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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completing a thought
I feel I want to mark the end of the year here, particularly given I have left the blog fallow for a bunch of months, but I feel oddly resistant to doing a traditional end-of-year round-up of any sort. This first manifested as a resistance to doing a year-in-reading post, which I initially suspected was…
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structure [and/of] structurelessness
I am thinking a lot right now about my work: what it is, certainly, but also what it’s for—where it fits not only in the now, but in times to come. Given that my work is focussed on futurity, this meta-level thinking frequently falls out of and/or collapses back into the more day to day…
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22NOV23 / accessions
Slow times in the accessions department of late—the institution is working on a number of large projects which are constraining budgets both fiduciary and temporal—but here’s a handful of new acquisitions. Frankfurt’s On Bullshit. One might argue that the time to acquire this book was immediately after its publication; certainly, the years since have only…
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she invites us in and holds us back
Stephanie Burt (at Strange Horizons) on John Plotz on Ursula K Le Guin; my emphasis. Leaving blank spaces for readers to see how well, and how often, we fill things in, Le Guin’s prose is (Plotz writes) “the antithesis of the well-rendered verisimilitude of a high-end video game” (p. 48). Those games show us everything,…
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who are you trying to impress? McDonald’s Hopeland and skiffy diasporae
It’s yer man ADH, who else? “Space is dead”, sez he: The moon landing happened because capitalism and American empire actually had a rival. These forces had to prove they could outrace, outplan, and outspend communism and Soviet empire. It was probably the biggest PR campaign of all time, if you don’t count our bloated…
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].”