Velcro City Tourist Board

Author: PGR

  • like a shadow anticipating its own body

    From the opening chapter of Wild Thought, being a fresh translation of the book by Levi-Strauss which was first translated as The Savage Mind: We should not, for all this, fall back on the vulgar thesis (which is however, admissible in the narrow perspective in which it is situated) that magic is a timorous and…

  • Gravity’s rainbow for Gonzo: High White Notes by David S Wills

    Wills’s thesis here is not at all controversial: he seeks not to challenge the accepted wisdom re: Hunter S Thompson as a once groundbreaking writer who became trapped in his own (deliberately constructed) literary persona, but rather to evidence that argument thoroughly by reference to Thompson’s published work, as well as to secondary sources, and…

  • writing about writing about writing

    A good grab-bag of writerly tips and tricks here from Irina Dumitrescu, mainly focussed on… well, not productivity, exactly (because that’s a framing that I am trying to avoid using these days, for Reasons) but what we might call instead the Getting-Something-Done Problem. Many of them are commonplaces of online writerly discourse, but some are…

  • Nostalgia for politics: The Hours Have Lost Their Clock by Grafton Tanner

    Subtitled “The Politics of Nostalgia”, Tanner’s book is divided into three sections, of which I found the first to be the most interesting: this is where Tanner unearths the history of nostalgia as a diagnosis (broadly medical before becoming more specifically psychological) which was literally lethal in its earliest manifestations among soldiers of the Napoleonic…

  • Through a Dylan, darkly: Invisible Republic by Greil Marcus

    I have, I confess, never understood the reverence in which Bob Dylan is held by music fans of the generation prior to my own. I mean, I understand it as a fact, as a thing that is inescapably true; and I think I understand its as a historical contingency, much the same as I can…