The Birth of Armenian American Literature

I conducted an email interview with David Kherdian, the editor of a new anthology of first-generation Armenian American literature entitled, Forgotten Bread (Available at Amazon), which is slated to appear in bookstores this fall–coincidentally, I contributed a short chapter on writer Peter Sourian.

We chatted about a project that many hope will revitalize a little known branch of Armenian and American literature, it is a body of work that has far too long been overlooked. As Kherdian reminds us in this interview, “…without our stories we are nothing.”

Why did you feel this book project was important?

I have something of the preservationist in me, and I didn’t want to have all (or nearly all) of these writers disappear without a trace. I’m also a born (or made) anthologist, (this is my 9th or 10th anthology), and a book maker as well. I mean I love to make books and ideas for making books come to me often. On a deeper level, I had wanted to refute the idea that those who followed Saroyan were followers of Saroyan (even though I was), with the belief among the general public that we were imitating him. What they couldn’t see, that was so clear to me, was that there is such a thing as an Armenian sensibility, and all of our work reflects this. It seemed extremely important to me to have this become known, so that we could squeeze out from under Saroyan’s burdensome influence.

How did you make your selections about which writers to include?

I had been carrying this idea around for going on 40 years, so I knew who all the writers were, and of course I knew the work of each one of them. There will also be a Notable Writers of the First Generation selection in the Appendix.

How did your opinion of Armenian American literature change during the course of this book?

There was only one new realization, and it was a Big One: I found that by assembling this anthology the creation of Armenian-American literature was born. You can say it was always there, but it was not known to be there and now it is something real. I will be interested to see what comes of this.

What was the biggest surprise for you, any unknown figures that proved to be more seminal than you first thought?

My estimation of each writers worth is the same now as it was before I began. Like I said, I had it all in my head and I knew it would be an important work long before I began, but not nearly as important as I see that it is now, and that is because I didn’t realize, until I put it all together, just how dynamic a book it would be.

There was one surprise, however, when I discovered that three writers I hadn’t considered before had, upon coming to America, made the decision to write in English instead of Armenian: Leon Serabian Herald, Emmanuel Varandyan, and Leon Surmelian. In my mind this qualified them as Armenian-American writers. These three lead off the book and add an exotic flavor that would not have been there otherwise. It is also amazing how timely their work is: Surmelian encounters Mexicans in one story and is taken for one and suffers discrimination; and then in his other story he befriends an Arab Muslim, and we see how–and with irony–their differences are resolved through their common humanity. The Varandyan story is set in the war torn Iraq of his day, with echoes that can be found in our own time.

Who do you think is the audience for the book?

1. First, the people in the book, because none of them know the work of their contemporaries in the way they should.
2. the second generation, who are nearly as clueless of our work as we are of theirs.
3. Armenian-Americans who read, whoever they may be.
4. Armenians in the homeland.
5. American writers.
6. Americans.
7. some fraction of the rest of the world, small perhaps but real.

Any regrets? Are there stories you wish you could include?

No regrets because the selections are ample–the book runs to nearly 500 pages.

What do you think is the greatest contribution of Armenian American literature to America’s national literature? International literature?

All art enhances the general body that acts as the source of their stability, which in turn is the means for its continuance. Within this continuum it is necessary that each people have their own art that is crucial to their stability, for our stories contain us and reveal us and inform us and nurture us, filling us with the real pride that comes from having lived and endured, not only with our lives intact, but with our stories told. For without our stories we are nothing.

Your book zooms in on the first generation of Armenian American fiction. Any thoughts about the writers that followed…the second (or third) generation?

It is of course very different: For one thing we grew up in the shadow of the Genocide, which had a huge impact on all of us. Your generation is somewhat affected, but of course differently, just as you are different as Americans. Then too, a writer often mirrors his own time, and so our concerns will have been different, also our struggles, our troubles, and our needs. One thing I wanted to do with my book, by having the second generation writers do profiles on the first generation writers in the book, was to create a tradition, which of course did not exist before now. I would like to move forward with this idea by doing an anthology of the writers of the second generation, which would be a completely different book from Forgotten Bread. And full of surprises.

How is their writing different?

It has a different urgency. When I put the anthology together we will discover together just what that is.

YouTube = New Global Folk Art

There was a time when graffiti was a global folk art, it was the eighties and early nineties when street artists didn’t dominate the scene and scribbling on the wall wasn’t automatically labeled “gang graffiti.”

Now YouTube has supplanted graffiti as the global folk art. The audience is bigger and posted videos can be seen simultaneously in Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, Paris and Mexico City–got to love that type of instant distribution.

The DRAMATIC PRAIRIE DOG that dominated YouTube this week and popped up on cable TV (I saw it on MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann) is a great case in point.

I’ve pooled a wide sampling that blossomed soon after the original posting and demonstrate–remember it has only been three days since the original surfaced. {Apologies to those that read this in email form, but I think a visit to my site is worthwhile to see the crazy spectrum of material.}

*** THE ORIGINAL ***

This one uses subtitles.

