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Big City Living (why I Love the Smell of Garbage)

December 26, 2017

city, comparing, feelings, urban, writing

What’s better, to live in a big city or a small village? Hey, there’s a thought: what’s better, to live in a small city or a big village (and does that phrase make sense)? I was born in a metropolis with a bit over 4 million inhabitants. I lived there until I was 17 – hence, a massive influence on my personality. Then I moved to another metropolis, about the same size (maybe very slightly bigger in absolute numbers, but covering a larger area it always felt smaller).

And then, I moved to a hamlet with about 100 inhabitants. Don’t ask why or where, it doesn’t matter. Life just happens. And life just happened when, after about two years in that village, I moved to a town that was larger by about 2000 people – and colder by about 40 degrees F (20C) on average. There, I lived for another two years until I moved to the place I currently live – a city of about 350.000 inhabitants.

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The Eternal Now in Gothic Literature

December 22, 2017

Criticism

academia, criticism, Gothic, literature, time, writing

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Note: this article is based on my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, see here.

What Is the Eternal Now

Arthur Schopenhauer states in his 1818 The World as Will and Representation that “[the present], empirically apprehended, is the most fleeting of all … [It] constantly becomes and passes away, in that it either has been already or is still to come” (Schopenhauer 1969, 279).

The metaphysical spectrality of this undefinably small present, this malleable here-and-now, seems to exist in a conflicting relationship with the sheer weight of reality it seems to carry. Human consciousness possesses epistemological access to the present that is uniquely more reliable than that of the past or the future.

The reason is that these “contain mere concepts and phantasms … The present alone is that which always exists” (Schopenhauer 1969, 279). I refer to this present, the borders of which are ambiguous, as the eternal now or the eternal present.

The Eternal Now in the Gothic — The Eternal Now is a major part of Gothic Fiction

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Mediocrity: Why Is It so Fashionable?

December 20, 2017

Society

art, education, injustice, mediocrity, writing

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Let’s talk about mediocrity. Let’s talk about art, too. I’m looking at the charts for the week of April 30, 2016. The song at the top is a song by Rihanna (feat. Drake) called “Work”. Let’s take a look at the lyrics.

Work, work, work, work, work, work
He said me haffi
Work, work, work, work, work, work!
He see me do me
Dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt!
So me put in
Work, work, work, work, work, work
When you ah gon’
Learn, learn, learn, learn, learn
Meh nuh care if him
Hurt, hurt, hurt, hurt, hurting

Now, let’s take a look at the song that was at the top of the list in the same week 30 years ago. I discover it was “5150” by Van Halen. Let’s take a look at the lyrics of that song.

The love in me is never straight and narrow
Unless the love is tried and true
You take a chance with new beginnings
Still we try, win or lose, take the highs
With the blues

It might not be something that would raise Samuel Coleridge from his grave, but hey, I doubt it would make him roll over in it, either.

Parthenon, the very opposite of mediocrity.

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