Author: PGR

  • A crude intrusion into someone else’s fantasies

    Found material might be “evidence” –might even be a direct, indexical sign of a thing that happened–but the thing that happened, the life that contained it, can’t be reassembled, or back-engineered into existence. It’s only what it is now: if you try to glue the fragments together with the sentiments “evoked” in you, all you…

  • Now Then’s Ten

    Surfacing briefly to note with pride that Now Then is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year. I stumbled across Now Then during my first weeks in Sheffield, way back in the autumn of 2012, when I was desperate to make some connections to the local cultural scene, and to find a new venue to write…

  • To interest, amuse, or instruct

    Many definitions of story emphasize the fictional part. However, there’s one major definition that gives a wider, and in my view more accurate, interpretation: “A narrative, either true or fictitious, in prose or verse, designed to interest, amuse, or instruct the hearer or reader.” […] But back to hypotheses — and vocations. People become scientists…

  • Bessemer

  • Contest and re-engineer the universal

    “For Laboria Cuboniks, the universal is synthetic – it’s a political category. It’s not something that is discovered, or progressively unearthed, but represents a ‘we’ that is collectively built, and which can be rebuilt in more emancipatory forms. Again, this can be understood as an effort to construct vectors of unanticipated and constructed solidarities. I…