comments

Thursday, October 13, 2011
*****************************************
FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
**********************************
Two favorite aphorisms on love and marriage:
Balzac: “The fate of the house hangs on the wedding night.”
Chinese proverb: “The rose has thorns only for those
who would gather it.”
*
In Roger Ebert’s LIFE – ITSELF: A MEMOIR
(New York, 2011, page 226) Lee Marvin is quoted as having said:
“'You ever hear me sing an Armenian song?’
Marvin sang an Armenian song.”
*
A question without an answer:
What prompted God to introduce imperfection
in a perfect world by creating man?
*
A glance is enough to change two destinies.
#
Friday, October 14, 2011
*****************************************
AS I SEE IT
**********************************
Whenever I reply to a critic, I make an enemy;
and whenever I am not diplomatic enough
in my replies – diplomacy not being my field –
I make a mortal enemy.
*
Once when I asked the nationality
of a dazzling beauty – a teenage waitress in the cafeteria
of a department store where I was employed as a stockboy –
she said: "Canadian."
When I asked for more details, she replied:
"Let’s see now, Irish, Polish, German, Cherokee,
French, Italian and Ukrainian.”
*
"We are a wounded nation,"
I am reminded once in a while by our propagandists,
"and you don’t kick someone who is down," – thus
equating truth with a kick in the groin.
But truth is a kick only to those
who prefer to live in a world of lies.
#
Saturday, October 15, 2011
*****************************************
FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
**********************************
On the Tea Party:
The forces of evil know how to get organized.
On the Occupy Wall Street movement:
It never pays to give up one’s faith in mankind.
*
For twenty days – or is it forty? – they were ignored.
Now, everyone is talking about nothing else.
*
Solidarity can move mountains.
Without solidarity,
all solutions will be dismissed as unrealistic and utopian
by the very same people who consider it
their patriotic duty to divide the nation
in the name of this or that orthodoxy or ideology,
thus giving patriotism a bad name.
*
Where there is solidarity
even bad solutions may improve matters.
Where there is no solidarity
even the best solution will be ignored.
*
I have met good, patriotic Armenians
who give up on Armenianism after the first insult.
*
After being insulted ten thousand times,
sometimes I reply with an insult
on the grounds that I have earned the right.
If you disagree with my MO,
you can go to hell!
*
“Help those who need the help,”
reads a headline in the Op-Ed page this morning.
The implied subtext: “Prevent future revolutions.”
#

diary

Sunday, October 09, 2011
*****************************************
OBSERVATIONS
*************************************
In evil men we see ourselves exposed.
*
To see meaning in the meaningless:
that’s the truest mark of creativity.
*
Forgiving others is easy.
What’s hard, perhaps even impossible,
is forgiving oneself.
*
Never take a whole paragraph
to say what can be said in a single line.
Never take a whole line
when a single word will do just as well.
And never underestimate the power of silence
which can be more eloquent than
the most eloquent speech.
*
Instead of eighty and ninety,
the French say four-twenties and four-twenties-and-ten.
This may suggest that human intelligence or inventiveness
is limited and after a certain point
it becomes inoperative.
*
If in a democracy the majority can be
systemativally moronized,
in what way democracy may be said to be
different from tyranny?
#
Monday, October 10, 2011
*****************************************
A JOKE
*************************************
“One Jew tells another that,
that very morning, he asked a passerby
what he’d think, if the next day,
as was rumored,
they’d kill all the Jews and all the haidressers.
And the passerby answered,
‘Why the hairdressers?’”
*
After reading this joke very early this morning
I wept and laughed uncontrollably
for almost an hour.
#
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
*****************************************
FROM THE MEMOIRS
OF AN UNEMPLOYABLE MISFIT
*************************************
For ten long years I worked for a living
in factories, department stores, and offices.
The work itself i didn’t mind.
What I despised were the men I had to work for
and the subservience of my coworkers.
And because I have always had trouble
disguising my feelings,
I was fired shortly after I was hired.
I don’t know of anyone in my circles
of friends, relatives, acquaintances, and neighbors
who has been fired as often as I have.
Don’t get me wrong.
I am not complaining.
They were right to fire;
so was I in finding all forms of modern employment
repellent.
*
If I am ever hired as a teacher,
one of the very first things I will say to the class will be:
all ideologies and religions have their own propaganda line
that contradicts the competition.
There may be some truth in all of them
but in so far as they divide mankind,
they are big lies.
You may now guess
how long my career as a teacher would last.
#
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
*****************************************
DIARY
**********************************
Watched Chaplin’s GREAT DICTATOR.
His imitation of Hitler speechifying was wildly hilarious.
I couldn’t stop laughing.
To all our speechifiers I say:
“Let that be a lesson to you.”
*
STRANGERS
**********************
You may say whatever you wish about me
or anyone else for that matter
and you will be partly right.
That’s because we are not one but many
and some of them are strangers we may never meet.
*
JUSTICE
*********************
Madame Justice is not blind.
She has 20/20 vision – but only for her friends.
During our Ottoman and Soviet periods,
and today, under our own semi-sultans and neo-commissars,
she has consistently ignored us.
*
FRIENDS?
******************
You don’t have to go out of your way
to make a mortal enemy out of an Armenian friend.
He will see something invisible,
hear something in audible,
and react as if you were plotting his murder.
*
ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES
*****************************************
So do words.
What if what I write may result in the destruction of the nation?
I am responsible only for what I say.
I cannot be held responsible for what others do.
#

