comments

Sunday, December 4, 2010
****************************
FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
************************************************
Bob Woodward in a recent interview: “I get up in the morning with the question: what are the bastards hiding?”
*
When I run out of things to say, I repeat myself, but not as often as our bosses, bishops, benefactors, and Turcocentric ghazetajis -- especially Turcocentric ghazetajis who, like me, have no choice but to speak about repellent things: Turks, in their cases; our leadership in mine.
*
It is a writer's duty to make sense. Unlike speechifiers, sermonizers, and propagandists, he is not allowed to be irrational.
*
An old Armenian composer once said to me: “I am grateful to all Armenians who refrained from obstructing my path.”
*
To say that I am an unpopular writer is to distort reality. The truth is, in the eyes of those who decide who is and is not popular, I don't even qualify as a writer -- a nuisance and a sh*t-disturber, maybe, but a writer, no!
*
Are we survivors as our propagandists like to tell us? The answer is, only in so far as the brain-dead and the comatose may be said to be alive.
#
Monday, December 5, 2010
****************************
FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
************************************************
With Russian military support, Iranian friendship, and American dollars, we are now masters of our own house. We never had it so good. So what if our best and brightest emigrate? So what if we don't have popular support? What matters is that we are no longer “tshvar, ander” but “azad, angakh!”
*
Once upon a time Turks were subjects of the Sultan. They are now children of Atatürk. They didn't lose an empire, they gained a papa.
*
The only thing our benefactors know about literature is that all writers are beggars.
*
When it comes to writers, what our leadership wants is not their ideas but their cojones surgically removed and presented to them on a platter; and the astonishing part is that most writers don't mind singing soprano.
*
Some of my Turkish friends think because I am critical of Armenians I must be anti-Armenian and pro-Turkish. It doesn't even occur to them to think that I may be against lies, intolerance, and corruption regardless of nationality.
#
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
****************************
FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
************************************************
Think of ideas – all ideas – as experiments,
because if you don't,
you may end up as a Catholic, a Bolshevik,
or even a suicidal Muslim terrorist.
That's what happens to people
who take what they think or believe seriously
with no margin of error, no humor, no doubt,
no objectivity...and no sense.
Claude Levi-Strauss may well be closer to the truth
when he says, there is no difference
between a primitive jungle tribe
that trusts its witch doctor
and a so-called 21st-century industrialized, civilized,
and progressive society
that takes its popes, imams, and rabbis seriously.
What matters about a man
is not what he thinks or believes
but what he questions and doubts –
beginning with his own religion.
Not “I think therefore I am,”
but “I doubt therefore I am a human being.”
#
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
****************************
FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
************************************************
Where there is freedom of speech there will also be freedom to recycle lies and propaganda – in other words, fascism without fascists.
*
As power increases the number of brain cells decreases: there is an algebraic equation to prove this fact but those in power have been against its publication – for obvious reasons.
*
For everyone who knows what he is talking about there are at least ten (some say ten thousand) who don't.
*
I know what I write makes a deep impression when old friends become new enemies.
*
Harold Pinter: “Life is beautiful but the world is Hell.”
*
Rumor has it that writers, and artists in general, are unreliable and solitary eccentrics, unlike political and military leaders who oppress, exploit, deceive, lie, declare wars and commit massacres. In an abnormal world the normal is seen as an aberration.
#