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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nudge / hold / spin
Will Davies at the LRB, reviewing Justin E H Smith’s Irrationality: Away from the frontiers and mythology of Enlightenment, the meaning of ‘rationality’ (and hence ‘irrationality’) becomes difficult to pin down. You can resort to the otherworldly ideas of logic and mathematics floating free from all politics and culture. But the academic study of ‘rational…
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26NOV2019 / accessions
Rinsed by the Verso winter sale, once again. And I haven’t even started making a list for the Palgrave cyber-sale yet… I’m told that the first step is admitting you have a problem. Well, OK then, I have a problem: there aren’t enough days in a year.
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Nail them to Zuckerbot’s door
L M Sacasas, doing a concise post-McLuhan “nine theses” thing for the present media moment. 6: In oral societies, freedom is conformity to communal standards. In the culture of print, to be free is to choose for oneself. In digital culture, freedom is relief from the obligation to choose.
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Andromeda Mission: Anarcha Prototype II
Sonya Dyer, 2019. Currently at Site Gallery, Sheffield.
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Thousand-yard think
Uncle Warren gets reflective about the reflexivity of the writerly life, or at least his own variant thereof: … the job gets bigger and more complex and I need more time to, basically, stare into the distance and Figure Shit Out. The figuring out of the shit is a big part of this writer’s work.…
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].”