Back in January of 2015 I met with Mimi in her flat in Stoke Newington, full of questions about (and barely concealed admiration for) her latest collection, The Weather Wheel, which had been published only a few months earlier. The hour-long interview was printed in the 4th issue of HARK magazine (March 2015). Here I reprint the interview and include the pieces which Mimi read, with the kind permission of […]
A few years ago I was in Rome and I visited the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore. Even though I found it breathtaking in scope and execution, with its grand proportions, fluid lines-of-sight and enormous gilded ceiling, I wasn’t inspired. I took a seat and closed my eyes, already thinking about my next stop in the city. As I was getting ready to leave, I looked up and was caught […]
The central character of this book is Lise, a single woman in her mid-thirties, who most likely is psychotic. Lise works in an accountancy firm and decides to take a vacation somewhere in the Mediterranean, in an unnamed place. Although she does meet people (on the plane and at her destination), she seems unable to connect with anyone, while at the same time she is desperately looking for the […]
* * * Fairy Tale Undisputed Can you see the fig tree, the weird fig tree? It is surrounded by sick angels sitting on Byzantine ruins. Can you hear its leaves breathing? Leaves become hands, in this moonlight, gripping the ancient stone. You are warned not to sleep under the tree: it is liked by snakes and traitors. Don’t even rest here – find an open space and wait for […]
‘I am a classical Greek living in the twentieth century.’ Iannis Xenakis In his Parisian atelier, Xenakis—Greek composer of some of the most thrilling and disturbing music of the last 100 years—always had to hand a slide rule, an electronic metronome, a stop-watch and at least one book by Plato in the original. His workspace looked more like a factory than a studio. Being without attachment to a particular style, […]
Collective Intelligence is a relatively new and loose term, which has been used to mean various things. A first attempt at defining it could go something like this: Collective Intelligence is an emergent property in groups of individuals acting both intelligently and collectively, which produces something inherently different from what would have been produced if each individual’s intelligence acted in isolation. There are many problems with how one defines intelligence […]
A novel, or a story, can’t be anything of the sort. It can’t be a machine, or a process, whether this is doing Bayesian inference or not. The novel itself is not dynamic and it doesn’t take an input, doesn’t produce an output. But of course when the book is picked up and read by someone else, other than its writer, something dynamic does begin to take place. The story’s […]
It is assumed that the identity of the person rests on that of consciousness. If, however, we understand by this merely the continuous recollection of the course of life, then it is not enough. We know, it is true, something more of the course of our life than of a novel we have formerly read, yet only very little indeed. The principal events, the interesting scenes, have been impressed on […]
D. I. Tsomokos 