more notes/comments

Thursday, March 06, 2008
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ON POPULARITY
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Once upon a time I was popular. Everything I wrote was translated and published in a dozen papers in Canada, the United States, and the Middle East; and I wrote what was expected of me so well that even our bosses, bishops, and benefactors wanted to hire me. That’s when I knew I was on the wrong path. Popularity in our context is the kiss of death.
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The most widely exploited commodity is not labor but ignorance.
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It should be obvious by now that our problems will not be solved by our politicians for the simple reason that our politicians are our problems.
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I will be more than happy to be on the side of our ideologues and believers if someone explains to me which one of their dogmas justifies the division, dismemberment, and the ruin of the nation.
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Nothing comes easier to a loser than to brainwash himself into believing that on a higher plane or in a different dimension he is a winner and those who portray themselves as winners are swine.
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We may sympathizers with failures and losers but not when they are in denial of their condition.
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Friday, March 07, 2008
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READING
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In THE JOURNAL OF JOYCE CAROL OATES: 1973-1982 (New York, 2007) I read: “The power of literature to shatter one’s peace of mind…” She means of course her peace of mind. I doubt very much if most people are capable of having their peace shattered by ideas. When it comes to literature, philistines are like the tone deaf with music and the blind with art. Speaking of music: I like her taste in music – Chopin, Verdi’s REQUIEM, Cesar Franck’s organ works. Her chitchat on her contemporaries (Updike, Susan Sontag, and Cheever, among others) is less illuminating. She writes a great deal about her own works with which I am only marginally familiar. Among the Armenians she mentions (but only in passing) are Saroyan, Arlen, and Nona Balakian.
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Also reading NATIVE SON by Richard Wright (1940) and READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN by Azar Nafisi (2003). The common theme in both works: the way a state uses the majesty of the law to humiliate, bully, brutalize, and dehumanize its own citizens. What a book one could write on justice in the service of injustice.
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PARIS MATCH (February 20, 2008) concludes its review of CONVERSATIONS AVEC ROBERT GUEDIGUIAN by Isabelle Danel with the words, “a must for cinephiles, apprentice directors, and moviegoers alike, this book should sell millions of copies.”
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Poets and intellectuals are generally thought of as dreamers, even mental masturbators. In a commentary in our paper today, titled “American ‘dreamers’ blundered into war,” the ‘dreamers and fantasists’ are identified as Dick Cheyney, Donald Rumsfeld, Bush and their gang of neocons.
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George Herbert: “Do well and right, and let the world sink.”
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Saturday, March 08, 2008
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YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW
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Fascists come in all sizes and shapes. There are even genocide and denialist fascists willing to kill and die for their cause. I suspect these fascists will be satisfied only if their counterparts are annihilated. But if for every Armenian fascist there are at least two, perhaps even twenty-two in the opposite camp, it is not unreasonable to imagine which side may experience another genocide or be collateral damage in a future Middle-East war.
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According to Hegel, the real is reasonable, which means, if something happens there must be good reasons why it happened. It is up to us to understand these reasons. Now tell me, which part of the above scenario you didn’t understand.
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Two things to remember: (a) We cannot apply yesterday’s solutions to today's problems; and (b) “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”
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BOOK REVIEW
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Conversation with Ara Baliozian.
World Literature Today, March, 1998 by Zeytountsian, Stephan
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Nazeli Baghdasarian. Kitchener, Ont. Impressions. 1998. 95 pages. Can$9.95. ISBN 0-920553-24-9. As the title suggests, Nazeli Baghdasarian's book consists of a lengthy interview with the prolific Armenian writer and critic Ara Baliozian. Baghdasarian is a native of Racine, Wisconsin, with an academic background as a university librarian, having worked at both the Arizona State and Fresno State libraries.


Far from being a heavy-duty esoteric dialogue, Conversation is a cozy and intimate chat between two unpretentious people. Baghdasarian's questions are fundamental in nature and are ...

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