The years following 2014 haven't been as artistically linear for me as before, a fact that reflects huge changes in my personal life for better and worse. The period haven't been unproductive, though:
I've published two artist's books and a collection of short stories; I've finished two theatre plays (chamber plays, now waiting for the theatres to open again so they can hopefully be performed – damn you pandemic!); I've written an ambitious introduction to Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception; I have been participating in the collective writing of erotic shorts stories under the nom du guerre Chleo which can bee seen as a sort of Decamecorona; I keep writing literary criticism and articles in the dailies Aftonbladet and Svenska Dagbladet; I have finished a first version of a new historical novel, "Vi var barn" / "We Were Children", a classical, tragic Love-story gone violently Bonnie & Clyde in the 1890:ies.
Also, I have written ten essays - or "Dissays" – in the Norwegian cultural magaine Vagant – one of the world's foremost and most ambitious of its kind, with its office in Berlin, a strong swedish presence and a neoscandinavistic outlook – since 2017. I have freely chosen my subjects; then the texts have been treated with deep ambition by the editors, with editor in chief Audun Lindholm first in line: such editorial commitment is an unusual blessing in our stressed-out times!
Without me having made a conscious decision or a plan, these texts, except for the very first one, started following a common tread or theme that could be summed-up as Literature, PTSD and Dissociation.
Recently, Dissay No. 9 was published: "In a Screen Darkly". It's a reflexion on the existential and cultural meaning of the technological step from glass-mirror to digital selfie these last 200 years, with E. A. Poe's work as the literary centre – and, obviously, references to the Duke of Dissociation, Philip K. Dick.
Some of the ideas in these Dissays may have some value and shouldn't remain unavailable to a non-Nordic audience; for instance I believe my hypothesis of the therapeutic value of reading and it's connection with EMDR, our time's most effective treatment of PTSD, has some originality: "Time and time and time and time again: PTSD, MPD, DID, EMDR and other letters".
Therefore, I am translating the Dissays into English and publishing them at Academia.edu, waiting for a publishing house to pick them up. Here, you can read three of them (+ some of my academic work on the history of alchemy):
https://independent.academia.edu/CarlMichaelEdenborg
(And yes, you should subscribe to Vagant! The Magazine stubbornly defends radical humanism and critical intellectualism in a depressingly antihumanistic time-period when supporting and fighting for these ideals are a matter of life and death.)
I am now working with Dissay No. 10 on Doppelgänger and Blindness, with a certain focus on the film-maker Lucio Fulci. It should be published this spring.
