Monday, March 26, 2012

Literary Las Vegas


The Guardian goes in search of it.

From the article...

It's amazing anybody could miss the Neon Boneyard Museum, which at first glance resembles a Scrabble set designed for a giant. The metal tips of lorry-sized words peak out over the fences of a huge industrial lot – the curl of an "S" visible through the barriers, the peeling paint of an obese red "B" glinting. This is where the neon signs of Las Vegas come to die, forming a higgledy-piggledy poem to the city's history. Spanning from early neon offerings of "beer" and "girls" through to the atomic font of the cold war, this is Vegas in her own words. "Literary tours" might not be advertised in this city's neon, but fiction is everywhere in Las Vegas.

When I ask a taxi driver to take me from the Neon Boneyard to the nearest library, he nervously replies: "You mean the Library strip joint on Boulder Avenue?" Vegas might be a literary inspiration, but the most popular "Library" in Vegas involves strippers wearing glasses.

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