Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Reading Journal

  • Worm Wards end Otherways

    Three things make a post, we used to say, back in the nostalgically glossed golden age of blogging… so here’s three things based on my being about half way through the Penguin Classics reissue of James Tiptree Jr.’s collection Warm Worlds and Otherwise. Let’s get the crabby complaint out of the way first. Look, it’s…

  • Nightmare on Planet Thanet: Rosa Rankin-Gee’s Dreamland

    Anyone of the “climate dystopias are surplus to purpose” school of thought might as well click away now; Dreamland is very much not the droid you’re looking for. A staggeringly bleak extrapolation of post-Brexit Britain, taking as its focus the recently (and probably temporarily) reinvigorated seaside town of Margate as its setting, I’m not sure…

  • as if there was necessarily just one transition

    Graeber and Wengrove again, referring to archaeological evidence from the soi disant ‘Fertile Crescent’: If the situation in just one cradle of early farming was that complicated, then surely it no longer makes sense to ask, ‘what were the social implications of the transition to farming?’ — as if there was necessarily just one transition,…

  • detect patterns that would be otherwise invisible

    Just over twenty pages into Graeber and Wengrove, confident from the outset that I was in safe hands, and I hit this: “Now, we should be clear here: social theory always, necessarily, involves a bit of simplification. For instance, almost any human action might be said to have a political aspect, an economic aspect, a…

  • trolley problems

    Thought it was time I saw what all the fuss was with Emily St. John Mandel, so started in on Sea of Tranquility while travelling to Helsinki for Finncon. (Scandinavian ferry culture deserves an ethnography all of its own.) My capsule takeaway on Mandel so far would be something like “what if David ‘Cloud Atlas’…