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My Medēn Art Project

January 10, 2022

art, artist, experiencing, experimental, Greece, literature, Medēn Art Project, poetry

The beauty of art – true art, where you simply don’t care about marketing, audience reception (or even intended audience), and the like – is that the artist can reach realms of unimaginable freedom. My Medēn art project is such an artistic work. It’s still in progress, and it will never finish – a project such as Medēn can never finish.

But that’s not the only peculiarity about it, as you’ll soon discover.

Part of true, liberated art, is that the artist can choose what to share, when, and in which shape. Should art be free? Should it be sense-making? Maybe true meaning is only sense-making when it doesn’t make immediate sense.

In any case, I’ve decided it’s time to turn on the faucet, allowing some colorful water to trickle down the canvas.

Stream-of-consciousness? Conceptual fusion? Perhaps no more (or less) than an experiment. Medēn is here and now, and yet it’s always been. Medēn is what it is, ultimately; we all are.

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Every Book Is Autobiographical – or Should Be

January 3, 2022

Experiencing, Writing

creativity, experiencing, imagination, literature, memory, writing

(Auto)biographies, autobiographical novels, “based on a true story”… There seem to be many ways of more or less describing the same thing. At least that’s what one may think. However, in actual fact, all these are very different modes of writing, with unique requirements. More importantly, for the purposes of this post, most people seem to ignore a very crucial thing: Every book is autobiographical!

This might feel an obviously wrong thing to say. “Hang on, Chris”, you might think. “How on earth can every book be autobiographical? What about American Psycho, or even some science fiction – say, Solaris? Surely, you’re not claiming that Bret Easton Ellis has killed people or that Stanisław Lem traveled to another planet?”

The answer is – to the best of my knowledge – no. Yet both these two examples, just like every other book ever written by any human is deep down an autobiographical book. The reason?

Because every author, even when writing fiction, puts a piece of themselves in it.

Or at least, they ought to! Because about the only way to fail entirely at writing fiction is to not allow yourself – your subjectivity, your experiences, your flaws and vices and insecurities – to become part of the narrative. Writing an autobiographical book the way I just defined it is the easiest way for any author (and especially so for less experienced ones) to introduce affect in their narratives.

Let’s see why that happens and how to control it.

autobiographical book — When it comes to all books being autobiographical, it’s not out experiences that are important, but *remembering* and *reflecting on* our experiences

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Vampire Capital: Social Classes in Dracula

December 27, 2021

Criticism

academia, capitalism, criticism, Gothic, society

Note: the following article on Vampire Capital and Social Classes in Dracula is a modified excerpt (pp. 127-131) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, see the list on the main website.

The emergence of the Gothic – particularly the Victorian Gothic – can be traced to the development of the market. The mid-nineteenth century also coincides with one of the most important theoreticians on capital, Karl Marx, who used numerous Gothic metaphors for his references to capitalism:

Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the worker works is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has bought from him. If the worker consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist (342).

Additionally, there is an association between, on the one hand, ghosts and specters, and, on the other, the transcendent nature of commodities and the invisibility of wealth. The association is facilitated through the introduction of economic devices such as the stock market and the prevalence of paper money (Smith, 149–150).

Andrew Smith claims that such an element can also be found in A Christmas Carol, as Scrooge’s wealth “is both there (hoarded) and not there (not in circulation)”, with a parallel formed between the “spectrality” of money and that of ghosts (150). Scrooge becomes a prime example – if not an actual personification – of this very invisibility of wealth.

For Marx, vampire capital was an apt metaphor of how capitalism becomes engorged by parasitically sucking life out of labor

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