, “the parcel at 629 Vine Street was transformed in two stages into a library building that startled America with its cutting edge design. Its vast Main Hall featured five tiers of cast-iron book alcoves that could house over 200,000 volumes.”

(via fyeakbookshelves)

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prosepoem:

Let’s take a trip, just you and I, beyond the mountains and beyond the sunrise. We’ll pack our bags with everything we need and slip away before anyone can miss us. And I’ll kiss your hand, and you’ll smile, and we’ll make our camp beneath spread-out stars and fragrant blossomed trees.

(via 24ribs)