diary

Thursday, October 06, 2011
*****************************************
COMMENTS
*************************************
With every book I publish,
I acquire a new friend and lose two old ones.
Any day now the number of my friends
will bear a negative sign.
*
I feel most alone when
in the company of my fellow Armenians.
*
William James:
"A great many people think they are thinking
when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."
*
The absence of God
plays a more important role in the life of atheists
than the existence of God in the life of most believers--
judging by the way they live.
*
Is it humanly possible to ignore or forget the truth
after hearing it?
#
Friday, October 07, 2011
*****************************************
COMMENTS (II)
*************************************
As soon as you settle on the answer
of an important question,
you begin to suspect there may be more merit
in its contradiction;
in the same way that after you take a woman in marriage,
all other women appear more desirable.
This may suggest that the world was created
not by God but by the Devil;
and if I am not mistaken
there is an Armenian medieval Christian heresy
that says as much.
*
Andre Malraux: “I am an agnostic.
But you know better than I that
no one can escape God.”
He should have added,
“and the Devil.”
#
Saturday, October 08, 2011
*****************************************
DIARY
*************************************
Very early this morning, on the radio,
a demonstrator in Athens:
“What’s happening today is not about saving Greece;
it’s about saving the banking system.”
*
Obama’s greatest blunder:
to ask men from Wall Street
to fix Wall Street.
Imagine asking predators
to reform the law of the jungle.
*
In a televised press conference
the other day when asked
why he did not prosecture the men
responsible for the economic collapse, Obama replied:
“What they did was immoral; it was not illegal.”
When the same question was asked to an economist:
“Their actions were criminal
and they should have been indicted.”
*
Who would have thought the Arab spring
would influence and shape
the Occupy Wall Street movement in America today?
Yanks being taught democracy by Africans!
What a strange place the world we live in is!
How gloriously unpredictable human beings are!
*
In an Op-Ed commentary this morning, I read:
“Russians say they are often more afraid
of the police than of criminals.”
Elsewhere Putinism is seen as an effort
to revive Stalinism.
What else would you expect from a former KGB agent?
*
Anonymous: “The rotten apple is the first to fall,
and it never falls far from the tree.”
*
A line from a western with Errol Flynn:
“There I was, no ma, no pa, brung up by Comanche Indians.”
*
I am reminded of a line by Updike
to the effect that as a boy
he was more influenced by Errol Flynn than Jesus Christ.
#

