shoptalk

[ara baliozian]

SHOPTALK

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Hostility towards selfless intellectual labor is not criticism;

neither is censorship.

Editors who practice censorship have been notoriously fallible judges.

Consider the Soviet era.

And if you think the Soviet era is history, think again!

Our partisan editors are not only neo-Soviet but also crypto-Stalinist.

They practice censorship;

hey have no respect for free speech and

no use for the exchange of ideas or dialogue;

they are committed to a closed system of thought

and they operate on the assumption that

what they know is as clear as daylight

and anyone who doesn’t agree with them is

either a complete ignoramus or an enemy of the people.

The only difference that I can see

between Soviet editors and ours is that,

unlike to Soviet, our editors don’t have any influence

on their local police and are thus

in no position to recommend the death penalty –

which may explain why I am alive.

[ara baliozian]

ON THE ART OF WRITING

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The most important thing to remember is:

the less art the better.

Be brief.

Write 100 pages,

reduce them to one page,

squeeze that page into a single paragraph,

and discard it into the wastepaper basket.

Be honest.

Forget all about the crap you have been exposed to

by sermonizers and speechifiers.

Speak from your own experience

and testify on what you have observed with your own eyes.

Do these things and you’ve got it made,

which in our environment means

making the maximum number of enemies,

among them editors and publishers.

If you remember,

the title of this essay is "the art of writing,"

not the art of being published.

But if you want to know all about getting published,

I will be glad to tell you that too – for the same money.

All you do is remember two things: kiss ass and recycle crap.