Velcro City Tourist Board

Month: March 2022

  • (late) winter wonder-Lund

    I’m given to understand that the weather here in Skåne has been somewhat unusual this season, which is to say unusually clear-skied and sunny; that certainly tallies with my experience from last year, which was of around five months of relentless grey overcast from late October to mid March. It’s still pretty brisk, mind you,…

  • a sense of an enclosed present, a total present, severed from history

    I was yesterday years old when I learned (courtesy David Higgins’ Reverse Colonization, which I may write about directly if time allows) that David Harvey—yes, that’s Lovable Marxist Granddad David Harvey™—can count among his many achievements having been a minor contributor to Mike Moorcock’s run at New Worlds, where he published a piece of fiction…

  • it may be a delusion arising from some sort of psychological damage

    My most recent review filed at (but, I think, not yet published at?) the BSFA Review is of The Art of Space Travel, a collection of Nina Allan’s short fiction. It was a somewhat out-of-the-comfort-zone commission, which is exactly why I chose it; in addition to reading outside my home range, I’m also trying to…

  • keep your shit straight

    Currently reading, and finding assorted resonances within, Maria Dahvana Headley’s radical re-translation of Beowulf. I’ve seen (admittedly few) accusations that its linguistic choices, exemplified by the use—first line, first word, and throughout the piece thereafter—of “bro” as a parsing of the tricky-to-translate “hwæt”, are somehow gimmicky. It certainly marks it at a translation of its…