On this Valentine's Day weekend, it's fitting to link to Geoff Manaugh, who likes to think about landscapes and the future, and comes up with an insanely romantic idea for a new museum.
Begin with a relatively simple fact: Russian forensic scientists are testing blood samples found on a certain sofa where the great writer Alexander Pushkin is said to have died, two days after he was shot in the gut in a duel. Then let Manaugh take off:
order to find the otherwise undetectable remains of a dead Russian
novelist. One might even say residue here, not remains
at all; it is the barest of traces. Suddenly, though, it's as if those
old stuffed sofas, fading carpets, and tables of hand-worn wood in
obsolete interiors around the world have been transformed into a kind
of archaeological site, in which the chemical traces of literary
history might yet be discovered. The sofa is Pushkin's Calvary, if you
will – a chemical reliquary. Furniture becomes a kind of hematological Stargate into literature's mortal past. Who else might they find in there?
You go around the world performing genetic tests on antique furniture
to see which novelists ever used it – traces of Sebald, Hemingway,
Tolstoy.
2) Two words: Pushkin Park. We clone Pushkin and start a theme park. Like a thousand Mini-Me's
well-versed in storycraft, Pushkin – one man distributed through a
thousand bodies – wanders the artificial landscape, and like some
strange Greek myth wed with Antiques Roadshow, he tells the crowds, "I sprung forth, fully formed, from a sofa…" And there begins a tale for stunned tourists.
Then Carolyn Kellog, of the under-appreciated Jacket Copy, throws in her version:
Well, Chekhov can be hilarious (ever seen "The Proposal?") Nonetheless, Kellog has a point. Don't think it'd keep the Russians away, though.
Nor me…here's Anton, via the incomparable David Levine:
Kit Stolz 
David Levine is my step-dad. Have you ever seen his paintings? They’re incredible.
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Here’s some views from his 2004 show, Escapes:
http://www.forumgallery.com/2004/e_levine.htm
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