Pamuk: "Nobody dares to mention that. So I do."

“Thirty thousand Kurds have been killed here, and a million Armenians. And almost nobody dares to mention that. So I do.”

After Turkish author Orhan Pamuk made those remarks in 2005, rallies were held to burn his books and a hate campaign forced him to flee the country.  When he returned, the future Nobel laureate faced a criminal trial.

He stood his ground:  “What happened to the Ottoman Armenians in 1915 was a major thing that was hidden from the Turkish nation; it was a taboo. But we have to be able to talk about the past.”

Norm Naimark would agree:  “A healthy national consciousness cannot abide nasty secrets hidden away in a locked drawer.”

For Turkey, there are practical consequences to the government’s official denial of genocide – scholars have been intimidated into doing research, denied access to research, and governments held hostage.

Naimark has edited a new volume of essays, just released by Oxford University Press: A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire. After reading this book, no one will be able to deny the Armenian genocide.  [Note:  If you want to see how bad it was, do an image search on google for “Armenian genocide” — I will not use those photos. They are dehumanizing.]

For Naimark, whose provocative Stalin’s Genocides was widely discussed and critically praised, a critical question is how, in fact, do these frenzies happen?

Context is everything.  “It is not too strong to state that war serves as a breeding ground for genocide,” he writes in his preface.  War provides justifications and possibilities.

“In the minds of Turkish nationalists, the Armenians’ traditional designation as gâvur (infidels) took on some of the elements of race prejudice and was reinforced by popular resentment of alleged Armenian wealth and treachery. That ‘Christians’ had driven the Ottomans out of southeastern Europe during the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 and now threatened the integrity of the Anatolian lands of the Turks from outside and within made the Armenian threat even more dangerous from the Young Turk point of view.”  The Young Turk ideology claimed the racial superiority of Turks to Armenians.

Envy and greed also play a role.  A trigger is often rapid status reversals, “especially when class and ethnicity are both involved” as well as racial and religious prejudices.

Rarely does genocide fix itself exclusively on one set of victims – in this case, Anatolia’s Assyrians were also targets; so were Greeks.

According to Naimark, “the whirlwind of killing pulls in more and more victims and implicates an increasing number of assailants.”

Here’s what I find interesting:  Genocide happens at a number of levels of government, each with their own methods of implementation and decision-making.   “Every case of genocide is in some measure local,” he writes.

Naimark (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

“Recent research on mass killing indicates that the crime of genocide needs to be thought of as occurring at various levels of society: at the very top, where decisions are taken that lead to mass murder; at the ‘meso-level,’ where regional officials and their accomplices, the police and military, implement orders or interpret signals from the political leadership that lead to genocide; and at the most basic local level of society, where individuals participate in the killing, steal from the victims, move into their houses, or witness the depredations. Sometimes, locals try to save individuals and families, or protest against the deportation or murder of their neighbors, usually in vain.”

Genocide is not an “event” but a process – one that follows “unwritten rules of historical behavior.”  The deportation and killing of Ottoman Armenians began in the spring of 1915 and accelerated over the next six months – but it wasn’t truly finished until the early 1920s, in the face of outside stabilizing political events.

The end product was the destruction of the Armenian community in Anatolia – as in most cases of genocide, the events took place in full view of the international community,” writes Naimark. In this case, the great powers were at war, and Realpolitik trumped humanitarian considerations.

As a result is a haunting betrayal of responsibility: “The conscience of contemporary world society is haunted by images of doomed Armenian women and children, wandering aimlessly in the Anatolian plateau, mad with hunger and grief, and by photographs of rows of corpses of murdered Armenian men and boys, guarded casually by Turkish soldiers.”

And the perps? W.H.  Auden put it best:

All if challenged would reply
– ‘It was a monster with one red eye,
A crowd that saw him die, not I. —

No caption needed.

Alexandra Petri of the Washington Post gives us more evidence that she is not a class act, though after her rather tasteless derision of the octogenarian poet Donald Hall receiving the National Medal of Arts last week, we really needed no further proof.  I posted about David Sanders‘s comments in “Poetry News in Review” on March 7, and the post was picked up by (among other places) the conservative Weekly Standard.