Dramatic Priarie Dog as vintage camp.

Prairie Dog falls in LOVE with Paris Hilton here.

The gangsta rap version.

With Kill Bill music…

…and with Kill Bill stylings.

Some people think peeps should give it a try…

…and some people will turn anything into a commercial.

The are those that envision Drama Dog as a mobster whacking Hilary Clinton…

…or Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver.

Drama Dog could be Psycho or…

…or up against Die Hard.

This is my favorite, a highly-artsy version with a 1960s feel.

This one is more 80s.

This one suggests what precipitated the Prairie Dog’s dramatic moment.

This video activist uses Priaire Dog to push for YouTube to reinstate categories…

…and so does this one.

Here’s a silent post-modern pastiche of Dramatic Prairie Dog that is pure art…

…and this is the same art with sound.

Some are just demented.

Then there are some dramatic cats envious of the attention Prairie Dog is receiving…

…and a dramatic cockatiel.

Then there is one video response which is rather sophisticated. It considers the 5 sec. Dramatic Prairie Dog clip too long and distills the fascination into a fast action one second granny boxing snippet. Not the same, but the message seems similiar.

And it’s reassuring to know that kids love it too!

I’m not 100% sure why this rodent with soundtrack is so riveting…it’s rather inexplicable.

We’re starting to learn more about the interaction of video and sound, we’re going to need to develop a new aesthetic understanding that makes sense of all this. No one could’ve predicted that a certain episode of Pokemon would cause some kids in Japan to have epileptic seizures like it did nine years ago, but it did. Where’s Walter Benjamin and Marshall McLuhan when you need them?

Don’t Tread on My Email

Some of us love the informality of email and prefer that it resist institutionalization. Now the New Yorker reports, that two text-based professional (David Shipley, the Op-Ed editor of the Times, and Will Schwalbe, the editor-in-chief of Hyperion Books) have conjured up an email style guide.

Two years back, Slate.com suggested that the American and European sensibilites regarding email were worlds away (article), and they made some good points–the skinny–for Europeans, e-mail has replaced the business letter, and for Americans, it has replaced the telephone.

The New Yorker, which has been using umlauts in lieu of hyphens (what century are we in?), isn’t exactly the go-to guide for contemporary writing style, but its interesting to know that even the calcified are thinking about email (and other e-based communications) nowadays.

Publisher’s Weekly tells us:

Shipley and Schwalbe…explain why people so often say “incredibly stupid things” in their outgoing messages. “Email has a tendency to encourage the lesser angels of our nature,” they note. They also offer “seven big reasons to love email,” along with quick guides to instant messaging and e-mail technology, all the while urging us to “think before [we] send.”

Ok, maybe their intention is not horrible, so if you must check out their book, “Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home” is on sale today everywhere (Amazon listing).

Wiki-novels?

Penguin Books, in collaboration with students at De Montfort University in Leicester (UK), created the world’s first Wiki-novel.

Nearly 1,500 people contributed to the one month project of A Million Penguins. Over 11,000 edits were made, 75,000 people visited the site, and more than 280,000 page views were recorded.

Perhaps it is a little lame to cite Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author” which argues that there are multiple readings of any text, and text is a product of multiple cultural tenets, but hey, a team of writers produced the U.S. Constitution, the Bible, the Koran, the Icelandic Sagas, the epic of David of Sassoun (to name a few), so the wiki-novel concept is not entirely unheard of.

It could be the next natural progression for literature, informed by the success of hypertext on the web, but robbed of the banality of post-modernism.

Here are the wiki-novel’s opening words:

With a word it begins … the sound of clicking keys and the smell of wet fur fill the room. Möbius strips made of banana yellow construction paper and Scotch tape are scattered haphazardly across the floor. The chief monkey, careful not to slip and fall, ambles from desk to desk collecting papers before pasting them slowly and deliberately into a gigantic scrapbook. He scratches himself, enjoying the sensation. If he had been able to read, as he once had been, he would have read something similar, or perhaps completely different, to the following…..

Ok, it might not be Ian McEwan or Margaret Atwood (probably more Douglas Coupland) but it’s somewhat intriguing.

Uwe’s blog is worth a read on the subject (post)

Mourning Taniel Varoujan

Friday, March 30, Marc Nichanian spoke at a HyeQ-sponsored event on the Armenian Turkish poet Taniel Varoujan. Even if it was a little difficult to follow at times it illuminated a main theme in the writer’s works.

Varoujan is one of those key artistic figures of the pre-1915 Genocide. He was deeply impacted by the culture of massacre that enveloped the lives of Ottoman (and Turkish) Armenians, and his poetry reflects that solemn mood. It was a time of contradictions for Varoujan and his community, they were at the brink of destruction while undegoing (simultaneously) the most radical moodernization and cultural revival they had experienced since the 5th C.

