M.J. Rose

Ah! These make for a most fantastic guessing game!

From which book does this meal hail? (Clue in the caption)–

From ‘Fictitious Feasts’, work about food scenes in literature. Here the memory of the avocado crabmeat salad, with the bell jar, symbol of death and despair, from the American novel…

From Featureshoot.com,

Spellbinding Photos of Meals from Classic Books
by Ellyn Kail

“Paris photographer Charles Roux describes his boyhood self as “a lonely kid that filled his life – and his voids- with literary fiction.” In this way, you could say Fictitious Feasts began in the artist’s early years, when he was curled up with a book, turning the pages and imagining the worlds inside them.

Growing up, he always had a vivid and visceral picture in his head of Alice’s tea party in Wonderland, the dinner table at the Ramsay house in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Gregor Samsa’s wretched pile of rotting food, left on the floor each morning by his sister Grete in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. As an adult and still life photographer, he had the means to bring these scenes to life.

Food, Roux suggests, has a hallowed place in the literary realm. Meals become metaphors; the real magic is in the mundane. For Fictitious Feasts, the photographer started with the books. Some, like the madeleines from Remembrance of Things Past and the porridge stolen by Goldilocks from the Three Bears, popped into his head instantly. Others took more time to recall and dig up. He read and reread the classics, jotted down notes, and sketched out table settings…”

For the rest, click here.

It was merely an experiment (one car, one station) but it lead to a future of subway transport.

Wouldn’t it be fantastic to find one of these old cars or the line itself somehow intact? Imagine a story about the Pneumatic Transit existing in a time warp right beneath our feet, complete with busy travelers from 1870… (and were there really fragile lamps balanced on little tables inside the cars?!)

Interior of the car – from “Illustrated Description of the Broadway Pneumatic Railway”

The Broadway Pneumatic Underground Railway – View of car in motion.

The Beach Pneumatic Transit

“The Interborough Rapid Transit subway, which broke ground in 1900 after many years of political maneuvering, was not the first attempt at transit tunneling in New York City. Several other groups attempted to build tunnel lines with varying degrees of success.

Probably the most well known of these early attempts, at least in terms of subway lore, was an 1870 demonstration line, the Beach Pneumatic Transit. Alfred Ely Beach, inventor and editor of Scientific American, had designed a pneumatic (air-driven) system which he demonstrated at the American Institute Fair in 1867, and he thought it viable for transit operation in underground tunnels. He applied for a permit from the Tammany Hall city government, and after being denied, decided to build the line in secrecy, in an attempt to show that subterranean transit was practical. (He actually did receive a permit to built a pneumatic package delivery system, originally of two small tunnels from Warren St. to Cedar St., later amended to be one large tunnel, to “simplify construction” of what he really intended to build.)

The Beach tunnel was constructed in only 58 days, starting under Warren Street and Broadway, directly across from City Hall. The station was under the south sidewalk of Warren Street just west of the Broadway corner. The single track tunnel ran east into Broadway, curved south, and ran down the middle of Broadway to Murray Street, a distance of one block, about 300 feet in all. The subway opened to the public on February 26, 1870.

Operated as a demonstration from 1870 to 1873, the short tunnel had only the one station and train car. While frequently mentioned as an important early development in New York City’s transit history, it was merely a curiosity. It is unclear that such a system could have been practical on a large scale. Smaller tube systems are used in buildings for mail delivery, but a rail-car sized system has never been developed. The perfection of electric multiple-unit traction and electric locomotives came about so quickly after this experiment that it wasn’t deemed worthwhile to even try an expanded pneumatic system…”

For the rest, click here to go to nycsubway.org.

From The Atlantic, a deep piece on the human fear of knowing it all…

The Human Fear of Total Knowledge
Why infinite libraries are treated skeptically in the annals of science fiction and fantasy

by Adrienne LaFrance

“Libraries tend to occupy a sacred space in modern culture. People adore them. (Perhaps even more than that, people love the idea of them. A Pew survey last year found that while people report feeling strongly about the importance of public libraries, those same people are using libraries less and less.)

The grandest libraries, built like monstrous cathedrals, are particularly beloved. It ought to follow, then, that the ultimate library—an infinite library—would be revered as a utopia, especially in an age where data is seen as its own currency. But libraries have a dark side in the cultural imagination.

In The Book of Sand, Jorge Luis Borges tells the story of an unexpected visit from a Bible salesman, who has in his collection a most unusual object. “It can’t be, but it is,” the salesman says. “The number of pages in this book is no more or less than infinite. None is the first page, none is the last.”

The strange book is so engrossing as to be sinister. This is a theme that comes up repeatedly in Borges’s work. “Paradise is a library, not a garden,” he famously said. But libraries, he warned, can be hellish, too….”

For the rest, click here.