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Showing posts from June, 2012

Memories put in mothballs

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It is rather interesting that the Greek Civil War was not mirrored in epic narratives. Novels on this subject, in their majority, reproduced the propaganda of either the winner or the defeated. The novels which didn’t follow this rule were very rare. In these conditions of political asphyxia poetry worked like a metaphorical catharsis, painful therapy or like a mirror, especially for those who were defeated during the Civil War. Poetry was a way of telling a traumaticstory that few in the country were willing or permitted to hear ( Read MORE )

Open letter to a Northern European...

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Hello from Athens and thank you for asking me how I’m doing in this mess. We walk in the streets. We buy fruits from the greengrocer. We listen to the radio and watch football. We are doing a thousand useful and useless things and thinking a thousand useful and useless thoughts – each and every one of us… things that will never be reported  on the front pages of the major international newspapers and in the headlines of the major international TV channels. Big Media, actually, is expecting to break the Big News on the results of the Greek election. The Big News is called the “Grexit”. Which means, according to the experts, a total collapse for Greece and an eventual collapse for the Eurozone. It’s a period of economic crises and prolific in neologisms. “Grexit” is the latest buzzword.  But here, for the time being, we are recycling old concepts and words. For example, the words “plot” and “guinea pig”. More and more people are convinced that Greece is  the “guinea pig” of the