Colum McCann’s Zoli (Boldtype, March 2007)

Based loosely on the life of Polish Romany poet Bronislawa Wajs (or Papusza, her Roma name), Colum McCann’s sixth and latest book, Zoli, is a poetic tale of belonging, borders, and the odd joy of being different. Easily roaming between narrators and nations, the delightful book has at its core an artist who refuses to conform and is never comfortable being anything but herself. Born Marienka but called Zoli, McCann’s main character encapsulates the complex and emotional journey the Roma people endured for most of the 20th century.

In the 1930s, in a nation that no longer exists, six-year-old Zoli and her Marx-reading grandfather escape the pro-Nazi Slovak forces that kill the rest of the family by forcing them onto a frozen lake at gunpoint. Fate is cruel to Zoli, but her grandfather ensures that she will buck Roma tradition, take up the pencil, and learn to read and write. With her kumpanija (“band of families”) Zoli escapes the maniacal fascists — who would rather cart her people off to concentration camps — to experience an all-too-brief golden age when the Communists arrive and embrace the Roma as examples of liberated proletarians.

Terri Jentz’s Strange Piece of Paradise (Boldtype, June 2006)

Terri Jentz’s Strange Piece of Paradise (June 2006)

Synopsis
A harrowing, true tale of how the author narrowly survived an attack by an axe-wielding maniac while camping in 1977. The traumatic event transformed her life and forced her to reflect on the rise of the serial killer that has marked the last quarter of the 20th century.

Review
If the story weren’t so eerie, so American, and so well documented, anybody might assume that Terri Jentz’s new book was a work of fiction.

In 1977, Jentz and a female companion ventured out West hoping to “find themselves” as they biked across the country. Filled with nostalgic notions of America, the two Yalies pitched their tent in an Oregon campsite on day seven of what promised to be an epic journey. That night, a man drove over their tent before jumping out of his truck with an axe. He attacked the pair and severely gashed Jentz’s arm while almost killing her companion.

Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul (Boldtype, December 2005)

Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul (December 2005)

Synopsis
Internationally acclaimed Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s loving and vivid memoir about the Istanbul of his childhood, perched precariously at the crossroads of a storied East and an affluent West.

Review
For his latest and most intimate book, Orhan Pamuk pens a chronicle of his early days in the great Turkish metropolis of Istanbul. Breaking through orientalist notions, he conjures up a stark portrait of a city traumatized by the shotgun modernization that everyone believed would usher in prosperity.

Pamuk intersperses the soul-searching tale of his once-wealthy, noble family with an appealing trove of photographs that set the stage for his rhapsodic remembrances. Istanbul combines family snapshots with over a hundred images by the city’s leading photographers — personal and public images that refract each chapter through the prism of daily urban life.

Katherine Graham’s A Personal History (Boldtype, September 2005)

Katherine Graham’s A Personal History (September 2005)

Synopsis
Born into privilege and surrounded by a who’s who of 20th-century American politics, Katherine Graham charts her awakening from D.C. debutante to one of the most powerful women in America.

Review
When Katharine Graham wrote her Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Personal History, she was already an American icon. As the publisher of the Washington Post, she expanded the newspaper into a media conglomerate. During the turbulent ’70s, she was a key behind-the-scenes player in the Watergate controversy that catapulted the Post onto the international stage.

While later chapters are spiked with the controversy that toppled Nixon, the majority of the book chronicles her life’s trajectory, from a shy, awkward silver-spoon childhood to phenomenal success at the helm of a Fortune 500 Company. With the breadth of an ancient historian and the insight of a modern psychologist, her lively, conversational prose chronicles her marriage, career, and eventual Pygmalion transformation.

R. Buckminster Fuller & Bruce Mau’s Critical Path & Massive Change

R. Buckminster Fuller & Bruce Mau’s Critical Path & Massive Change (January 2005)

Synopsis
A comparison of Mau’s new Massive Change and Fuller’s seminal Critical Path — two books that take on the challenge of examining the future of information and culture.

Review
When architect-designer-theorist R. Buckminster Fuller published Critical Path in 1982 — a year before his death — he summed up a life’s work theorizing about the crises that face humanity, and cemented his reputation as one of the planet’s most innovative thinkers. In addition to inventing the geodesic dome and the Dymaxion world map, Fuller is known for a unique philosophy anchored in both individuality and sustainability — the latter being a radical notion at the time.

Critical Path is a trove of futurist thinking that predicts, among other things, the ubiquity of computers; but the bulk of its ideas remain dormant, still awaiting discovery. Some theories, such as his declaration that Southeast Asia is the true cradle of human civilization, are thrilling if yet unproven. Others, such as the viability of the geodesic doming of midtown Manhattan, sound as attractive today as ever. The book reads like an amalgam of Fuller’s life and work, which influenced generations of creators, including leading Toronto-based designer-theorist Bruce Mau, whose Institute Without Boundaries (IWB) takes on Fuller’s challenge to forge a new breed of designer.