jan/3

Sunday, December 31, 2006
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FRAGMENTS FROM A LIFE
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On the day I see the light I will give up writing because I will be too busy expiating my sins, one of them being the time I wasted writing all the nonsense (or “crap,” as several of my gentle readers put it) of use to no one.
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A Jewish friend of mine once told me one reason why he acquired a university degree was to avoid the alternative — working in a used car lot, which he equated with “selling crap to shit.” The difference between selling used cars and writing for Armenians is that cars may take you from point A to point B.
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At the age of thirteen when I first heard one of the Mildonian sisters in Venice (there were three of them: piano, cello, and harp) play Khachaturian’s Toccata and Chopin’s C-minor Etude (the “Revolutionnaire”) on a concert grand in the Hall of Mirrors of the Moorat-Raphael College, formerly Palazzo Zenobio, I decided to be a pianist. Never made it. Only one recital – a Chopin waltz, a Debussy Prelude, a Grieg Wedding March, and Beethoven’s 5th Symphony for four hands played on the same grand and in the same Hall of Mirrors with my temperamental piano teacher, Giarda (also Mildonian’s teacher) who loved to brag about his encounter with Puccini.
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Many years later in Canada, at an organ recital in an Anglican church, when I heard Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in G-minor, I switched my loyalty to the organ and eventually became the organist of a neighborhood Catholic church. It was a large congregation numbering over two thousand members. Though I can’t say I enjoyed playing at weddings and funerals (sometimes several a week) nothing gave me more pleasure than the long hours I spent alone wrestling with the complete works of Bach. That’s when I discovered the introspective and mystical Bach of the Chorale Preludes where he speaks of his longing for death.
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I remember my cousin Esmerian who idolized Mozart telling me that after listening to a Mozart Piano Concerto he became so unhinged that he was tempted to commit suicide. He was a chain smoker and died of cancer at an early age.
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There is a Somerset Maugham short story, adapted to a movie titled QUARTET, in which the central character, a failed pianist like myself, shoots himself after listening to a concert pianist play Schubert’s E-flat Impromptu.
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Monday, January 01, 2007
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HAPPY NEW YEAR?
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Will the new one be an improvement over the old? I have no reason to think so; neither do I have any desire to engage in wishful thinking, which happens to be a perennial source of disappointment to individuals and of ruin to nations.
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If our political parties survive it will be because they can always rely on a new generation of dupes, and wheeler-dealers willing to say and do anything for an empty title and minimum wages. Political parties, ideologies, and belief systems should be judged not by their longevity but by the mediocrity of their performance and the magnitude of their lies. If we were to judge a belief system by its longevity, we would have to admit that astrology is the most universal, reliable, and flawless system.
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Perhaps my least popular and most anti-political idea is trying to close the gap between victim and victimizer by refusing to dehumanize the enemy. We have wasted so much verbiage in our efforts to prove that losers are winners on a higher plane; and they (our enemies) have done the same in their efforts to prove that victory may be achieved without victimizing anyone.
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It is easy to hate. I want to understand the enemy not because I want to love him but for a far more selfish reason: namely, to enhance my understanding of the “other” in my fellow men, including myself.
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I cannot in all good conscience look down on readers whose judgment exceeds their understanding. Once upon a time I too dehumanized those I neither understood nor wanted to understand.
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To impose a belief system on life is the surest way of misunderstanding reality. Reality cannot be shaped like dough, it can only be understood on its own terms; and since only god can understand everything, we can only hope to understand it with the minimum degree of distortion or misinterpretation.
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Tuesday, January 02, 2007
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MONEY TALKS
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The headline of a front-page story in our paper today reads, “Top earners widen ‘stunning’ wage gap,” where we read that some chief executives make more money in an hour than the average working stiff in a year. I suspect one of our bishops today makes more money in a year than all our writers combined in their lifetime. I once heard of an Armenian writer who survives by pimping his wife. Others may earn minimum wage by pimping their integrity. To those who say, they can’t be good writers, I say, “Name a good one.” And if you were to ask me to define a good writer, I would say, “one who can afford to stand on his own two feet and speak his mind.” “I cannot afford to speak my mind now,” the hireling of one of our national benefactors once told me. “But on the day I retire and start collecting my pension, I will expose these bastards for what they are.” That was thirty years ago when he was in his fifties.
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The things that we remember are not always things that we would like to remember. And when we remind things to others, we usually remind them of things that they may not care to remember. When Proust wrote REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST he was producing literature. Had he been under psychiatric care, his analyst would have been in a position to publish an entirely different book. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if, even as I write these lines, an ambitious novelist is working on a book about Proust titled REJECTED MEMORIES.
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Wednesday, January 03, 2007
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FROM THE DIARY OF AN IDIOT
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For many years I suspected the world was populated by semi-idiots, and then, early one morning, to my shock and outrage, I woke up with the certainty that I was the idiot.
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FAMOUS LAST WORDS
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Once upon a time a man ventured into a jungle and as he was being torn to shreds by wild beasts, he said: “I didn’t know there were wild beasts in the jungle.” Our revolutionaries.
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ON THE ART OF WRITING
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After writing a line, write another that contradicts it and if you see even a quasi-invisible particle of truth in it, rewrite the first line.
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MEMO
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Remember, if you identify yourself as infallible, no one will believe you.
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MONEY TALKS
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Sometimes I am criticized for my rudeness. But even at my worst I am not as rude as the benevolent benefactor who once said to a writer: “I hire and fire people like you every day.”
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CONFESSION
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How can anybody be so consistently wrong on so many things for such a long time? This is a question I ask myself again and again, and the only answer I can come up with is that a man’s capacity for believing the unbelievable is infinite.
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