things

Sunday, October 02, 2011
*****************************************
IN LOVE
*************************************
When in his eighties Pablo Casals fell in love
with one of his students and wanted to marry her,
his doctor was against it saying it could be dangerous;
to which Casals replied:
“If she dies, she dies.”
*
READERS
**********************
Some readers resent the fact that
I refuse to reproduce their sentiments and thoughts.
They believe a writer should be like a secretary –
take dictation.
I see that as another symptom of our sultanism.
*
Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821): “I don’t know
what the life of a rogue can be like
since I have never been one;
but the life of an honest man is abominable.”
*
Anything that is not worth rereading
can’t be worth writing.
#
Monday, October 03, 2011
*****************************************
DENIALISTS
*************************************
Denialists have a powerful argument in their favor:
Everybody lies.
*
My aim in life:
to humanize the dehumanized.
Call me a megalomaniac.
*
The arrogance of the half-learned:
I know all about that.
I was there once.
*
Life’s favorite trajectory:
from arrested development
to advanced degeneration.
*
We have been ruled by barbarians
for such a long time that
we don’t mind our own.
Either that or we see them
as the lesser of two evils.
#
Tuesday, October 04, 2011
*****************************************
AS I SEE IT
*************************************
Until very recently,
we, Armenians of the diaspora,
were not allowed to know
the identity of our political leaders;
and now that we know them,
we understand why they preferred to remain anonymous.
*
One of the best things about life is that it’s short.
*
Actions have consequences,
consequences have repercussions,
repercussions have echoes
and so on ad infinitum.
*
Memo to our editors:
silencing writers,
burning books,
burning men,
concentration camps,
gulags:
they all begin with censorship.
*
It is impossible to struggle
against the certainties of ignorance
with the doubts of knowledge.
#
Wednesday, October 05, 2011
*****************************************
ON A VARIETY OF THINGS
*************************************
Some of my Turkish readers are outraged
when I criticize Turks.
Like all dictators, Kemal knew that
the only way to be popular
is to flatter the collective ego of the nation.
Which is why most Turks are convinced
they are beyond criticism.
*
I don’t always write what I think and feel
because I don’t really know what I think and feel.
All my thoughts and feelings contain
their own deviations as well as contradictions.
*
I resent it when someone steals my stolen lines.
I work hard to find lines that are worth stealing.
Let him do the same.
*
Here are some aphorisms by Antonio Porchia (1886-1968),
an Argentine writer of Italian descent
who appears to know all about us:
*
"Truth has very few friends and those few
are suicides."
*
"A door opens to me. I go in and am faced
with a hundred closed doors."
*
"You think you are killing me.
I think you are committing suicide."
*
"Some things become so completely our own
that we forget them."
*
"They will say that you are on the wrong road,
if it is your own."
#

