Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Writing

  • struck by the fact of your own mortality

    From a 1984 Paris Review interview with James Baldwin: INTERVIEWER: This brings us to your concern with reality as being history, with seeing the present shaded by everything which occurred in a person’s past. James Baldwin has always been bound by his past, and his future. At forty, you said you felt much older than…

  • the feared disseminators of complexity

    A new discovery, made within Simon Reynolds’ response to the shuttering of Beyond the Beyond: Matti Swiedmann’s Red Velvet Corridor. Top of the stack of posts at present is this thing, rambling around in Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, Baudrillard… all the intervals in that haunting earworm of a scale that…

  • unknowable differences populating an imagined horizon

    Struggling to write on sociological topics (or indeed on anything that engages significantly with social dimensions, whether academically or otherwise)? David Beer is, too: … beyond the problems of the speed of change and a lack of focus, there is also a sense that the thing I’d normally be analysing – society – will not…

  • discontinuity against ubiquity: narrative form and climate crisis

    Lots of food for thought (and suggestions of novels to read) in this LARB dialogue on the topic of “fiction in the age of climate catastrophe” between authors Anne Charnock and James Bradley. It’s all of interest, but the following clips are relevant enough to merit excerpting here for reference purposes: James Bradley: The problem,…

  • post-partum

    On Monday I finshed a (long-overdue) chapter for an academic handbook on placemaking. I outlined the thing months ago—almost half a year ago, in fact—but then life happened (and then the virus happened), and it got shunted onto the backburner. And so when I came to actually cranking the thing out, a process which I…