Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Reading Journal

  • 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’…

  • Walking my riddels where ever theyve took me

    I dont think it makes no diffrents where you start the telling of a thing. You never know where it begun realy. No moren you know where you begun your oan self. You myt know the place and day and time of day when you ben beartht. You myt even know the place and day…

  • a sense of an enclosed present, a total present, severed from history

    I was yesterday years old when I learned (courtesy David Higgins’ Reverse Colonization, which I may write about directly if time allows) that David Harvey—yes, that’s Lovable Marxist Granddad David Harvey™—can count among his many achievements having been a minor contributor to Mike Moorcock’s run at New Worlds, where he published a piece of fiction…