as i see it

Thursday, September 29, 2011
*****************************************
A TOUMANIAN FABLE ABRIDGED
*************************************
Early one morning when the fox hears a rooster crowing,
he thinks: "Breakfast!"
When he is told by the rooster in the tree
that he is not alone but with a friend,
he thinks: "Lunch too!"
But when he finds out the friend is not
another rooster but a dog,
the words breakfast and lunch are replaced with
"Feet, do your stuff!"
*
BLESSINGS
*************************
An Arab blessing
(as quoted by Flaubert in a letter from Cairo):
"I wish you all kinds of prosperity,
especially a long prick!"
What’s next in line?
"May you deflower a hundred virgins"?
*
While in Cairo, Flaubert is said to have explored
the Armenian community.
I wonder if he discovered anything of interest.
*
PROVERBS
**************************
I love exotic proverbs especially when they are phony.
Example: A Burmese saying (which I just made up):
“You cannot feed a hungry tiger
with the bones of a hummingbird.”
*
CELEBRITIES
**************************
There is a type of minor celebrity
who behaves like a major celebrity
in the hope of being confused with one.
There is also a type of nonentity
who wants you to believe he is a future celebrity.
*
GIDE ON WAGNER
*******************************
“L’Allemagne n’a peut-etre jamais rien produit
a la fois d’aussi grand ni aussi barbare.”
*
ONE-LINERS
***********************
Balzac: “Les moeurs sont l’hypocrisie d’une nation.”
*
Baudelaire: “Life is a disease. Everyone knows that.”
*
Because reality is against us, we say God is with us.
#
Friday, September 30, 2011
*****************************************
ABOUT HEGEL
*************************************
Hegel is not an easy philosopher.
As a matter of fact I have never heard anyone say
“I enjoy reading Hegel.”
Even Hegelians don’t always agree
on what he said or meant.
With one exception:
the Francophone-Russian Kojeve.
Kojeve’s interpretations of Hegel
are readable, accessible, insightful,
and eminently unHegelian.
Some samples follow:
*
“Man, to be really, truly ‘man’
and to know that he is such,
must impose the idea that he has of himself
on beings other than himself.”
*
“Christianity is born from the Slave’s terror
in the face of Nothingness, his nothingness.”
*
“The Christian frees himself from the human Master
only to be enslaved by the divine Master.”
*
“He does this for the same reason that
he accepted the human Master:
through fear of death.”
*
“For Hegel, as for Marx,
the central phenomenon of the bourgeois world
is not the enslavement of the working man,
of the poor bourgeois by the rich bourgeois,
but the enslavement of both by Capital.”
#
Saturday, October 01, 2011
*****************************************
AS I SEE IT
*************************************
If I were to say to my shrink:
"Most of my problems stem from the fact that
I was born an Armenian," he would reply:
"I was born a Jew. Only Turks are after your ass.
The whole world is after ours."
*
Those who violate my human right of free speech
do so because they are convinced
they are better men than myself;
and they are better if only because
they are closer to God and Country.
Some of them may even deliver lectures to me
on good Armenianism.
They seem to be totally unaware of the fact that
only certified morons assume that
God, Country, and good Armenianism
have only one definition: their own.
*
It is a scientifically established fact that
prejudice makes people stupid.
*
Hell is more accessible than heaven.
*
Lovers are mutual parasites.
*
Love and hatred are chains.
So is indifference.
*
Very often all great reformers do
is replace big lies with bigger ones.
*
There is more authority in silence than in speech.
One reason why the dead enjoy more respect than the living.
#

this and that

Sunday, September 25, 2011
*****************************************
CONTRADICTIONS
********************************************
They fascinate me and I see them everywhere.
AVANIM (Stones) an Israeli film
whose unstated but clearly implied moral is:
Rabbis may be as much of a threat to the survival of Israel
as Palestinians.
*
Search for the enemy within and you will find him.
*
They may talk of God
but the means they employ belong to the Devil.
This is as true of rabbis as it is of imams and popes.
*
They may praise rebirth and resurrection
but what they promote is death of the spirit.
*
DECEPTION
**************************
What could be easier than deceiving children?
And are not adults children is disguise?
Do we ever give up – are we capable of giving up --
childhood illusions?
Are we not our own most gullible dupes?
*
A GOOD ANSWER
**************************
When asked if Cary Grant was homosexual or bisexual,
one of his wives (he had five of them) is reported to have replied:
“I was too busy f***ing him to ask.”
There should be a Nobel Prize for the best remark of the year.
#
Monday, September 26, 2011
*****************************************
REFLECTIONS
********************************************
Most of my life I kept my thoughts to myself
out of fear of offending men in positions of power.
I was a coward but refused to admit it.
I behaved like a fool and thought I was wise.
Nothing comes more easily than to preach heroism
and to promote cowardice
in the name of tradition, law and order,
respect for authority, and countless other
fictional considerations.
*
If you are a fool
do not attempt to share your wisdom
with better men than yourself.
*
Are you wise or brave enough to admit
you are a fool?
*
To the rich, money is the quintessence of all wisdom.
*
Between the virtues of the rich
and the vices of the poor,
which would you choose?
*
The criticism of idiots
is more of a testimonial than an indictment.
*
More important than education itself is
who does the educating.
#
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
*****************************************
NOTES & COMMENTS
********************************************
To know perfection
we must first experience the degradation
of life on earth.
Heaven will not be heaven for me
if I can’t play the Beethoven Sonatas like Schnabel
and Bach like Glen Gould.
*
Anonymity will make a hero out of a zero.
*
Promises are one thing, delivery another.
The two might as well be strangers to one another.
*
Whenever I see an odar
joining one of our discussion forums on the internet
I would like to post the following message:
"Welcome to this forum, dear friend.
Please remember to ignore the hooligans among us.
They represent no one but themselves."
*
It must be obvious by now that
one doesn’t have to be a Turk in order to behave like one.
Nothing comes easier to an Ottomanized Armenian
than to behave like a Turk with the certainty that
he is discharging his duty as a patriotic Armenian.
The same applies to Sovietized Armenians.
#
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
*****************************************
TWO PHILOSOPHERS
********************************************
Once, when after a loud argument,
Socrates’ wife poured a pail of dirty water on his head,
he said: “It generally rains after thunder.”
More recently, while massaging his wife’s neck,
Louis Althusser (1918-1990) strangled her,
he pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.
*
Women disappoint men
because they find men disappointing.
*
The difference between dialogue and Armenian arguments is that
the aim of the first is synthesis or consensus,
the aim of the second is verbal assassination.
*
Gide: “Le plus grand bonheur, après que d’aimer,
c’est de confesser son amour.”
*
Valery: “Combien de gens meurent dans les accidents,
pour ne pas lacher leur parapluis!”
#

