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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Futures Brought to Life, brought to life
That post on worldbuilding I wrote a little while back was fairly well received, which was gratifying—it’s always nice when people like a thing you wrote, of course, but it’s nicer still when the point you felt you were trying to make has been taken in the spirit in which you felt you were making…
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political problems cannot be solved on the aesthetic level
After getting irked by reviews of Oppenheimer, Adam Kotsko wrote a short thing that feels to me like it’s the missing piece to that Sam Kriss essay I excerpted last week, which has been—as the kids say—living rent-free in my head ever since. Kotsko has an interesting and very valuable insight into “culture war” stuff,…
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21JUL23 / accessions
A couple of laggards that were meant to come in with the previous shipment: Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle proved excellent, so now attention is being turned to earlier works heretofore overlooked. The acquisition of the Prose Edda is at least in part about integrating the institution with the deep history of its socio-cultural environment, but the…
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an entire industry to cater to your whimsical myopia
Ron Horning has been on what I suspect was a much needed holiday, but—delightfully, but perhaps also tragically?—Horning clearly didn’t get much of a holiday from being Horning. But then, of who among us could it ever be said that &c &c? Anyway, the first half of Horning’s latest reminded me of thoughts I had…
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18JUL23 / accessions
The accessions department is off visiting a monastery today, so the following report has been prepared in advance. Errors and omissions &c &c. Classic goth seems to be having its, ah, moment in the sun right now. The Cathi Unsworth has some good reviews, and promises to be rather better edited than John Robb’s recent…
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].”