maxims

Sunday, February 8, 2009
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REACTIONARIES
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We sometimes forget that our revolutionaries, as well as dictators like Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, began their political careers as dissidents; but the only important lesson they appear to have learned is that, if it is easier to silence dissent, engaging in dialogue is a waste of time.
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Even as they dig us deeper into the hole, they speechify about the light at the end of the tunnel.
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On Armenian TV, a schoolmarm was delivering a report to a silent audience. At one point when she mentioned someone's contribution of a thousand dollars to the school, the audience woke up with a thunderous applause.
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To think someone else's thought is not thinking. To think, to really think, means to explore the not-yet-thought.
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The brainwashed cannot think; they can only think they are thinking.
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Understanding is a solitary endeavor. Prejudice is gang-driven.
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What is literature? In the preface of a history of French Literature I read the following: “Literature is not just something that writers produce. Oral literature preceded written literature and it has always coexisted with it. Conversation, unless it is purely utilitarian, is also a form of literature.”
What happens when two Armenians disagree? The answer must be, they produce anti-literature.
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Monday, February 9, 2009
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ONE-LINERS
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Flattering the scum of the earth does not qualify as love of one's fellow men.
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Mahatma Gandhi was not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize but Arafat was.
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My brilliant career: from a young man to watch to an old junkyard pit bull to be avoided.
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If like me, you were brought up on a steady diet of propaganda, you should have more questions than answers.
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Barbarians may be civilized. It is much more difficult with riffraff.
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To top dogs, words like democracy and human rights are just words that hardly register on their consciousness. To underdogs like me they may well be a matter of life and death.
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Etienne de Silhouette (1709-1767): French politician and financier under Louis XV who balanced the budget by taxing the privileged classes and the rich. His enemies gave his name to linear designs as a symbolic reference to the condition to which his victims (those he taxed) were reduced by the time he was through with them.
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No one believes anyone who assesses himself, and only gullible fools believe in gypsy fortune-tellers. To those who say, sometimes gypsies can be right, I say, they may well be, but an Armenian who brags never is.
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Tuesday, February 10, 2009
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ON SAROYAN
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In Athens, I read him in Greek, in Venice in Italian, and in Canada in English. He sounded good in all of them.
The three books that I enjoyed most:
HERE COMES, THERE GOES, YOU KNOW WHO,
PAPA YOU'RE CRAZY,
MAMA I LOVE YOU.
Not his best works, granted. What I loved about them was their spontaneity. It was this quality that encouraged many to become writers – most of them, like Kerouac and his followers, mediocrities.
I saw Saroyan only once in the 1950 in a schoolyard in Kokinia, a suburb of Athens. He spoke very briefly, with a booming voice, in Armenian, to an audience of about a hundred fellow countrymen. His two children were with him. Afterwards people went up to him, shook his hand, and exchanged a few words. I was too intimidated to follow their example.
About twenty years later, I wrote him a letter asking for an interview. A few years passed before I heard from him. He apologized for the delay, agreed to the interview, complained about a recent interview with an Armenian poet (who was later murdered in Moscow), mentioned Zarian (he knew him but couldn't figure him out, he said). To my astonishment he also said he reads everything I write, and wanted to know if I have written any fiction. In reply I sent him some of my published fiction but I never heard from him again. Someone who knew Saroyan well once said to me: “Saroyan is interested only in Saroyan.”
In the memoirs of his son Aram, and wife, Carol Matthau (referred to as “Carol Saroyan Saroyan” in Truman Capote's last and unfinished nonfiction fiction, ANSWERED PRAYERS, because she married him twice) Saroyan appears as a wholly unSaroyanesque character.
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Being Armenian looks easy only in Saroyan’s fiction. In reality it is such a demanding enterprise that most Armenians give up the effort and assimilate, and I for one do not blame them.
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The most amusing line that I remember from Carol Matthau's memoirs: “As Armenians like to say, when I say la, understand lalabloo.”
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Wednesday, February 11, 2009
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MAXIMS AND REFLECTIONS
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If Naregatsi, Raffi, Baronian, Odian, and Zarian, among many others, failed, what are our chances of success? Next to nil! We may, however, succeed if the “angularity of time” is in our favor. Life is unpredictable, the future uncertain, and the world as dangerous a place as the mouth of a volcano. Who would have thought that American capitalism would one day degenerate to socialism for the rich? Who would have imagined that three multi-millionaire chief executive officers, hostile to unions, would come to Washington in their private jets, united, begging for taxpayers' money?
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We are much more transparent than we think we are, and we expose ourselves more not by what we say but by what we avoid saying.
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Why should anyone care what a marginal scribbler thinks or says? -- unless of course he exposes a wound, at which point he becomes a nuisance, a menace, a disturber of the peace, and an enemy of the people.
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There are those who read me for the sheer pleasure of sending me abusive e-mails, and they are my best sources of stimulation.
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Why fight an adversary who is his own worst enemy? Why kill a man who is hanging himself?
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You start winning when you no longer care whether you win or lose.
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It is only when you try to change the status quo that you acquire a better understanding of the powerful forces that hold it together.
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