Writers

[arabaliozian]

Re: Writers

Wednesday, September 07, 2016
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NOTES / COMMENTS
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We are expected to believe
there are good and bad Turks
as there are good and bad Germans.
But I prefer to believe (with Thomas Mann)
we are all a mixture of both.
*
Even a so-called smart Armenian
(self-assessed of course) will believe in a big lie
that flatters his colossal ego;
and if with this assertion I stand to lose
99% of my audience, so be it!
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: Writers

CONFESSION
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I know something today that i didn't know yesterday.I would have been more useful to my fellow men had I been a carpenter or a bus driver. Or a travel agent. That’s what my mother wanted me to be, a pilot or a travel agent. She loves going places and I don’t even drive. The only two places that I visit regularly are the library and the church – both within walking distance. I go to church not to pray but to carry on a love affair with the organ works of J.S. Bach.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: Writers

Reading a big biography of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I still cannot connect his life to his work. Where did ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE come from? A paragraph from Balzac married to a plot by Faulkner written with a touch of Kafka?
*
Also reading Richard Price's LUSH LIFE. His fast-moving dialogue fascinates me even when there are times when I cannot follow its logic and slang.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: Writers

To ignore our writers is to exterminate them by other means. There is a Talaat & Stalin in all of us.

[arabaliozian]

Re: Writers

GOSTAN ZARIAN
ON SOVIETIZED ARMENIANS
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In his TRAVELLER AND HIS ROAD and speaking of
Sovietized Armenians who recycled Bolshevik
propaganda to him, Zarian writes: “They are
spitting on Raffi. They are spitting on
Aharonian. They are spitting on Derian. And that
with the borrowed, consumptive spittle of
Muscovite ‘masters.’ Even their filth is second
hand. Even their words have not been picked up
from our streets. Danger, danger, danger!”

[arabaliozian]

Re: Writers

At one time our writers were not afraid to see things as they are and to say what they think. Genocide appears to have changed all that. Objectivity has now been replaced with compassion, compassion with pity, and pity with self-pity. Result? Writers have been replaced with brown-nosers, literature with propaganda, and patriotism with borodakhos and unpardavan verbiage signifying nothing.#

[arabaliozian]

Re: Writers

Saturday, September 10, 2016
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MORE ANSWERS
TO THE PROUST QUESTIONNAIRE
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Q: What is your greatest regret?
A: Not being able to play Beethoven like Schnabel.
Q: How would you like to die?
A: Without inconveniencing others.
Q: What do you most value in your friends?
A: Their existence.
Q: Which historical figure do you most identify with?
A: Socrates.
Q: What is your greatest fear?
A: American presidents and Russian commissars.
Q: What do you consider your greatest achievement?
A: Surviving my enemies.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: Writers

SHERLOCK HOLMES & THE SULTAN
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In a review of a new biography of Conan Doyle, I read that “the Sultan of Turkey, a man with a thousand concubines, used to have Sherlock Holmes stories read aloud to him in translation…What did Conan Doyle have that a thousand women above the Bosphorus could not supply?”

[arabaliozian]

Re: Writers

It was Graham Greene, I think, who once said
something to the effect that a writer is a
capitalist among communists, and a communist
among capitalists, because his main function is
to challenge, disturb, and provoke.

[arabaliozian]

Re: Writers

MARIA IORDANIDOU
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The only reason I read Maria Iordanidou
(an unfamiliar name to me until last week) is
that the title of one of her books is HOLIDAYS IN
THE CAUCASUS. Immediately after I also read
another book by her titled LIKE CRAZY BIRDS.
*
Maria Iordanidou may not be a giant in world
literature, but unlike most giants, she is
incapable of writing a single boring or
unreadable line. She writes about her life in
Istanbul at the turn of the last century, an
extended stay in the Caucasus during World War I
and the Russian Revolution, her residence in
Alexandria, and final move to Athens on the eve
of World War II.
*
In A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN, Virginia Woolf writes
that since women can’t express themselves fully
and authentically, they cannot take a rightful
place in a literary tradition which has been
shaped by men. Reading Maria Iordanidou is
discovering the obvious fact that liberation
consists in being oneself, and if one is honest
one’s authenticity and originality will shrine
through every sentence one writes.
*
Maria Iordanidou doesn’t writer as a writer but
as a human being. As a result, her humanity
speaks louder than any literary tradition you
care to mention. And though she writes about
Turks, Armenians, Russians, Arabs, and Greeks,
she judges no one. Which may suggest that most of
our judgments about people are based on hearsay
evidence.
#