reading

April 18, 2010
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WRITING
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From an interview with Philippe Sollers in the latest issue of LE POINT:
“To know how to write, one must know how to read; and to know how to read, one must know how to live. That's all there is to it.”
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“It is said that anyone can be a writer because language is a medium at everyone's disposal. Allow me to confide in you if I may: writing is an art.”
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VICTIMS
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Not all victims are nice. I will never forget the young, attractive woman who was so rude to me that I did something I have never done before: I walked out on her. When she went and complained to my employer, he telephoned to explain that she had once killed a man who had tried to rape her.
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CRITICS AND DUPES
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There is more merit in being too critical to the point of being wrong than being a dupe. When one is wrong one may be corrected. But the chances of a dupe seeing the light are slim to the point of being non-existent. Racists, fanatics, fascists, and skinheads have existed and will continue to exist even in the most liberal democracies like the United States of America, and even in the most “progressive, civilized, and intelligent” nation like Armenia.
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TURKS
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If we call Turks swine we run the risk of alienating the good Turks as well as the half-Armenians within Turkey, that is to say, our most important potential allies.
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If teachers in Turkey have no choice but to use textbooks approved by the state, in what way is the average Turk today guilty or evil?
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April 19, 2010
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EXTRAVAGANT CLAIMS
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With the financial support of the Gulbenkian Foundation, an Irish academic by the name of D.M. Lang once wrote and published a lavishly illustrated book titled ARMENIA: CRADLE OF CIVILIZATION. Another academic, J. Strzygowski by name (an Austrian, I think) published a monograph asserting Italian Renaissance architecture is unthinkable without Armenian medieval architecture. Both claims have been rejected by our own academics, among them Sirarpie Der Nersessian, who was later to expose the illegal sale of ancient Armenian manuscripts by the Patriarch of Jerusalem, a well-known black marketeer.
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The sad truth is, there are as many charlatans in academia as there are in politics, organized religions, medicine, and jurisprudence.
Medicine. Last night on 60 MINUTES a con man maintained he could reverse the symptoms and even cure such terminal conditions as pancreatic cancer for the modest sum of $125,000. To prove this assertion he listed an impressive array of credentials, all of which were exposed as phony.
Jurisprudence. Consider its Greek variant which, in its Golden Age, condemned Socrates to death; Roman jurisprudence that crucified our Lord.
More recently British jurisprudence that imprisoned Gandhi; Soviet jurisprudence and its Gulags; German jurisprudence and its concentration camps; and last but far from least, American jurisprudence that, with the blessing of the Church (all denominations) legitimized racism in the South and its countless crimes against humanity.
One may therefore be justified in suspecting that the aim of a justice system (even at its most progressive and civilized stage of development) is to legitimize criminal conduct.
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Who is taken in by charlatans? Not just the ignorant, the naïve, and the desperate, but also underdogs and victims whose egos have been so mortally wounded that like drowning man they will cling even to the most absurd lie.
Hamlet's assertion that to be an honest man is to be one in ten thousand holds as true today as it did four centuries ago.
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For more on Lang, Strzygowski, and Sirarpie der Nersessian, see my ARMENIANS: THEIR HISTORY & CULTURE (New York, 1980) which was published by the AGBU (also known as KGBU in some circles), a textbook that was conceived and written for the purpose of flattering the naïve and the uninformed (beginning with myself).
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April 20, 2010
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READING MANN
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“The intellectual man is almost as much interested in painful truths as the fool is in those which flatter him.”
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Thomas Mann was a contemporary of Hitler who saw him as an enemy of the state as well as his own personal enemy. Like all megalomaniacs (a condition not alien to us) the German dictator thought of himself not only as a great statesman and a messianic figure on the stage of world history, but also a better writer than Mann. His resentment grew exponentially when Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize and his MAGIC MOUNTAIN sold many more copies than MEIN KAMPF. He tried to have him assassinated but failed. Mann escaped to America where he wrote a big book on Jews – the four-volume JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS, a magnificent and magisterial retelling of a story from the GENESIS. He also wrote many analytical commentaries in which he tried to understand and explain his fellow Germans. Understanding Germans also meant understanding Hitler and his hold over the nation:
“The totalitarian statesman is the founder of a religion; or, more accurately, the founder of an infallible inquisitorial system of dogma that forcibly suppresses every heresy while itself resting on legend – a system to which truth must austerely submit.”
Sounds familiar?
On Hitler as speechifier:
“It is oratory unspeakably inferior in kind, but magnetic in its effect on the masses: a weapon of definitely histrionic even hysterical power, which he thrusts into the nation's wound and turns it round.”
Further down:
“Thanks to his own baseness, he has indeed succeeded in exposing much of our own.”
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Mann and Hitler shared a boundless admiration for Wagner's music. That was enough for Mann to call Hitler “a brother.”
“A brother – a rather unpleasant and mortifying brother. He makes me nervous, the relationship is painful to a degree. But I will not disclaim it. For I repeat: better, more productive, more honest, more constructive than hatred is recognition, acceptance, the readiness to make oneself one with what is deserving of our hate.”
Finally, here is Mann on his contemporaries, among them Heidegger (according to some, the greatest philosopher of his time) who were taken in by Hitler in the same way that our own own writers were taken in by Stalin in both the Homeland and the Diaspora:
“...lame-brained sycophant intellectuals who mistook the vilest travesty of Germanism for the real thing – who spinelessly took part in every abjectness, prating the while of 'change in spiritual structure.'”
One must be blind not to see parallels here.
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April 21, 2010
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ON STYLE
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A rich vocabulary may complicate matters. Speaking for myself, I prefer a limited vocabulary -- as in the Bible or Hemingway. Less confusing. Easier to follow. More accessible. Shakespeare is at his best when he uses monosyllables -- “To be or not to be...”
“For whom the bell tolls.” That's not Hemingway but Donne.
Nabokov on Hemingway: “Bulls, bells, balls.”
Hemingway on writing: “Don't borrow, steal!”
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If it takes you an entire page to say what could be said in a single line, then the challenge you face is not being right but being readable.
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ON QUOTATIONS
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To those who say I quote too much, my answer is: We all quote or paraphrase and, more often than not, garble and misinterpret our sources.
Some of us do their utmost to quote honest witnesses; others prefer charlatans who will corroborate their perjury.
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ON LIMITATIONS
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One of the hardest things in life is to know one's limitations. But to most people, their limitations might as well be unknown territory.
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ON BRAGGARTS
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As children we were taught to brag about our past achievements. I will never forget the Greek who kept bragging about ancient Greek culture and its many contributions to world civilization to a bored American who finally said: “What else have you done more recently?”
What about us? What else have we done beside dropping our pants?
Once when I asked that question to a loud-mouth Armenian, he replied: “We taught the Azeris a lesson they will never forget.”
In other words, we did to them what they did to us. And I thought, there goes our much vaunted moral superiority down the drain.
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ON MORTALITY
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It is easy to come to terms with your own mortality; much more difficult to survive the death of someone you love.
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