Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Reading Journal

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • books read 2022

    Yep, it’s that time of year again. 103 books finished (of which 20 were graphic novels); dates indicate when I finished reading; one asterisk means a re-read, two asterisks a second re-read, three asterisks a many-times-re-reading; a zero indicates a book left unfinished. Graphic novels Maggie the Mechanic Jaime Hernandez 19 Jan * The Girl…