comments

Thursday, September 22, 2011
*****************************************
AS I SEE IT
********************************************
It never ceases to amaze me
the greed with which we cling to the illusion
of our own importance no matter how often
we are exposed as irrelevant.
*
Our genocide?
The West wouldn’t allow it.
The recognition of our genocide?
If we write enough books,
produce enough eyewitness accounts,
and organize enough demonstrations,
the West may finally see the light.
*
Historic lands?
All of America is someone else’s historic land,
so what?
*
Perhaps truth or reality itself is a territory
beyond our comprehension,
and God Himself is the negation of the “I”
and everything connected with it.
*
If Calderon is right and “life is a dream,”
it may not even be our dream but someone else’s.
*
In my younger days our elder statesmen
would seek me out and give me advice – all of it useless.
*
History may become more comprehensible
if you think of serial killers as failed political leaders.
*
What if I am wrong?
I will be dead wrong on the day I assert infallibility.
#
Friday, September 23, 2011
*****************************************
FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
********************************************
If you search long enough for something
you are sure to find a substitute.
*
The more I deal with Turks
the more I like my fellow Armenians;
and the more I deal with Armenians
the better I understand Turks.
*
A writer is someone who has developed the art of speaking
even when he has nothing to say.
*
My mother believed what she read in the papers
except what I wrote.
*
Spengler: “The less one needs others,
the more powerful one is.”
*
My ambition in life when young:
To come to terms with death.
My ambition now:
to die in order to have the final answer
which may or may not exist.
*
There are no questions and answers in reality –
both begin and end in the convolutions of our brains.
*
We are told space must have an end.
We are also told space is being created
with the speed of light.
It follows, no matter how fast we travel
we will never see what’s on the other side of space.
*
Love means being always on the verge of tears.
Love feels as though your insides
were being surgically removed
without anaesthesia.
If you have not experienced love,
you don’t know bliss.
#
Saturday, September 24, 2011
*****************************************
SHRINKS
********************************************
Almost everyone I have been reading about recently
has been analyzed. I have never been near an analyst
and I doubt very much if I ever will find myself
in the same room with one.
What could he tell me that I don’t already know?
And what could I tell him?
Where would I begin?
I am misunderstood and spat upon by hoodlums?
Who hasn’t been?
Homer, it is said, was kicked out of seven villages,
all of which, after he died, claimed to be his birthplace.
To this day no one knows where he was born or,
for that matter, buried.
#