I dreamed last night that a very large library offered me a job interpreting their ask box, which involved a lot of idly scribbled little scraps of paper about books people had once read that they couldn’t remember the name of but really liked, and books people had always wished existed but didn’t think did, and books that were their favorite and if only they could read another book like that.
My job was to take the little scraps of paper and then run around with a lot of long sparkly strings of various colors and pin one end of each string to the note and then make it a trail leading to various books i thought might satisfy the desire, tucking it into one book and then another, weaving this sparkly varicolored web all over the library.
I lived in the library, and I found all these rooms, like the foreign films room where immigrants and refugees from various countries had set up a little home with canned soups ranged neatly on the rows in alphabetical order, and they were heating it up on a little campfire and eating it with plastic spoons and watching six movies at once in various languages of the places they had come from. They looked nervous when they saw me, and one said, “We watch English movies too” and I said “no it’s good to watch movies from home” and they smiled and nodded and offered me soup.
I loved my job, and my friends came to visit me and I zipped around bringing them books, and people flocked to the library because they loved my webs, and then like a week in I was sorting through fresh notes and scraps and I found one that just said “christopher tau visited”
I brought it to my bosses, and said, “I don’t know what this means” and the one who’d offered me the job (a pleasant maiden aunt type) said “oh, well, no matter” and took it from me
but later I heard my bosses talking in a low voice through the stacks
“what could she have done to draw his attention already”
“she’s very talented”
“yes but I never imagined he’d notice so soon”
“do you think she’s in danger”
“of course she’s in danger. the question is, do we pull her out now, or wait”
(forlornly) “she’s very talented”
This dream is fantastic. I want to know how the story goes from there. Even your dreams are compelling storytelling.
So I bought a couple of things from Stuart Semple’s art supply shop, (Stuart Semple, as you may remember from another Tumblr post, is the artist in a fued with Anish Kapoor because Anish won’t let anyone else use a super black paint called Vanta Black and is generally ultra elitist about art and who has access to both it and supplies to make it), anyways, my purchase came with a free coloring book.
