Thursday, March 15, 2007
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MAFIAS
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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.
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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.
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I will be a popular Armenian writer on the day mice become infatuated with mousetraps.
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Friday, March 16, 2007
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FROM THE SUBLIME TO THE RIDICULOUS
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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 with 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.
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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 who go about their business the way Oriental rug dealers do.
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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 people everywhere.
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Saturday, March 17, 2007
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ON POWER
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“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.
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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.
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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 jewelry to feed a thousand hungry children a year.
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People mourn when solders die. They should mourn on the day war is declared.
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