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Old Memories Murmured in Dreams: Young Love Poetry

May 20, 2024

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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Pornography or Erotica? On Art’s Function, Purpose, and Essence

March 18, 2024

The topic might sound unusual and, ironically enough, this too is part of the theme. Namely, we should be able to explore a topic as ubiquitous as human sexuality. The differentiation between pornography and erotica (erotic art, that is) is problematic. United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart notoriously said he couldn’t define it but he knew it when he saw it.

That isn’t good enough.

I want to define it and I want to understand it. I’ve had some discussions on the topic with my friend Igor, and I decided to take my side of the emails we exchanged, edit it for length and focus, and turn it into a post.

But here’s an important caveat: My main interest isn’t in defining pornography (or erotica). Rather, I want to create a more general theoretical framework that talks about the differences between art’s function, purpose, and essence. So while there will be a fairly in-depth discussion on pornography, erotica, and their differences, my ultimate focus will divert to art in general.

pornography vs erotica. Image of young woman
Erotica doesn’t even need to display nudity to be erotic. Though, funnily enough, even nudity itself can be a matter of definition (i.e. historical/cultural contexts). Is the woman of the photo nude (a little? a lot?) or not? Ask a twenty-year old secular, liberal person in present-day Helsinki and a Victorian prude like Christina Rossetti, and you’ll get very different answers!
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Review of Boredom by Alberto Moravia

October 24, 2022

The original title of Alberto Moravia’s novel is La Noia, which means “Boredom”. For some unfathomable reason, there are many English translations referring to the book as The Empty Canvas. In this review of Boredom, self-evidently, I stick to the more direct translation of the title.

Alberto Moravia was an Italian author who produced plenty of interesting texts in the decades right after World War II. He did write (and publish) earlier, too, but his most intriguing texts came after the war. Boredom is certainly one of them.

If I had to pick just one word to describe it, it would be… No, not “boredom”. In Moravia’s novel, as his protagonist explicitly clarifies, boredom isn’t what you think it is. Perhaps the word I’d pick, the one arguably coming closer to the protagonist’s predicament, is absurdity.

review of boredom
This review of Boredom, by Alberto Moravia, focuses on the way the Italian author portrays aspects of existentialist self-delusion.
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