When Sarah Palin tweeted about Petri’s “caption contest,” I feared it might become a political football, and I was right. A fundamentally human issue fell into the mighty left-wing/right-wing chasm that now disfigures this country’s public discourse.

Petri grabbed the low-hanging fruit.  In her blog post, she reveals:

“My first thought on hearing that Sarah Palin had tweeted this in response to something I’d written was: ‘Oh no, she’s read the Justin Bieber coverage.’

After all, I frequently wake up in cold sweats from dreams in which I am reprimanded by Sarah Palin for writing too much about Justin Bieber — or vice versa. This is the single most shameful thing that can happen to anyone, ever, including wearing white after labor day while being Charlie Sheen.”

While I’m not a fan of the Alaskan governor, she (or whoever wrote the tweet for her) happened to be right on this one.

However, Petri appears to be one of those people who only opens her mouth to change feet.  Hence, she continues:

Meh.

“Still, I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, Sarah Palin et al., but caption contests have been around for a while. They fall, like rain, on the just and the unjust alike. From the sounds of the coverage, you would think I’d gone to Mr. Hall’s home with a megaphone and read ‘Sudden Things’ in a snide voice, or that caption contests were a new invention, designed explicitly to bedevil old gentlemen with rich life experiences who wind up in amusing snapshots.”

Nice to see you googled Donald Hall to read one of his works, Ms. Petri – not his best effort, but I don’t expect you’d know the difference, given the cultural interests you’ve cited.  In any case, we’d prefer you’d stuck to Justin Bieber and Charlie Sheen.  Caption contests don’t fall “like rain,” they are developed by writers, approved by editors, and then read by the public.  This isn’t a big issue – and I certainly didn’t expect a moment of conscience from you – but it’s worth noting, which is why I took time to write about it.  I had hoped for better from your editors.

“Maybe this is a good time to explain the concept.

“A caption contest presents you with a photo. (Sarah, a photo is basically like a TLC series about you, but sometimes it can show you in an unflattering light.) Then, the people who see this photo attempt to write something called a caption, the goal of which is to provoke laughter in the people who read it with the photo.”

Donald Hall receives honor from Pres. Obama

Yes, Ms. Petri, we gathered that was the point.  That’s why many people wrote about their dismay and your lack of respect for people who are clearly your betters.  We were appalled by the low cultural level your writing represents for a once-great national newspaper.  We were repelled by the ageism you encouraged in the comments. When you offered, in today’s post, your own picture, for more funny captions, we are puzzled by your lack of self-respect as well.  But it explains a lot.  Really.

“I’ve written more than a dozen pieces about Palin herself, who is like cocaine except that there are rare occasions when cocaine might make your writing better.”

Whatever it takes, Alex.  Whatever it takes.

Postscript: Mark Bauerlein at The Chronicle of Higher Education weighs in: “It must be read to be believed.”  Read more here.

Postscript #2:  Frank Wilson at Books Inq throws in his 2 cents:

[Petri] certainly appears either incapable or unwilling to grasp that the problem was not with her having a caption contest, but with her choice of photo, which was of a person deserving respect, not derision. So let’s help: You were making fun of a frail old man, Alex, for no other reason than that he looked frail and old. Most people regard doing such as in terrible taste. Don’t hide behind Sarah Palin. Go take a course in remedial manners.

There’s a swirl of events March 21-28 honoring the Czesław Miłosz centenary in New York City (and one event for Zbigniew Herbert).  Join me in celebrating, if you’re in town!  It’s certainly a rare event for me — at least a decade since I’ve been in New York at all, sedentary little West Coaster that I am.

I will be speaking at Columbia University (see poster at right) on the 28th and at the Brooklyn Central Library on the 27th.

Ann Kjellberg at Little Star has blogged about some of the other events here.

