notes / comments

[Կարմիր Բ]

Re: notes / comments

Its independent media, the news are written by ordinary people. Armenia used to have one but now its not opperating for various reasons. Probably our ''democratic'' state has something to do with it.

http://www.indymedia.org/en/index.shtml

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Sunday, March 11, 2007
********************************************
ANSWERS
***********************
Organized religions are the best proof of the fact that an answer, any answer, even the wrong one, is better than no answer. The same applies to ideologies when they are confused with theology.
*
One of our ideologies stands for independence and freedom. But how independent and free can they ever be if they live in fear of free speech?
*
A GUESS
*********************
There are more Armenians today who don’t identify themselves as Armenians than Armenians of the opposite disposition.
*
PEARLS
*************************
Francis Ponge: “It is by his death that a man proves he deserved to live.”
*
Jean Cocteau: “The future belongs to no one. There are no precursors, only retards.”
*
Julius Caesar: “I’d rather be first in this village than second in Rome.”
*
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “The most important prediction we can make is that we cannot predict everything.”
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Its independent media, the news are written by ordinary people. Armenia used to have one but now its not opperating for various reasons. Probably our ''democratic'' state has something to do with it.

http://www.indymedia.org/en/index.shtml

the only time we enjoyed some degree of free speech (in regard to armenian affairs and politics) was under Sultan Abdulhamid II. after that we have been at the mercy of our political parties.

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Monday, March 12, 2007
****************************************
ON REVOLUTIONARIES
***********************************
I have at no time questioned the good intentions of our revolutionaries. What I have been doing is reminding them that hell is paved with good intentions.
*
In an intolerant environment, even an often-repeated cliché can make one an enemy of the people.
*
What could be more cowardly than fear of clichés?
*
No writer has ever silenced a politician. Censorship has always been a one-way street.
*
ON SERIAL KILLERS
**********************************
Serial killers operate on the assumption that truth is as easily killed as defenseless civilians.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Tuesday, March 13, 2007
******************************************
A REQUEST
************************
Before you contradict me, I beg you to reflect for ten minutes. Because everything I say is a result of at least twenty and sometimes thirty years of experience, study, and reflection.
*
CONFESSION
***************************
I don’t mind admitting that I have been wrong so many times in the past that I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if someone were to prove me wrong not just on this or that specific point but on everything. I say this because just when I think I have committed every conceivable blunder I commit a new one. But the blunder that I keep committing again and again is trying to reason with fellow Armenians who know better. For I have yet to meet an Armenian who did not know better.
*
SOCRATES
***********************
Socrates never said “I know better.” What he said was “The only thing I know is that I don’t know.” What would happen to Socrates in New York, Moscow, or Toronto today? He would be ignored as a harmless and unemployable misfit, eventually acquire the status of a homeless street person, and die of exposure. There are better ways of getting rid of a nuisance than a public trial and the administration of hemlock, both of which cost money.
*
PHILOSOPHY TODAY
*********************************
Nobody takes philosophy seriously these days; and yet, everyone has a philosophy, even when it happens to be a cliché. “Live and let live, that’s my philosophy,” they say; or “You only live once.” These "philosophers" never ask whether or not they deserve to live at all.
*
ENEMIES
*************************
The hardest thing to explain to an Armenian is that divisiveness, corruption, and incompetence are a far greater threat to our survival today than Turks were a hundred years ago. And yet, what we get from our Turcocentric pundits and media is endless talk of past atrocities. After which they accuse me of being negative.
*
PAUL JOHNSON ON CROCODILES
*******************************************
“Everything about a croc is efficient. It copulates under water and takes exactly ten minutes, which oddly enough is the time it took Napoleon Bonaparte.”

