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My Medēn Art Project

January 10, 2022

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.

Medēn
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Stream of Consciousness Nonfiction: Can It Work?

December 20, 2021

This will probably be one of the weirdest posts I’ve ever written, but if we don’t try new things how can we challenge ourselves? Without the courage to lose sight of the shore, how can we discover new oceans? This post on whether stream of consciousness nonfiction can work is an example-in-itself.

I decided to give myself a challenge: start writing a post and see how much I can write in the span of thirty minutes. Can stream of consciousness nonfiction work? What will it look like? Is it worth it? Will I stop making silly, self-evident questions and instead proceed with the post itself?

I’ll document my progress as I go along, because I feel this will be the most useful (to you) part of the entire experiment.

stream of consciousness nonfiction
Whenever I don’t have time to think much about an image, I simply add a cat photo. Always works!
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Experimental Fiction: Examples and Dynamics

March 29, 2020

Experimental fiction examples aren’t easy to find. The thing is, experimental fiction is the kind of writing that rarely produces a commercial hit – though it does so every now and then.

Imagine literary fiction on LSD, and you have something like experimental fiction. But no, not all experimental fiction is literary – and certainly most of literary fiction isn’t experimental.

A definition of experimental fiction isn’t easy, either. In some sense, experimental fiction is the kind of fiction that displays significant deviation from literary norms – mostly in structural, formatting, or methodological aspects. We’ll see more about all these in a moment, through the examples I’ve picked.

At the same time, we must also recognize an interesting paradox: Whether a novel is experimental or not must be seen in connection with its context. In other words, what is groundbreaking, radical, and unorthodox today, might be the norm tomorrow.

For some, experimental fiction is “weird”. For others, it’s “awesome”. As for me, it’s an interesting opportunity to learn a thing or two about how fiction, writing, and even literary criticism operate.

Experimental Fiction, image of book
Experimental fiction examples aren’t easy to find, because this kind of writing produces a commercial hit rather rarely
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