Thursday, August 23, 2007
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QUESTIONS / ANSWERS
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You don’t always reply to your critics. Why not?
I don’t always read them.
Why don’t you?
One reason, they are unreadable.
What’s another?
A diarrhea of words and a constipation of ideas – to put it as elegantly as I can.
That’s what they say about your stuff…or words to that effect.
They don’t mean it. If they meant it they wouldn’t read me. I think they read me because they find me irresistible. And they find me irresistible because I speak about them.
They say the only reason they read and criticize you is that they don’t want young readers to be taken in by your anti-Armenian tirades.
What have I done to deserve such dedicated and selfless specimens of humanity?
You don’t believe them?
I have every reason to suspect they don’t believe it themselves.
Some say you are motivated by bitterness, rage, and disappointment because you have been neglected and ignored by your fellow Armenians.
Nothing new in that. It has been the fate of our writers to be ignored and neglected, sometimes even silenced, starved, and betrayed by their fellow Armenians.
Betrayed? What do you mean betrayed?
I mean betrayed to the enemy. Both Talaat’s and Stalin’s victims, two generations of our ablest writers, were betrayed by their fellow Armenians.
There are those who say you flatter yourself if you think you qualify as a writer.
In the eyes of commissars of culture no writer ever does; and judging by the number of readers who keep telling me what and how to write, we have become a nation whose commissars outnumber its writers. I said nation. Strike that. Make it, collection of tribes.
Any concluding remarks or advice for your critics?
Critics: I wish I had them.
What would you call them?
Kibitzers would be a euphemism.
Okay, any final words?
Whenever they feel the urge to read and comment on my things, they should slice a watermelon.
Slice a watermelon? — why?
They tell me it’s a good substitute for slaughter, and slaughter is never too far from an Armenian’s mind.
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Friday, August 24, 2007
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SELF-ANALYSIS
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We don’t know who we are. We may know what others think of us. We may even know what we think of ourselves. But that doesn’t even cover the tip of the iceberg – only a fraction of its shadow. Freud, Jung, Adler & Co. may disagree on many things, but they are unanimous on this point. We are full of contradictions. There is a Jekyll and Hyde in all of us. We rule over a kingdom that is terra incognita.
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I can tell how good an Armenian is by the frequency with which he uses the words “Yes, sir!” If an Armenian disagrees with me on one thing, such as the placement of commas or semicolons, he is bound to disagree with me on many other things. An Armenian who disagrees with me might as well be a Turk, and the only good Turk is a dead Turk. If you dare to disagree with me on this point, I shall have no choice but to accuse you of insulting the nation.
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In life, questions outnumber answers. Case in point: If they are bloodthirsty savages, why did they wait for 600 years to slaughter us?
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In a commentary in our local daily today I read: “Even superpowers need friends.” Judging by the number of our internecine squabbles and tsunamis in a teacup, we behave as though we were invincible giants among gutless midgets. Heroes among zeroes. A Hercules among yellow-bellies! Hercules — Iraklis in Greek, Hergele in Turkish — hergele (with a lower case “h”) also means an oversized hoodlum in Turkish. Transplant a hero and you get a zero. Another symptom of the Jekyll/Hyde syndrome.
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The shortest list in the world? Wars we have won.
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Saturday, August 25, 2007
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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If I were to say I am better than you, not only you wouldn’t believe me, you would also be justified to dismiss me as a self-satisfied ass. Remember that next time you think of performing your first-nation-this and first-nation-that routine to an odar.
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We fought a war against the Persians and their elephants in defense of our faith? That’s 1500 years ago. Since then we have learned to adapt and compromise. Under the Soviets we were the first nation to convert to atheism. How about that? Another first for us!
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Armenianism and objectivity seem to be mutually exclusive concepts. Whenever I make an honest effort to deliver an objective assessment, I am assailed by a chorus of screaming Apaches on the warpath, followed by a contingent of yataghan-brandishing Janissaries.
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May I remind those who use the word philosophy as if it were synonymous with mental masturbation, that the alternative to philosophy is philo-inbred-moronism.
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What’s the use of having two or three answers to every question if they are all wrong or so full of holes that they convince no one?
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I am accused of being consistently negative. Once upon a time I knew many stories that ended with “three apples fell from heaven,” and “they lived happily ever after,” but I have forgotten them all. My repertoire now consists of only one or two Nasredin Hoja stories that I have already told more than once. The best I can do today is this: Shortly before he died at the age of 91, Sibelius said: “All the doctors who wanted to forbid me to smoke and to drink are dead.”
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