They include:

March 21 — 8 p.m., Kaufman Concert Hall, 92 Street Y: “A Celebration of Czesław Miłosz with Robert Hass, Adam Zagajewski and Clare Cavanagh”

March 22 — 7 p.m., Music Building, Queens College: “A Centennial Celebration of the Work of Czesław Miłosz” — Clare Cavanagh, Robert Hass, Edward Hirsch, Adam Zagajewski

March 24 — 7 p.m., Poets House: “A Poet’s Prose: The Poetic Vision of Zbigniew Herbert,” Edward Hirsch, Charles Simic, Alissa Valles, Adam Zagajewski

March 27 — 1.30 p.m., Brooklyn Central Library, “An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czesław Miłosz,” Cynthia Haven, Adam Zagajewski, Anna Frajlich, Elizabeth Valkenier and Zygmunt Malinowski

March 28 — 7 p.m., The Lindsay Rogers Room, Columbia University, “An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czesław Miłosz,” Cynthia Haven, Anna Frajlich, Elizabeth Valkenier, Bogdana Carpenter, James Marcus, and Alan Timberlake

No, I’m not talking about Donald Hall‘s appearance in this headline – rather, I’m talking about the ugliness of the Washington Post‘s online derision of him, following his acceptance of the National Medal of Arts last Wednesday (we posted about the awards here – and there’s a nice March 2 article about Donald here).

In the column, which is determined to be unflaggingly perky,  Alexandra Petri commented on the 82-year-old poet, “who is not, in fact, a yeti.” She invited us to think of a funny caption for the photo – but the suggestions in the comments section make clear the mean-spiritedness of the whole, largely ageist, enterprise.  If the comments aren’t enough, you can read a discussion of the submissions on the chat here.

“What does this photo say to you, other than: ‘Help! I’m a talking photo!'” Petri asked.  David Sanders in his emailed newsletter, Poetry News in Review, responded more graciously than I could:

A better question might be what does a photo caption competition say about you. I wish I can articulate exactly why this bothers me. I suspect it has something to do with my own inclination to poke fun at the perceived deficits of others without regard to whether they are self-created, congenital, or accidental, as if that mattered. It’s not a side of me that is attractive, but mockery is easy and instantly gratifying.

In this case: Donald Hall, a white, male, octogenarian, successful poet, with an unkempt mane and beard, appearing with our dashing president to accept a prestigious award. So which of these things is open to ridicule and mockery at the behest of our utterly charming Washington Post columnists? All of them.

Of course, this bothers me particularly because I know who Donald Hall is, what he’s achieved, and admire his body of work. I’ve met him only once and that was in passing a couple of years ago, but he seemed to be content with himself. So I assume that this little cleverness from our well-tailored friends at the Post would not bother him, if he even knew about it. And he doesn’t need me to defend him. So I won’t. But I will be embarrassed for the rest of us.

(You can subscribe to David’s Poetry News in Review here.)

Moore Moran, Sept. 27, 1931 - Feb. 27, 2011

I received an email from my publisher at Ohio University Press/Swallow Press earlier this week – the poet Moore Moran, known to his friends as Mike, died on February 27.  He was 79.

I had blogged about the Santa Rosa poet here and here. He had published his first full-length book, Firebreaks, in 1999 – it bagged a National Poetry Book Award.  His newest book, The Room Within, was published last year.

“Imagine a poet who could deal with the experience of Jack Kerouac but with too much intelligence to limit himself to the road. You don’t have to imagine him. He exists. He has many skills, all of them beautifully bright, and on occasions when he looks into the abyss they take him safely over it,” said Turner Cassity of Moran’s poems.

But I was startled when I reread the email a few days later and realized I had overlooked that the memorial would not be in Santa Rosa, but nearby, in Menlo Park – where, it turns out, he had graduated from high school before getting two degrees from Stanford.

So I dropped in on Friday afternoon to pay my respects to a poet in the century-old Church of the Nativity.  But it was not a poet who was being honored so much as  “husband, father, grandfather, great grandfather, father-in-law, friend, poet,” according to the program.

He was much loved.  About 150-200 friends and family came to the mass, with bluegrass guitar and bass fiddle performers Dennis and Ehlert Lassen singing “Amazing Grace” and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”  Not necessarily what one would expect from the poems, with their bleak, spare mystery.

