Meet your deadlilnes for the
next conference, publication, or practice discussing ideas or magazines, books, etc.
Schedule: Please contact me for available times.
Place: In-person and online.
Contact: erik@lab.erikpeter.me
Signal/Molly: @erik.204
Enjoy the process of discussing great literature. No expertise required.
Forget AI. Just express what you think.
The theme of unreliable narrators offers many great options, and this week's story
continues to be read and performed over a century from its publication.
Text: "The Nose" by Gogol
「鼻」 ニコライ・ゴーゴリ
Nikolai Gogol uses common settings to stage events that resist easy interpretation. Join Kovalyov as he struggles to recover his nose, which goes missing and takes him on an absurd chase around a city.
If you haven't seen William Kentridge's setting for The Nose (Met Opera), here is a preview of Shostakovich's masterpiece:
1914 painting by Malevich, who showed the architecture of unreliable narrators in his Manifesto of Suprematism.
Order Book: Contact by email.
Schedule: Ongoing, contact for times.
Place: Online or in-person, never in AI!
Cost: Please contact for details.
Contact: erik@lab.erikpeter.me
Our best stories often come from unreliable narrators, which may be absurd, demented, pathological, playful,
Socratic, or confuse us for other reasons. Going back to Socrates in Plato's Phaedrus:
"enormous advantages now come to us through madness once it is given as a divine gift.
In fact, the prophetess at Delphi and the priestesses at Dodona do a great deal of good for Greece,
both privately and publicly, when they are mad, but they accomplish little or nothing
when they are sound-minded." (244 b)
Mania can be a blessing, and aporia may cause us to pause, reexamine our assumptions, and reveal something new.
Join and discuss classic authors (workshop: erik@erikpeter.me) like Dostoevsky, Gilman, Poe, Plato, Plotinus, Gogol, Akutagawa
and others. How do various unreliable narrators function as tools for discovery?
What is the value of aporia?