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Sunday, March 11, 2007
********************************************
ANSWERS
***********************
Organized religions are the best proof of the fact that an answer, any answer, even the wrong one, is better than no answer. The same applies to ideologies when they are confused with theology.
*
One of our ideologies stands for independence and freedom. But how independent and free can they ever be if they live in fear of free speech?
*
A GUESS
*********************
There are more Armenians today who don’t identify themselves as Armenians than Armenians of the opposite disposition.
*
PEARLS
*************************
Francis Ponge: “It is by his death that a man proves he deserved to live.”
*
Jean Cocteau: “The future belongs to no one. There are no precursors, only retards.”
*
Julius Caesar: “I’d rather be first in this village than second in Rome.”
*
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “The most important prediction we can make is that we cannot predict everything.”
#
Monday, March 12, 2007
****************************************
ON REVOLUTIONARIES
***********************************
I have at no time questioned the good intentions of our revolutionaries. What I have been doing is reminding them that hell is paved with good intentions.
*
In an intolerant environment, even an often-repeated cliché can make one an enemy of the people.
*
What could be more cowardly than fear of clichés?
*
No writer has ever silenced a politician. Censorship has always been a one-way street.
*
ON SERIAL KILLERS
**********************************
Serial killers operate on the assumption that truth is as easily killed as defenseless civilians.
#
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
******************************************
A REQUEST
************************
Before you contradict me, I beg you to reflect for ten minutes. Because everything I say is a result of at least twenty and sometimes thirty years of experience, study, and reflection.
*
CONFESSION
***************************
I don’t mind admitting that I have been wrong so many times in the past that I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if someone were to prove me wrong not just on this or that specific point but on everything. I say this because just when I think I have committed every conceivable blunder I commit a new one. But the blunder that I keep committing again and again is trying to reason with fellow Armenians who know better. For I have yet to meet an Armenian who did not know better.
*
SOCRATES
***********************
Socrates never said “I know better.” What he said was “The only thing I know is that I don’t know.” What would happen to Socrates in New York, Moscow, or Toronto today? He would be ignored as a harmless and unemployable misfit, eventually acquire the status of a homeless street person, and die of exposure. There are better ways of getting rid of a nuisance than a public trial and the administration of hemlock, both of which cost money.
*
PHILOSOPHY TODAY
*********************************
Nobody takes philosophy seriously these days; and yet, everyone has a philosophy, even when it happens to be a cliché. “Live and let live, that’s my philosophy,” they say; or “You only live once.” These "philosophers" never ask whether or not they deserve to live at all.
*
ENEMIES
*************************
The hardest thing to explain to an Armenian is that divisiveness, corruption, and incompetence are a far greater threat to our survival today than Turks were a hundred years ago. And yet, what we get from our Turcocentric pundits and media is endless talk of past atrocities. After which they accuse me of being negative.
*
PAUL JOHNSON ON CROCODILES
*******************************************
“Everything about a croc is efficient. It copulates under water and takes exactly ten minutes, which oddly enough is the time it took Napoleon Bonaparte.”
#
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
*****************************************
MEN AND APES
******************************
The status quo will always have its supporters. Even criminal regimes had their rostrum of friends, among them famous writers, composers, scientists, conductors, and Nobel Prize winners. And where there are great men who support a regime for their own reasons, there will also be an abundance of mediocrities and dupes who will support it because better men than themselves do so.
In my anti-Soviet days this type of ape in human form would write me angry letters saying, “Do you think you are smarter than Saroyan?”
What happened to these famous men who supported Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini? Some committed suicide, others like Ezra Pound were declared insane and spent a number of years in an asylum, a few wrote books admitting their mistakes.
It is said that when asked about Jesus, the dying Pilate replied: “I don’t remember anyone by that name.”
The human brain is a marvelous, not to say miraculous, tool a thousand times smarter than the smartest computer. Learn to use it. And if you have your own, why rely on someone else’s? To put it more bluntly, if you are a man, why behave like an ape?
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Thursday, March 15, 2007
******************************************
MAFIAS
************************
The problem with our so-called cultural foundations is that they are staffed by self-assessed intellectuals, poets, writers, and pundits with their own narrow agendas and criteria, whose central concern is the ruthless elimination of the competition. Translated into dollars and cents this means, when mediocrities are in charge, only lesser mediocrities will have a chance to qualify for support.
*