Surprisingly, everyone looked like they had come for the same event – the men were all in jackets and ties, and the women in somber suits and dresses. Banished were all traces of “California casual,” where some people look as if they had wandered in from the garden or the beach or a cocktail party.  Nor did there seem to be any poets on hand from the “Yvor Winters Circle” – but then, the room was crowded and I was in a back corner, and this was a very quiet death, after all.

The priest, referred to only as “Father Davenport,” recalled that Moore Moran, despite disability, was “always smiling” and “a good man.”

His son, businessman Mike Moran, said, “I never stopped amazing my dad, and my dad never stopped amazing me.”  The son, to put it mildly, was not a poet or lit freak.

His father taught the kids Latin and music, as well as Yvor Winters, John Steinbeck, and J.D. Salinger.  He was “an encyclopedia of jokes,” recalled his son.  And, in fact, the program included his poem “Just Joking,” written on his 51st birthday, when he had “maybe a third of a tank left”:

…the bewildered heart in us which,
Year by year, measuring our slim attainments
With mounting despair, still feeds
In its recesses some faint hope, despite
The certain knowledge that what it hopes for
Cannot change the tide…

“He was often lost in afterthought,” said his son.  “I’m certainly no poet, but I came to appreciate my father’s poetry.” He recalled the children’s hesitancy to have their father correct their writing, because “then we’d go back for another hour of writing.”

But sometimes dad came in handy.  Moran Jr. recalled a long discussion his father launched when the son was having trouble “getting” Chaucer‘s Canterbury Tales.  The next day in class,  Moran Jr. performed the usual duck-and-hide with averted gaze, to avoid the teacher targeting him with a question.  The teacher targeted him anyway.

Thanks to his dad’s monologue, the so-so student poured forth with a reply “at a depth and level far beyond what my teacher had.”

The class was “absolutely stunned.  The whole room was silent,” he recalled.

“I was bumped up to AP English,” he said, and paused for only an instant. “That lasted about four days.”

On Moran’s memorial page at legacy.com, David Sanders wrote: “A gentleman and a fine poet. It was an honor to edit and publish his last book.”

“Just Joking,” with its rambling style is nice, but my favorite Moran poems are quick and cryptic – like this one:

Ordinary Time in the Pews

Church of the Nativity, Menlo Park

Ordinary days again.
Advent, Pentecost are past;
who now will accept our sins,
raise the dust in which we’re cast?

Cold the God flesh on the tree,
banned the crèche to attic murk,
sheer the silence after prayer.
Nothing seems at all to work.

Yet we try and try again
serving Him we hardly know:
honk if you love Jesus, friend,
beeping blessings as we go.

Here we meet who, somehow, must
rescue meaning from the dust,
where betrayal’s kiss presents
our best hope of relevance.

Postscript:  Patrick Kurp at Anecdotal Evidence has added a lovely tribute here.  “Earth only will find him cold.”

Postscript on 3/7: Looking online for others who remember Moore Moran, I found this mini-memoir from Peter Robinson.

We’ve written about books-as-tables here.  But say, don’t you need a chair to go with that table?

Look no further.  Timorous Beasties introduces La Bibliochaise.  For a mere $7,000 (not counting shipping costs from Scotland) you could sit on about 5 meters, or about 16 feet, of bookshelf space.

Alternatively, try the Parisian Dondola, from Made 75.  The English version of the site says “Price on Request.”  I consider that an early warning signal.

For a high art version, see Richard Hutten‘s stacked book chair in Ghent (below) — with the Dutch artist inside of it.  The internationally renowned, 40-something Hutten is considered “one of the most well-known and most unconventional Dutch designers,” according to the Chair Blog. “Hutten is a conceptual designer but his designs are highly functional, each and every one of them. Often the object will even have multiple functions.”

Obviously, none of the multiple functions include actually reading the books.

No mention of a price for the Hutten piece — you have every reason to fear the worst…

I think I’ll stick to Ikea.