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Mass Tourism Needs to Die

September 16, 2024

Society

capitalism, ignorance, social masses, social media, society

Greece has many beautiful places, and though I’m Greek and I spent the first 20 or so years of my life there, I of course haven’t visited its every corner. I recently spent a few days on Crete, and let me tell you, it was an eye-opening experience. Mass tourism needs to die, yesterday!

You might have recently seen how Spanish citizens in Malaga and other places have protested mass tourism. If you live in any remotely touristy location – let alone a place like Rome, Paris, or Venice – you surely know first-hand how damaging mass tourism can be.

I was so affected by my own experiences – which I’ll talk about more in a while – that I decided to write this post. I was always against mass tourism, but now I am absolutely adamant: Mass tourism must die!

mass tourism needs to die. image of tourists in Louvre
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Review of The Glasgow Coma Scale

June 24, 2024

Book Review, Criticism

affect, art, book, literary fiction, literature, metatextuality, plot, restraint, review, social masses

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
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The Collapse of Criteria and the Prostitution of Art

March 4, 2024

Society

art, creativity, ignorance, literature, mediocrity, social masses, social media, society, writing

In an interview in 1991 (I will share the relevant excerpt translated/transcribed in this post), the Greek-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis pointed out a sobering fact: We live in an era characterized by the collapse of criteria and the prostitution of art.

That is to say, Castoriadis argued, we live in an era with no criteria by which to gauge art. As a result, art prostitutes itself and loses its true meaning. It becomes industrialized.

There are two important elements in this very short excerpt I will discuss in this post:

  • Castoriadis naturally spoke before the internet and – especially – social media. I wonder what he would think about them.
  • Importantly, Castoriadis argues that art should create its own criteria.

If art should create its own criteria, and we observe a collapse of criteria today, what does that tell us?

collapse of criteria. image of Acropolis
The Acropolis of Athens, Greece. Each era creates its own criteria. Parthenon still stands, 2500 years later
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