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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On the rails again: Conference season 2019
I did pretty well at sending out (and landing) abstracts for conference and journal papers during my PhD, but I lost a lot of momentum in 2018, The Year Of The Interminable Corrections. This was partly due to lacking the time and energy and security to really think about it, but I realise with hindsight…
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Alter the biogeochemical organism on the fly
Robinson Meyer on the latest IPCC report; climate change is an existential issue in both senses of the term. More than 30 years after climate change first became a political issue, it feels like we are still figuring it out. This report gets us closer. It makes clear that climate change isn’t only about coal-fired…
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an appropriately unheroic spirit
Nice chewy essay by John Farrell at LARB, on the long-running philosophical ding-dong between utopianism and what he calls the “literary-heroic worldview”. … the transition to modernity, with its focus on economic rationality, has only changed the terms upon which status is distributed without assuaging the basic competitive drive that animated the literary culture 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].”