Wonderful! Thank you for these heartening thoughts.

To a degree. We can't escape his charge that describing a sea captain isn't the same as being one, for example. As for my approach... how long have you got 😅 I haven't got quite comfortable with the echoes of predecessors which will appear in my work, probably why the imitation topic interested me.

You express what I wondered about as I replied - the 'accidental' imitation, where we echo earlier artists, but these instances are far from what grates for Plato, which might be, for example, a pint-sized clay rendering of a hurricane, as opposed to 'later guy who borrowed a technique from Homer'.

and surely an intentional imitation, put forward as an original work, would be an act of deception? The result would be as 'real' as any other work of art, but it isn't the artist's natural vision, either (2/2).

Thank you. To answer your question, usually yes, absolutely - however in this case perhaps Plato is aligning the artist's original vision (manifested in their chosen form), however various, with reality. We could, therefore, extend the meaning of 'imitation' to mean a falsehood (1/2)

I loved last week's instalment, went back to it a few times. Thank you for this project!

Hi Angela, do you add to the list in the month at all? This one looks good... bsky.app/profile/augu...

Looked it up. Ah, a highly rated sequel. Thanks for the pointer.

Actually a subtle subversion on the 'US military might prevails' narrative popular at the time, because the ending shows that they never actually defeat the alien. The best they can hope for is survival. I enjoyed it, especially the cat-and-mouse jungle scenes, which run almost like a silent movie.