Home For Fiction – Blog

for thinking people


Why I Want to be Forgotten when I Die

July 1, 2024

For most people – certainly for most artists – to be forgotten when they die is not something they would wish. They would like to be remembered for a long time. Sometimes, when they fantasize about success, they might even dream of an undefined future, long after their demise, with their name still associated with artistic or other achievements.

Not me. I want to be forgotten when I die. I want my art, in particular, everything that I’ve made – from novels to songs to drawing – to disappear as if it had never existed.

This might sound counterintuitive, odd, and to some readers even hypocritical. I don’t blame you. As I said, to be forgotten when you die is not something you hear often from the mouth of people who create. Yet my motivations, as always, are entirely selfish. The deeper reasons might even be useful to you.

I want to be forgotten when I die. Image of graves
This is the graveyard of a small village on Lemnos, Greece, where my grandparents are buried – and, parenthetically, where some of the action in The Storytelling Cat takes place. I remember them, but after I and a couple other people die, there will be nobody left to remember them. It will be as if they never existed. I want the same, I want to be forgotten when I die, especially my art
(more…)

Review of The Glasgow Coma Scale

June 24, 2024

Whenever I go to the library, trying to find something to read, I often end up frustrated. Call me picky if you want. Yet as I’m going through the blurbs (nowadays even they are buried beneath the asinine, useless “INSTANT BESTSELLER!” tags), what I see is more and more authors overly enamored with plot. I decided to write this review of The Glasgow Coma Scale by Neil D.A. Stewart before I’d read ten pages of it.

The reason?

Because it at least didn’t try to reinvent the wheel. The blurb didn’t promise some sort of epic saga spanning three continents and six decades, or some sort of in-between state between fantasy and reality.

As it turned out, it was actually a damn well-written book to boot. Truly, a masterclass on what quality literature should be.

review of Glasgow coma scale. photo of street graffiti.
Much of the book is about juxtaposition, the interplay between antithetical qualities. Yet at the same time, the title of the book is not only a reference to the location where the events take place – Glasgow, Scotland – but also the eponymous test assessing brain damage and response to stimuli. In a novel about giving up, this becomes a highly relevant metaphor
(more…)

Conscientious Workers: Meaning of a Dying Breed

June 17, 2024

What’s the first word coming to mind when you hear conscientious? Though it might be objector (an interesting topic for another day), in this post I’m focusing on conscientious workers and why, as a concept, it’s highly revealing of the rapid societal transformation we’re experiencing.

Inspiration for this post came from a remarkable interview the French-Greek philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis gave in 1991. Castoriadis is not very well known in the Anglophone world – he wrote in French – but his societal analyses are remarkably prescient. If you haven’t done so, take a look at my post on the collapse of criteria – based on this very interview I’ll be examining today, too.

In a nutshell, Castoriadis makes an intriguing argument regarding conscientious workers as a dying breed. According to him, to work conscientiously is meaningless in capitalism from a systemic point of view. Capitalism relies on conscientious workers, but does not produce them; they are remnants of older societies.

It goes without saying that the repercussions are monumental – and dystopian.

conscientious workers; image of woman packaging
When you have to work long hours at relentless speed (and with the threat of being fired if you don’t), quality becomes a meaningless sidethought
(more…)