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Two Weeks Visiting Lemnos (or, Taking a Shot at a Travelogue)

June 19, 2023

If you are reading these lines around the time this post went live, I’m enjoying the Greek summer sun having iced coffee on the beach. I’m visiting Lemnos, a Greek island in the north Aegean Sea, and I had a funny idea: How about if I wrote a travelogue – a form I’ve never written?

I’ll confess it right away: The reason I’ve never written a travelogue (as a blog post, let alone anything longer) is because I’m not interested in them. I don’t care about travelogues as a reader, either. But hey, it’s important to get out of your comfort zone every now and then, so I’ll give it a shot.

What’s in it for you?

Plenty of photos from a genuinely beautiful place, as well as intriguing details you almost certainly don’t know.

visiting Lemnos — The Old ~~Man~~ Cat and the Sea, Lemnos-style. The cats around the port know the exact time fishing trawlers return, and patiently await their arrival

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My Medēn Art Project

January 10, 2022

Experiencing, Literature

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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Review of Rachel Cusk’s Outline

July 21, 2019

Book Review, Criticism

book, fiction, Greece, literary fiction, literature, Rachel Cusk, review

This post features another book review, and yet it’s so much more than a review. Writing this review of Rachel Cusk’s Outline is a fantastic opportunity for me to talk about literary fiction. What it should be and what it doesn’t care about.

Often on this blog I talk about over-explaining in fiction, or about realistic characters versus insignificant plots. Rachel Cusk’s Outline is one of the best examples of what high-quality (literary) fiction ought to be.

Outline is not perfect (we’ll talk about its flaws in a while), but as an example it’s near-flawless. In other words, it’s great teaching material.

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