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 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…
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16JUN23 / accessions
The accessions department invites anyone seeking a justification for the acquisition of Mike Harrison’s new anti-memoir—in a signed hardback edition, no less—to, and I quote verbatim, “get themselves bloody well looked at”. The department’s position on the Science Fiction and Innovation Design edited volume is rather more professional, to the point of terseness: this is…
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11JUN23 / accessions
The accessions department is far from tireless, but rarely rests. It acquired this copy of the new posthumous Graeber while dropping in at Shakespeare & Sons, an English-language bookshop in Prague, that most literary of cities. Quite why the institution was in Prague is a topic for a later update, perhaps… though it bears noting…
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it’s not the invisible hand that puts packages on our porches
As someone who tries on the regular to drop critiques of the passive voice and its role in the obfuscation of the infrastructural, it’s very nice to see someone making the same point from a much larger soapbox than my own: Through passive voice and other forms of labor-erasing language, delivery notifications ask us to…
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].”