writers

Sunday, April 5, 2009
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THE CHARITY OF SWINE
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We are told the favorite reading matter of Roman emperors was epic poems glorifying their deeds. Which reminds me of a book I once wrote for an Armenian publisher subsidized by one of our national benefactors in which his (benefactor's) name wasn't mentioned. Though the book was a success (three printings in as many years) the publisher was fired.
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Roman emperors, Ottoman sultans, Soviet commissars, Armenian benefactors, Wall Street chief executive officers: they expect to be brown-nosed and rewarded even when they make a mess of things. They want smart people working for them but not smart enough to see their limitations. They support free speech provided it doesn't expose their failings.
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The wealthy think of the poor as lazy parasites. The poor return the compliment by viewing the wealthy as a bunch of bloodsuckers.
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Some of the worst blunders in the history of mankind were committed by men who assumed to know better.
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In the world of high finance, the lower in the totem pall you are, the more checks and balances you have to deal with.
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I think of my schooldays in Venice when the Mekhitarist monks charged us for the toilet paper we used. Then motivated by greed they trusted the wrong investment firm and lost everything.
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Monday, April 6, 2009
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HUMAN NATURE EXPLAINED
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“In his place I would have done the same thing.” There is more truth in that sentence than in many treatises on understanding and human nature.
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“...tribalism has impeded African progress. What Africa needs is precisely such transmutations of tribal loyalties to the larger loyalties of nationhood.”
Why is it that none of our pundits dares to say as much about us?
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Both Turks and Armenians are naïve dupes in so far as they believe in the lies of their own political leaders, the biggest lie being that as civilized people they are incapable of violating anyone's human rights, let alone committing crimes against humanity. Butter would not melt in their mouths -- or anywhere else for that matter.
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Reality is versatile in its production of facts and by carefully selecting some and ignoring or rejecting others one can justify anything. Theologians, ideologues, historians, and propagandists in general are fully aware of this phenomenon and like lawyers they go about their business with ruthless dishonesty.
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Somewhere Alain writes that we conceive of birth as something that happened in the past and of death as something that will happen in the future. But in reality, he tells us, they are both ongoing processes. Every moment that passes is a preview of death, and it is up to us to be reborn as human beings “today, now, immediately, it is our only chance.”
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Tuesday, April 7, 2009
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TWO FASCINATING WRITERS
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In his DIARIES, Christopher Isherwood speaks of several encounters with Lesley Blanch (then wife of Romain Gary) but at no time does he mention that she is the author of SABRES OF PARADISE, one of the most fascinating books ever written on the Caucasus, and one of the very few books that I have read three times -- the others being THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN (Mann), LOLITA (Nabokov), and Toynbee's RECONSIDERATIONS.
Simenon is mentioned only once to be dismissed as “a dreary little mind.”
In my twenties and for about ten years Simenon became an obsession. I read everything that I could locate in libraries and bookstores. He wrote under several pseudonyms and may have published as many as five hundred book, and slept with as many women, he never tired of boasting in interviews, and did so to enhance his understanding, he would explain. I think it was Gide who first compared him to Chekhov.
In a 1960 entry, Isherwood quotes Leon Surmelian as having said: “...among Armenians who come to America, it is always the third-rate who succeed,” and “Armenians are either businessmen or dreamers.”
I remember once when I wrote Surmelian a letter proposing an interview, he turned me down and said he had just published an essay in the weeklies and I was welcome to comment on it in a letter to the editor.
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Wednesday, April 8, 2009
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ISHERWOOD AND WHITMAN
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By skipping passages dealing with Ramakrishna, Krishnamurti, assorted swamis and gurus, and mercenary Hollywood producers, I was able to finish Christopher Isherwood's mammoth DIARIES. May I confess that what I enjoyed most are his one-liners on his fellow men and women:
On Charles Laughton: “stupid, vain and pretentious...an arrogant old fool.”
On Laura Huxley (Aldous Huxley's third and last wife): “[a] mannish well-tailored bitch.”
On Claire Bloom (who was to become Philip Roth's wife): “demure but probably quite a bit of a bitch.”
On Shelley Winters: “a blundering Jewish leftwing ass.”
On Izak (OUT OF AFRICA) Dinesen (Baroness Blixen): “a withered monkey.”
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I am now reading Walt Whitman. Some of his lines are piercing in their precision, as when he speaks of animals:
“They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago...”
We need more Whitman in our lives and less sermonizers and speechifiers who rub salt in our wounds and promise heaven which is even more inaccessible to them than it is to the rest of us.
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