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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The Way Out Is Through: Co-produced Critical Utopia as an Antidote to Anthropocenic Academic Melancholia
It is surely fitting that one of my last few academic publications should have a title so verbose that it’s almost autoparody. Talk about the slow grind of academic publishing, though. My records suggest I sent the abstract for what would eventually mutate into this chapter toward the end of summer in 2021… and I’m…
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more fool me
The first day of April is traditionally a day to totally avoid the internet, at least in this household, so it feels weird to be writing something on my own blog on that date. But the only fool here is me—and that’s always been the case, I suppose, but particularly so at the moment. In…
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bear discovers fire: on the erroneous over-estimation of generative systems
Oh god, OK—yes, I’m sorry, more “#AI” discourse, and believe me, no one finds my repeated returns to the topic more wearing and ironic than I do, but we are living in A Moment, and I have been wrestling with that moment on the personal and artistic front, but I have also been looking at…
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18MAR24 / accessions
North’s House of Odysseus: the institution has been stanning Claire North ever since Notes from the Burning Age—“the best solarpunk novel which has never been slapped with that label”, if you want the capsule plug—but also loved Ithaca, the predecessor to this new novel. Retelling the ancient epics in new voices and/or from the point…
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merciful release: navel-gaze blogday blahblahblah
Happy blogday to me! I have owned and written stuff on this domain since 14th March 2006. Eighteen years! It seems quite astonishing to me, that stretch of time. This will come as not surprise to regular readers, of course, who will be accustomed to me writing “it feels like an eternity, and yet like…
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].”