velcro city tourist board
a blog by Paul Graham Raven
science fiction / social theory / climate futures / infrastructure / utopian narratology / sometimes cats
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06JUN20
Sign-of-life post. Difficult few weeks. Picking up the pieces. Keeping hold of perspective. Black Lives Matter.
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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…
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contractions / contradictions
From the Salvage Collective’s third Covid State Dispatch. The opening salvo deserves constant repetition: The hubris of seeing in this moment the inevitability of socialism follows the shattering electoral defeat of the left, and can only end in two ways: with demoralisation; or with the predicate-shifting disavowal that leads one to find a socialist militant…
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block, busted: reading Leviathan Wakes
A few weeks ago I finally gave in to the importuning of a friend and acquired the first book of The Expanse sequence, and in doing so managed to break a case of reader’s block that had been running for months. Perhaps there’s something about having a book chosen for you, rather than picking one…
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technologies that place me in a seemingly Promethean position: regardless power, regardless freedom and the desire for excession
More newsletter cribbing, this time from the redoubtable L M Sacasas. Like so much material being produced at the moment, this piece is mostly about the pandemic, and specifically the USian response (or lack thereof); but there’s stuff in here that has broader application, and some themes which VCTB veterans will recognise as favourites of…
Who is Paul Graham Raven?
“… who, with raving lips uttering things mirthless, unbedizened, and unperfumed, reaches over a thousand years with [his] voice, thanks to the god in [him].”