The immediate satisfaction of our instincts makes stronger demands on us than reason, common sense, and decency. There you have the source of much human suffering.
*
I will be a popular Armenian writer on the day mice become infatuated with mousetraps.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Friday, March 16, 2007
************************************
FROM THE SUBLIME TO THE RIDICULOUS
************************************************** **
When Dorothea Ertmann’s son died, her piano teacher came to see her but “instead of expressing his sympathy with words, he sat right down at the piano, without a word, and extemporized at length.” Dorothea Ertmann is identified as a Bach interpreter and her piano teacher as Beethoven. I read this in Martin’s Geck’s J.S. BACH: HIS LIFE AND WORK (Illustrated, 738 pages, Index, Bibliography. New York: 2006) and in connection to the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue D minor. Geck goes on to explain that Beethoven “knew the Chromatic Fantasy, which since 1802 was widely available in Vienna in print as well as in manuscript, indeed, he copied parts of it himself in 1810.” Elsewhere he explains why one sometimes responds to Bach’s music with laughter and tears at the same time. Though at times scholarly and overly technical, as all books on Bach tend to be, this is no doubt one of the very best books on the subject that contains many accessible pages to the average layman.
*
Marcel Proust: “Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.” Maybe so, but so far, all grief seems to have done for us is develop our ability to sell Oriental rugs. To those who object and say, there are at least a thousand Armenian academics in America alone, I say: most of these academics are alienated Armenians and have not written a single line on Armenians; the rest are mostly genocide pundits and they go about their business the way Oriental rug dealers do.
*
In a commentary in our paper today, titled “Iraqi terrorists are targeting intellectuals,” we read: “The terrorists who are fighting for control of Iraq realize that freedom of expression and learning are their enemies.” This is true not only of terrorists in Iraq today but also fascists, authoritarian regimes, and intolerant and dogmatic people everywhere.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Saturday, March 17, 2007
****************************************
ON POWER
************************************
“Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” Wrong. Don’t trust anyone with power, even if he is in his teens or twenties; or anyone without power whose ambition is to become powerful. In short: don’t trust anyone. I remember, the first thing I did when I acquired some power was to abuse it. My power was mostly in my imagination and the abuse was as severe as a harmless practical joke. But the fact remains that I abused it as naturally and as thoughtlessly as I breathe or sneeze. Which is why I don’t trust anyone with power, or “the insolence of office,” as the Prince of Denmark (who ought to know) puts it. I have yet to meet a partisan or panchoonie, a bishop or archbishop, who did not abuse his power whenever he thought he could get away with it. Power corrupts because it promotes abuse, and no one is as severely and promptly punished as he who takes it upon himself to expose the abuse.
*
Cain killed Abel not because he was a born killer but because he had the power and the opportunity. To say that empire builders like Alexander the Great, Caesar, and Napoleon were better than Cain is an illusion advanced by militarist historians -- the very same militarists who supported the likes of Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao who killed more innocent people than a thousand serial killers.
*
Where men are in power, women will be abused. But not just women. It was G.B. Shaw who once observed that an upper-class lady spends enough money on her clothes and xxxelry to feed a thousand hungry children a year.
*
People mourn when solders die. They should mourn on the day war is declared.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Sunday, March 18, 2007
***************************************
THE BLACK AND THE YELLOW
**********************************************
Time is the greatest magician. It turns black to white, and night to day; it exposes crooks and does away with the obnoxious effortlessly, all the while remaining invisible. Writing history is trying to understand and explain the incomprehensible tricks of this magician knowing full well that one’s efforts are doomed to failure. That is why historians from Herodotus to Toynbee have been accused of lies and charlatanism. And speaking of black and charlatanism: there is a Canadian by the name of Black, Conrad Black, who had everything any man ever desired —wealth, power, intellect, looks, and an attractive, young, and smart wife (both Lord and Lady Black are prolific writers) who now stands accused of crimes that could land him in prison for 101 years. And then there is Bush whose understanding of history never went beyond Hollywood westerns -- a good guy on a white horse liberating Dodge City from the nefarious grip of a bad guy and his gang of cutthroats. With one difference: unlike Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, and Alan Ladd, this particular Texan never planned to confront the bad guy himself at high noon or at any other time of day or night. He was going to let others do the killing, dying, maiming and being maimed. He may think of himself as the leader of the mightiest empire in the world but he is neither Caesar nor Alexander the Great or Napoleon. Even Hitler had more first-hand experience of war than he.
*
The easiest thing in the world, to solve someone else’s problems; the hardest, to solve one’s own.
#