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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species traitor (and proud of it)
I admire Matt Webb in a lot of ways, but I’m also aware that we come at the world from very different positions. This post clarifies and specifies that difference: Ought we take sides? Like: if you’re not all in on eating the Sun for its total energy output to drive the turbines of humanity in a…
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23JUN23 / midsommar
I had plans to actually celebrate the summer solstice properly this year by going along the coast to Ales Stenar, a stone circle site which is presumed to have been constructed some time in the Nordic iron Age, around 1,500 years ago. Of course, events (dear boy) intervened, and so I’ll be doing a rather…
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22JUN23 / accessions
The accessions department considered any new Ann Leckie a non-negotiable acquisition, given the institution’s response to previous volumes by the same author. Tchaikovsky is actually a newcomer to the institutional collection, which is somewhat surprising given the author’s astonishing productivity and sterling reputation. That this volume collects novellas rather than being part of an extended…
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how you write is what it’s for
Mike Harrison’s anti-memoir managed to be everything you thought it might be, but nothing at all like what you expected; that negating prefix to the generic category is an obvious warning, a hockey-stick graph where the y axis represents lateness of style, but such graphs—as has been demonstrated—are easily misinterpreted, and/or renarrated to provide comfort…
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the pathology dwells not in the symptom but in the attempts to treat it
Some striking moments in this searingly honest essay by Grace E Lavery on their writing life. Firstly: A thing I’ve learned teaching graduate students—literally, some of the smartest people in the world—how to write: writing is, indeed, pathological, but the pathology dwells not in the symptom but in the attempts to treat it. People who…
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].”