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Thucydides and Linux: a Free or a Peaceful OS?

May 27, 2024

computer, ignorance, society, technology

You’ve got to admit, seeing Thucydides and Linux together in the same sentence isn’t something ordinary. “Linux” and “free” is far more common, for obvious reasons. But whether Linux is free is one discussion; whether it’s a peaceful operating system yet another.

So where does Thucydides, the ancient Greek historian, enter the picture?

You might recall from some previous posts – for instance, the concluding section of writing academic theses – that Cornelius Castoriadis, drawing on Thucydides, puts forward an apt suggestion: We can be free or we can be peaceful, but being both is impossible.

In our time – when to some/many/most/[pick depending on your neighbors] people to be free means to own guns – understanding the repercussions of freedom becomes more pressing than ever.

And yes, this includes your operating system! However, I should make one thing clear here: The role of this post is not to glorify one OS and snub others. It’s not even about computers and technology – not primarily at least. The post is about society.

Linux free, not peaceful; AI render of Thucydides using a computer on Acropolis — As if combining Thucydides and Linux wasn’t wild enough, I thought to reach the utmost of absurdity and use AI to generate this image

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Old Memories Murmured in Dreams: Young Love Poetry

May 20, 2024

Fiction

book, fiction, literature, love, poetry, writing

An old joke claims that thirty years of marriage is when she wonders what happened to the guy she married, while he wonders what happened to the girl he didn’t marry. There’s something special about young love, and poetry themed around this concept has certain unique features as well.

The most important element is of course relevant to rosy retrospection. Young love – our first romantic interactions in teenagehood and early adulthood – might be beautiful, meaningful, and exhilarating, but it’s also confusing, painful, scary, and sometimes dark and destructive.

No sane person would ever want to go through that more than once!

But that’s the beauty of art: It allows us to safely experience and reflect on feelings, thoughts, and states of mind that we wouldn’t want to experience in “reality”.

So I decided – on a whim, basically – to put together Old Memories Murmured in Dreams, a poetry collection focusing on young love. Quite frankly, I’m not even sure we can call it poetry – I tend to see it more like my Medēn art project; something between poetry and prose.

In any case, if we want to call it poetry for simplicity’s sake, it’s poetry from a naïve, young-adult perspective, but with intriguing darkness. Hey, it’s me; what did you expect!

young love poetry; cover art for Old Memories Murmured in Dreams — Cover art, made by yours truly

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Review of A Naked Woman in the Snow by Dariush Beritan

May 13, 2024

Book Review, Criticism

literature, review, short story

A Naked Woman in the Snow is a short-story collection by Dariush Beritan. Indeed, it’s a… short short-story collection, at about 80 pages and containing five stories. In other words, although (as you will see in this review) it’s not a collection for everyone, it also doesn’t require much of your time. That makes it a marvelous opportunity to try something you’re unfamiliar with.

Familiarity with the subject matter – or lack thereof – will be the key concept in this review, because at the same time it’s what assigns the collection much of its expressive power yet also what keeps it from being fully relatable. But this isn’t as much of a problem as you might think. Indeed, I’d even say it’s a literary device – it’s not a bug, it’s a feature!

review of a naked woman in the snow; image of wheatfield — A good portion of *A Naked Woman in the Snow* is set in settings far outside what I’d term “the Anglophone experience”

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