Author: PGR
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struck by the fact of your own mortality
From a 1984 Paris Review interview with James Baldwin: INTERVIEWER: This brings us to your concern with reality as being history, with seeing the present shaded by everything which occurred in a person’s past. James Baldwin has always been bound by his past, and his future. At forty, you said you felt much older than…
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contractions / contradictions
From the Salvage Collective’s third Covid State Dispatch. The opening salvo deserves constant repetition: The hubris of seeing in this moment the inevitability of socialism follows the shattering electoral defeat of the left, and can only end in two ways: with demoralisation; or with the predicate-shifting disavowal that leads one to find a socialist militant…
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block, busted: reading Leviathan Wakes
A few weeks ago I finally gave in to the importuning of a friend and acquired the first book of The Expanse sequence, and in doing so managed to break a case of reader’s block that had been running for months. Perhaps there’s something about having a book chosen for you, rather than picking one…
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technologies that place me in a seemingly Promethean position: regardless power, regardless freedom and the desire for excession
More newsletter cribbing, this time from the redoubtable L M Sacasas. Like so much material being produced at the moment, this piece is mostly about the pandemic, and specifically the USian response (or lack thereof); but there’s stuff in here that has broader application, and some themes which VCTB veterans will recognise as favourites of…
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no choice but to be aggregated: enclosure and augmented reality
I’m going to assume that people have spent the last few days pointing poor old Bill Gibson at this story by way of draping the (oft-refused) garland of prophecy around his neck. The short version is that people bored of the tedious affordances of that suddenly ubiquitous video-conferencing platform (and/or possibly seeing an opportunity for…