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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03JUN23 / accessions
Not done one of these in a while; acquired a few new titles in the interim, but workload throughout the institution has necessitated the, ah, temporary shelving of outreach activities in the accessions division*. Rather than go back and catch up, we’re just picking up from the present moment. So: I’ve never actually read The…
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the extreme wrong we congratulate ourselves for not being
Digital polarization is not simply the process whereby views tend toward extremes, but that which sorts us against our better judgment to commit to a stance of binary opposition. In other words, the process by which politics is hollowed out into opinionating and by which it converges with consumption and entertainment. “Hitler” is the extreme…
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every teenage car in this town was turned to the same station
I have been thinking a lot about worldbuilding over the last year or so, in a deliberately more expansive sense than the one common to sf discourse, though taking that sense (naturally enough) as my starting point. This is because it’s obvious to me that something that we might as well call worldbuilding is at…
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s’not unusual
** Attention conservation notice: man complaining about being ill ** Day six of an absolute stinker of a head-cold; at the end of each day, it’s felt like a turning point has been reached, only for the actual turning point to occur in the middle of the night, and to be a turning not exactly…
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a paradoxical solace that follows from the realization that we are fucked
I’m a bit all over the place as regards my information channel management*, so I can’t credit whoever it was that caused me to see this long review-essay at the European Review of Books… but I can tell you that the challenge was less finding a piece of it to pull-quote, and more deciding which…
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].”