Velcro City Tourist Board

Tag: literature

  • all these words have been poisoned, right?

    McKenzie Wark, interviewed at Believer: … in Capital is Dead I wanted to ask the question of how have we innovated language—god, I hate that word, innovate. All these words have been poisoned, right? What’s the art, if I can say that, what’s the literary dimension of writing theory? It’s a genre of literature, Marx…

  • We’ll always have Paris

    Umberto Eco on “The Cult of the Imperfect” at the venerable Paris Review: When all the archetypes shamelessly burst in, we plumb Homeric depths. Two clichés are laughable. A hundred clichés are affecting—because we become obscurely aware that the clichés are talking to one another and holding a get-together. As the height of suffering meets…

  • Urbanism 101

    “… I have constructed in my mind a model city from which all possible cities can be deduced,” Kublai said. “It contains everything corresponding to the norm. Since the cities that exist diverge in varying degree from the norm, I need only foresee the exceptions to the norm and calculate the most probable combinations.” “I…

  • Notes toward an MFA creative writing module

    INTERVIEWER: Do you really think creative writing can be taught? VONNEGUT: About the same way golf can be taught. A pro can point out obvious flaws in your swing. And somewhat less flippantly: VONNEGUT: I guarantee you that no modern story scheme, even plotlessness, will give a reader genuine satisfaction, unless one of those old-fashioned…

  • The problem of being anyone at all

    Those who disparage authors for practicing auto-fiction tend to believe character is a steady state that can be adequately represented on the page and thus see the autobiographical as an easy option, a copout. What they want instead is a determined effort of the unbridled imagination representing many different characters, all stable and well-defined, interacting…