Author: PGR

  • don’t call it a weeknotes

    I had a couple of paragraphs to go here, but deleted them once I realised that this would actually be just as effective: I mean, it hasn’t been bad—just pretty intense? And I have not taken to Haddock-scale alcohol consumption, to be clear. (Though I did have a few jars of Eriksberg with my cat-sitter…

  • 11APR24 / accessions

    11APR24 / accessions

    Folks, I’m gonna be abandoning the pretentious thing I’ve been doing with these posts—you know, the whole “the department” and “the institution” routine—because it was never particularly funny, and it’s a strain on the basic purpose of these posts, which is to just be like “hey, look what I got myself to read!” Cue half…

  • mister gotcha trend-lord douchebag

    Trends Discourse is a genre unto itself, I have discovered lately, as I try to sustain some sort of engagement with what is arguably an adjacent profession to my own. But the self-satisfaction of its leading pundits, and the lack of reflexivity thereby implied, can make for some serious eyeroll material. Exhibit A is this…

  • transition as seen from the other side: Jon Raymond’s Denial

    transition as seen from the other side: Jon Raymond’s Denial

    A brief and unusual work of climate fiction, this. Raymond gets straight into an early-2050s US, and a world in which popular anger saw not only some sort of transition away from fossil fuels (in some nations), but also a run of very public prosecutions of bigwigs from Big Carbon: life sentences, the occasional hanging,…

  • 08APR24 / accessions

    08APR24 / accessions

    Nice that the seasons have shifted sufficiently that there’s now natural light by which to photograph newly accessioned items, eh? Pilates for Men: presumably self-explanatory, especially if one is reminded that the institution’s head is a man in his late 40s who recently quit nicotine, and who does not want to buy a whole new…