money

Thursday, July 23, 2009
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MONEY
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Whenever the subject of compensating writers for their work comes up, we are informed there is no money. Which of course is another one of our big lies. My first paying job at the age of 18 was as translator for a partisan daily in Athens, and I was paid handsomely.
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Near the end of his life, Granian, himself a prominent Tashnak and world traveler, once said to me: “We organize lavish banquets to celebrate anniversaries of total mediocrities, after which we have the audacity to say, there is no money...”
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In a commentary I once wrote, I made fun of anniversary banquets and I remember to have said something to the effect that, unlike our Jack S. Avanakians, neither Tolstoy nor G.B. Shaw celebrated their 40th or 50th anniversary of their debut as writers. This must have offended a recent celebrant who called a friend of mine to tell him I should stop persecuting him. As Cagney would say: “They can dish it out but they can't take it.”
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One of our philistines once wrote me an angry letter saying, “You are a writer. Behave like one, for heaven's sake. Stop talking about money. It's undignified. Imagine if you can Mozart or Beethoven talking about money.” In my reply I explained that I did not have to imagine anything, and that if he took the trouble to read Mozart's and Beethoven's letters, he would see that money is mentioned more frequently than any other subject.
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You may have noticed by now that like most people I prefer to speak of my minor victories and to ignore my major defeats. May I therefore assure you, gentle reader, that my major defeats far outnumber my insignificant victories, and if I don't speak of them it may be because if I did I would be even more depressing, gloomy, unbearable, and unreadable.
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One reason I don' mind exposing the negative aspects of our collective existence and ethos is that for everyone who writes as I do, there are dozens of apologists eager to explain and justify our ways on the grounds that everybody does it. There is some truth in that. There is no such thing as a stupid or incompetent nation, only stupid and incompetent leaders.
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Friday, July 24, 2009
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REALITY & ILLUSIONS
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Compared to Armenians, Canadians have very few problems, and yet, they spend an inordinate amount of time discussing them in their media, unlike Armenians who spend even more time ignoring or covering them up.
I scan the latest issue of my Armenian weekly:
Navasartian games in California,
a new school building in Michigan,
a jubilee evening dedicated to one of our dime-a-dozen elder statesmen,
a headline with the word “basterma” in it,
articles about half-a-dozen minor celebrities
and their even more minor recent triumphs.
And now, consider the headlines in this morning's local paper:
Murder investigations and trials, burglaries,
a large variety of other crimes and misdemeanors,
waiting time in hospital emergency rooms,
several articles on greedy and incompetent administrators
and their phony expense accfounts,
car accidents, politically incorrect civil servants,
corruption in high places,
the unemployment rate,
the sorry state of the economy, and so on.
If one were to judge Canadians and Armenians by the contents of their printed media, one would have to conclude that Canada is a morally bankrupt country on the verge of disintegration, and Armenians in their homeland and diaspora never had it so good because they are in the best of hands and everything that must be done is being done.
And if you believe that, I have no choice but to assume you also believe in Santa Claus and the theory that maintains the earth is as flat as a pancake.
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Saturday, July 25, 2009
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THINGS TO REMEMBER
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If it took brainwashing to convince you, it can't be true.
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One of the safest assumptions you can make is that, the most important things you were taught as a child were lies.
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At all times and everywhere, what we don't know far exceeds what we know, and this applies even to the wisest among us – from Socrates (“The only thing I know is that I don't know”) to Chekhov (“If I can't answer the most important questions, am I not fooling the reader?”).
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We should teach our children to doubt and to question rather than to accept our answers as established truths.
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The function of a truth is not to establish itself but to raise more questions.
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Some of the greatest crimes against humanity were committed in the name of established truths.
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When an established truth is contradicted by another established truth, the result will be two big lies. Case in point: American democracy versus Russian communism.
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At the root of all empires there is a big lie.
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And now, from the general and the abstract to the specific and the concrete:
If the most important function of the State is to reconcile conflicting interests, it follows, during most of our historic existence we have been a collection of stateless tribes at the mercy of fools who have done their utmost to brainwash us into believing they are smart.
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