notes / comments

[arabaliozian]

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Thursday, December 28, 2006
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BUSHWHACKED
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The pen is mightier than the sword? What unspeakable nonsense! Not even PRAVDA and IZVESTIA under Stalin would dare to print such an absurd assertion. How many lives have the Holy Scriptures saved? Or rather, how many wars have been fought in their name?
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Contradictions are inherent in politics, religions, and human affairs in general. Wars are conducted in the name of peace, and innocent civilians are murdered in the name of a merciful Allah. Why should we be surprised if our dividers and destroyers portray themselves as our saviors?
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Speaking of our destroyers: I dedicated the following quotation to my brainwashed gentle readers who would like to see anyone who refuses to recycle their favorite propaganda line silenced permanently: “I call on you not to hate because hate does not leave space for a person to be fair and it makes you blind and closes all doors of thinking.” Thus spake Saddam Hussein. Gandhi is right: No man is beyond salvation…except perhaps mankind.
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To brag is to lie. Two recent examples: “I am not a crook,” and “Mission accomplished.” I wonder why American comedians and pundits don’t use the word “bushwhacked” more often these days.
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The dwindling number of polar bears is now making headlines not only in newspapers written, edited, and published by polar bears but also those of an entirely alien species. What about the dwindling number of Armenians? I remember to have read somewhere that once upon a time we numbered as many as thirty million. Today it’s more like three million. And yet, I don’t see any panic in our streets.
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[arabaliozian]

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Friday, December 29, 2006
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TWO DAYS TO GO
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Two days to go for the New Year. What does that mean? Nothing much. Years may come and go but some things never change; or, if they do, “the more they change the more they stay the same.”
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A headline in our paper today reads: “Bush closer to new strategy.” New, meaning here, more of the same. What else?
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Why do smart people make dumb mistakes? Because even the smartest man on earth cannot fathom the cunning of reality.
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Our paper has printed a long list of all the famous men and women who died in 2006, among them the “gritty, satiric, and erotic” Canadian poet, Irving Layton, the only one I have met. I will never forget his piercing blue eyes and his comment to someone who dared to quote the words of one of his critics: “Some people think,” he replied, “just because they have an xxxxxxx they must also have an opinion.” Crude! – my style.
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[arabaliozian]

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Saturday, December 30, 2006
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ON A REMARK BY BEETHOVEN
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Getting emotionally involved in music was wrong, Beethoven once said, because that way you miss the craft, the design, the architecture, all of which are results of expertise, hard work, dedication, and cold-blooded calculation. As a composer Beethoven knew that to master that aspect of music was much more difficult that to arouse emotion, which any modulation from a major to a minor key can do. Something similar could be said of understanding history or the workings of reality. Hence the importance of objectivity, which also means, the systematic elimination of all emotional involvement.
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In rejecting the emotional aspect of musical composition, Beethoven was also saying that an artist (be he a poet, painter, or composer) should not rely on inspiration alone at the expense of technique. Inspiration is not enough. If the emotional commitment, or the irrational element in human activity (and it makes no difference if you call it faith, ideology, or mysticism) is not modified by reason or cold-blooded calculation, it is bound to lead to sterility and the commission of colossal blunders like wars, massacres, and genocides.
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And speaking of crimes against humanity: Saddam’s greatest blunder was not the crime for which he was tried, found guilty, and hanged, (the revenge killing of 148 Shiite Muslims after a 1982 assassination attempt) but the war against Iran, during which millions perished. He was not tried for that offense because war making is not seen as a crime. If it were, how many political leaders today would be able to sleep at night?
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[arabaliozian]

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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 xxxish 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 xxxx.” 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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[jgk3]

Re: notes / comments

I remember studying the revolutionary study... The only way you can do it is if you study the left hand alone for hours and hours so that when you play hands together, it guides the right hand. Chopin intended this, not only for this piece but for all pieces played on piano requiring a lot of coordination between the left and right hands.

I only reached 112 or 116 tempo in the revolutionary study, 144 was far out of my reach because it requires too much study for my easily distracted self.

In that sense, you can consider me a failed pianist too. I learn a lot from studying and practicing piano: my emotional reactions to the music, the "cold-blooded" theoretical and technical aspect of music and I too enter an introspective state, which is probably the very thing that distracts me the most from the music...

Sitting, facing nothing but the piano and training for a prolongued period just makes me think about other things. Only when I play the final result, or if I'm sight reading music can I fully appreciate and feel the music, truly enjoy myself.

I just have to finish the Collegial II level in the conservatory of music in McGill, now called the Schulich School of Music, then, like you, I can settle down in my music studies with something I truly love, and I wouldn't mind playing bach on the organ either because even when training for the "coldblooded" technical aspect, you are rewarded with perceiving his genius, and the soul of his music.

[arabaliozian]

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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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[arabaliozian]

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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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[arabaliozian]

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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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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Thursday, January 04, 2007
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GOOD OLD DAYS
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Saddam was no doubt a bad man and fully deserved his fate. But whether or not his executioners are any better remains to be seen. In movies, good guys prevail; but in life even when bad guys perish the chances are other bad guys will replace them. For centuries we dreamed of a free and independent homeland, and now what we have it, there are those who miss the good old days under Stalin, and I for one cannot blame them. And is there a writer today who does not miss the freedom our writers enjoyed in Istanbul under Sultan Abdulhamid II?
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CRITICIZING CRITICS
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When they say we need constructive or positive critics whose intent is to solve our problems, what they are really saying is that our literature so far has failed to produce a single writer who meets these criteria, and that all our critics have been anti-Armenian degenerates whose sole aim in life was to degrade the nation and to insult its leadership.
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ON RULES
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Study rules carefully in order to know when and how to break them.
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ON A SERIOUS ABNORMALITY
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One of the most serious abnormalities inflicted on human beings is considering oneself normal and all others if not abnormal than slight deviations.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Friday, January 05, 2007
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OUR ACADEMICS
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“What kind of Armenians are these?” I would ask myself whenever I thought of our academics (over a thousand of them in the U.S. alone) that produce a plethora of learned texts in which Armenians are not even mentioned. Now finally I have an answer: “Smart Armenians.”
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CULTURE AND SOCIETY
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The headline of a commentary in this morning’s paper reads: “Culture a force for stagnation or change.” When things go from bad to worse, as they tend to do sometimes, culture becomes a force for decline and degeneration. That’s when the best and the brightest quit and search for challenges in alien environments. Some may call this betrayal. I call it reading the writing on the wall.
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ON HISTORIOGRAPHY
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Facts don’t disagree – they can’t. Propaganda does – that’s their raison d’etre.
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GOOD QUESTION
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How can anyone be so abysmally wrong and think he is right? This is a question I ask myself again and again when I think of my past.
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UNDERSTANDING TURKS
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I make an effort to understand Turks because any child or fanatic can hate. As for understanding Armenians: I don’t even try because at one time or another I have been all of them in all their stages of disintegration, megalomania, self-righteousness, obstinacy, and that unique combination of naiveté and cunning which is peculiar to all underdogs from xxxs to Gypsies.
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BEARDED MEAT
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Unfamiliar idiomatic expressions sometimes read like riddles. Case in point: “Unless the penis dies young, it will surely eat bearded meat.” (From Chinua Achebe’s ARROW OF GOD.)
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ON ORIGINALITY
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Sometimes originality is nothing but undetectable plagiarism, very much like great wealth, which more often than not is nothing but covered-up grand larceny.
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VALUES
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Let others speak of family values. Let us learn to speak of national values, which stand in direct opposition to partisan or tribal values.
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