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[ara baliozian]

READING READERS
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If you want to know more about Armenians as tourists, ask a tourist guide.
If you want to know more about Armenians as patients, ask a doctor.
Armenians as readers? Ask me.
My impression is that Armenian readers are as a rule hard to please.
Those who are easy to please may well outnumber them
but since they are seldom heard from
their numbers are difficult to assess with any degree of statistical accuracy.
About the others, who are always more vocal, ubiquitous, and loud:
they go far beyond expressing displeasure: they make demands;
they set down rules, specific goals and a program.
They are not readers. Rather, they are commissars and like all commissars
they harbor a killer; and they have been successful in murdering Armenian literature.
Every other Armenian writer I meet these days has either
given up, fallen silent, or tells me, "I am the last one."

A GUIDE TO THE PERPLEXED
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A reader writes: "I have been reading you now steadily for over three years and may I confess that I have failed again and again to establish any kind of rapport with you: I have no idea who you are and why you write as you do. Please explain."
Another writes: "After reading over a thousand essays by you I have reached the conclusion that you are an anti-Armenian racist and a dangerous influence on the next generation."
My answer to both readers: I am in no position to choose my readers, but you are in a position to choose what to read and what not to read. Some day if I ever write for children, fools, and mentally challenged readers, I may have better luck with you and your kind. But until then, do yourself a favor: stop reading me. Because that’s exactly what I do when confronted with a writer I neither understand nor like.

[Pilafhead]

This applies to the second reader in your post, but what about the first? They apparently both understand and like you. For readers that are like-minded to yourself, what alternatives do they have?