Sunday, July 15, 2007
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PAPER TIGERS
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Writers tend to take themselves seriously; and the more mediocre they are the more seriously they take themselves. It follows, if you tell a hopeless mediocrity he is not another Shakespeare, you are liable to make an enemy for life.
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It may matter to writers what they write but to the vast majority who read him or to the millions who don’t, it makes absolutely no difference. Something similar could be said about our controversies. Since the majority is silent, each side may think it is on his side when in fact the world is too busy with far more important matters to give a damn one way or the other.
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Of the one million Armenians in America (Canada and the U.S. combined) my guess is only less than 1% read our weeklies and most of the 1% read only to see their names in the paper. Now then, go ahead and take yourself seriously.
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When friends ask me if I am working on a new project, I tell them I have given up writing. I don’t consider writing for the Internet writing. But if it is writing, it is more like writing on water.
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Monday, July 16, 2007
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MAFIA-DEMOCRACIES
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Many great writers were misunderstood and neglected because they were ahead of their time. That’s not my problem. Nothing I say is difficult to understand, or original, or new. My ideas are not mine but the common currency of literature, including our own. They have been around for centuries, even millennia. My great liability is that I write about our problems and no one gives a damn about us, not even us. The only thing we seem to care about is Turks and their stonewalling and indifference – an indifference that we understand very well because we share it.
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In his most recent book, TO THE CASTLE AND BACK (New York, 2007), Vaclav Havel calls the present political and economic structures of former Soviet countries “Mafia-democracies.” Now, why didn’t I think of that? Mafia-democracies! That’s like saying the law of the jungle.
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Tuesday, July 17, 2007
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AN ARMENIAN CREDO
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I believe in one God who may or may not be on my side.
I believe as a human being I can be wrong, and I have been wrong more than once.
I believe it is also conceivable that like most human beings I have been wrong more often than right.
I also believe as an Armenian it is my patriotic duty to do my utmost to learn from my mistakes. Whether I have been or shall be successful in this endeavor is not up to me to decide but up to more impartial and objective observers.
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Wednesday, July 18, 2007
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AD HOMINEM
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At no time have I been remotely tempted to silence fellow Armenians who hold views opposite to mine, not because I am tolerant by nature or morally superior to anyone, but because I never had the power to do so. Which is why I suspect all power. If I don’t trust myself with power, I see no reason why I should trust anyone else, least of all the scum of the earth parading as la crème de la crème.
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