As part of the Hollow Earth Society’s time here at Elsewhere—inhabiting a library, workshopping the notion of library/museum/site of education—we’ve developed an Elsewhen Tumblr to showcase our fictions and other responses to the books in the Living Library.
Read our stories; share them; write your own! We will be posting titles periodically that still need narrative and aesthetic remixing. We see libraries as time machines (collecting eras, stories, histories; of ownership of books, of understanding of ideas), as theaters (of ideas, of performances of reading and re-reading), as museums (of books, of the slimming pool of people who value knowledge over data).
We see as one part of this overall museum-ificiation our ongoing Elsewhen project of re/narrativizing every single book (narrative or not, “good” or “special” or not) in the Living Library. This project seeks to make all books newly “special” and wholly new: pieces of new wholes, mutant-dead stories, para-stories, object stories as much as “story” stories (para-realism, Surrealism).
This project is the best mix of collaboration, constraint, and constant renewal. All around me are short stacks of books from the mid-nineteenth century to the early Clinton years. From Tarot-inspired games with book images to sonnets, from strange stories based only on titles to reflections of beloved classics (Tristram Shandy, Moby-Dick), we’re working every angle to deliver an omni-story, to create a narrative vortex…
