Lukapej is a digital home to critical, academic, and—of course—creative (above anything else, but not limited to, fiction) writing by Luka Pejić, Croatian writer, linguist and literary translator.

While the first post may have been a literary critique and the second one a speculative flash fiction piece, the third may or may not be a poem with, perhaps, an analysis of that very poem, a blog post, a commentary of sorts, a creative first-person essay or an academic one, a research paper, a memoir entry, a novel excerpt, a random article because what I like to call sociopathology pissed me off again (and here I mean sociopath as much as psychopathology directly refers to any one psychopath), a book or film review or one of both of them and more—or a critical analysis of some piece all over again, except that is never merely literary: if the aforementioned self-proclaimed artist† (this Luka guy—myself, if you will) does at some point write a critique, it will be all but literary blabbering, as if that hasn’t been done to indecent extents by one too many rigid academic who dare not step out of their comfort zone for the fear of epistemological implosion or, a more common one that goes beyond any single field, and that is the fear of the so-called critical thinking and (gods forbid) actually learning something not screaming specifically [enter your rigid academic’s designated field or discipline they adopted like a snail and the house].

And this young artist’s Google Drive is full to the brim with various kinds indecencies of his own that demand fresh air—but I am doing everything but hunting down Zephyr and feeding him to all the drafts that are borderline aggressive with the lack of certain boundaries. More on my version of open-access publishing soon.

Now, a rather urgent thing I’ve wanted to scream from the heart and soul of my lungs for so long:

† One would think you’d need a sort of license to call yourself artist, when all you have to do is choose a few words (or colours, for that matter, or notes, et cetera), give your words an order—or disorder, if you prefer, which is perfectly fine because disorder is another word for mess, not illness††—a tone and intent, a mood, a channel of communicating the intended message, and soon you’ll realise that, contrary to popular belief, all humans are, without exception, born artists simply by engaging in communication: at some point they will have to make a decision on what meaning they wish to convey and the means of it, and they’ll do it even if they never open their mouth.

As for whether they’ll ever be less useless, to build some on Oscar Wilde’s famous defamation of art as unuseful, I suppose that, while art may or may not be useless or useful (which quite literally depends on whether you’re reading Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar when you are deeply disturbed already, or perhaps Rebecca F. Kuang’s The Poppy War trilogy if you’ve recently experienced a war-related psychological trauma (or, really, any kind of psychological trauma); Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower when you feel entirely lost, or André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name when you need to understand that your identity is a formidable thing not to be treated as an anomaly but an iridescent fingerprint-painted self-portrait that won’t ever happen again, and that you’re already quite understood and accepted by a rather unbelievable number of other individuals you’ve never met but might; or Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians if you’re eleven and hate reading but find yourself unable to put the book down, or simply reading it for the escapism it offers, that you could use at a certain point in life instead of any designer pill to get through a period—so, I guess, personally? I find some art is more useless than other).

†† As for those twenty-something psychiatric folders they like to place people like shoes that need a very demanding cleaning and then do everything but, note that, purely statistically speaking, any single housekeeper has been through and solved 100% more mess than any single psychiatrist or the psychiatry as an institution. Frankly? The statistics of psychiatry never curing a single patient, only ever treating any of them, including the clients who were never supposed to be patients†††—for my entertainment and yours, indulge in the Rosenhan experiment’s 101s, and note that the institution in question remains completely political and unscientific to this date, and that in the actual most cases psychotherapy alone (nearly extinct already, yes, so you might as well stop trying and get to it yourself, and if you ever wonder how, it’s quite simple, and I’ll show you), because it’s just so much easier to swallow the never-more-accessible akathisia… drug, I meant the psychotropic drug)—and what also is very often enough is what I find staggering in this year of the Lorde 2025 (but the black box of psycho-pharmaceutical industry à la David Healy that I intend to free into this wilderness will show you how viable concepts such as personality disorder (mostly people drugged to death for being misguided and/or adapting the best they can as an actually natural consequence of deeply rooted trauma, in so many cases) or, perhaps, antipsychotic medication (the pretty word for a neuroleptic drug, derived from Greek to denote nerve seizing)—but pharmaceutical industry is all about pretty names, so if you think the brand name Ambien for a sleep-inducing drug, or Abilify that, coincidentally, takes all ability away from those who are forced to take it (too often causing not just suicidal but homicidal thoughts), or Lunesta or Celexa or Lyrica or Lexapro or Effexor are all just some random names for chemical compounds that help people, I bet you’ll think twice soon enough, since the only reliable science used by the psycho-pharmaceutical symbiosis is communicology)—and the Google Drive in question is, at the point of writing this, already in inner turmoil, tormented with the ghosts of unpublished research paper drafts that I don’t care about offering to any gatekeeping journals.

††† As for whether one is a patient or a client, there’s a whole world of difference not in what happened to you but what may or may not, depending on the lexeme. I pledge here that communication science is one of the most fun games you’ll ever want to play (or be played unto)!

And I pledge that I shall write the devil out of communication, too. It’s not like I’m not given enough material every day to write just about people miscommunication or malcommunication every single day—and then die, and now what?

Note: About section still in development.

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