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Thursday, February 12, 2009
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HORROR SH0W
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In his impressions of Siberia, an American traveler writes that whenever he wanted to say “good” in Russian, he would say, “horror show” (=horosho). Reminds me of Rosalind Russell in A MAJORITY OF ONE saying “You're welcome” in Japanese sounds like “Don't touch my mustache” (=Do-itashimasta”).
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From a televised interview with deputy prime minister of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, a puppet of Putin:
“What do you like doing best?”
“Fighting. I'm a soldier.”
“And when there's no one left to fight?”
“I have bees, bulls, fighting dogs.”
“What else to you like?”
“Partying. I love women.”
“And your wife doesn't mind?”
“I do it secretly.”
From THE ANGEL OF GROZNY by Asne Seierstad (New York, 2008, page 100).
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A moderate pacifist doesn't have a chance against a warlike fanatic.
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When an Armenian realizes he cannot settle his score with Turks, he moves on to an easier target – his fellow Armenians, and the more defenseless the better.
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We learn from failure. Success has the opposite effect.
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It is good to be smart but not to appear to be smart – especially if one is an idiot.
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As a child I was brought up to believe all Turks go to hell. As an adult I know that not all Armenians go to heaven.
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Friday, February 13, 2009
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THE POWER AND THE GLORY
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Because they can't promise peace and prosperity, nationalists promise power and glory, and what mortal can resist two divine attributes? (“For thine is the power and the glory.”)
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There are many schools of criticism, the most common are envy-driven and revenge-driven.
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I have yet to meet an anti-Semite who wasn't a bully.
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Churchill on de Gaulle: “What can you do with a man who looks like a female llama surprised when bathing?”
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Under the Soviets we experienced despotism, intolerance, censorship, corruption, abuses of power, and purges (a euphemism for the systematic slaughter of the best and the brightest). And yet, there are those who assert the Soviets ushered in a renaissance of arts and culture. Who says Armenians are smart? Only Armenian idiots who think they are thinking even as they recycle enemy propaganda.
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Nabokov's aristocratic contempt for lower-class writers like Dostoevsky, Mann, and Sartre reminds me of the king who, after the premiere of DON GIOVANNI, said to Mozart: “Too many notes.”
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Once, when I was the regular book-reviewer of several Armenian-American weeklies, I received a book of memoirs by a rug merchant with a note that said, the longer the review, the bigger the check in the mail.
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The universal and irresistible temptation to appear smarter or better than we are.
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Saturday, February 14, 2009
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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Our faith in Athena, goddess of wisdom, has collapsed, but the Parthenon stands. We are made of stardust, and it is the dust that will survive.
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We are careful to admit only the failings we think we have overcome.
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Our Turcocentric ghazetajis think humor is pro-Ottoman.
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In his WISDOM OF THE SANDS, Saint-Exupery tells us to be aware of misguided pity. There are beggars, he explains, who love to cling to their stench and to expose their sores.
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A self-appointed commissar of culture may qualify as a potential murderer but not as a critic.
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"For a smart man, you can be very naïve!" a trial lawyer, who is also a good friend, tells me. I don’t know about smart but I am worse than naïve when I get emotionally involved. Emotion reduces a complex reality into a one-dimensional extension of ourselves. Emotion, writes Sartre somewhere, attempts to change the world by means of magic. What could be more primitive?
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Saint-Simon: “My self-esteem has always increased in direct proportion to the damage I was doing to my reputation.”
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Tolstoy: “The higher I rise in the opinion of others, the lower I sink in my own.”
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Writers like Naregatsi, Raffi, Baronian, Odian, Zarian, Shahnour, Massikian, among many others, prove that criticism and patriotism are not incompatible concepts; blind patriotism by contrast is almost always symptomatic of fascism.
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