The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Biting The Bullet

Biting The Bullet
Posted by pancho (Guest) - Sunday, December 9 2007, 22:34:41 (CET)
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I’m not a scholar….I haven’t a shred of the academic in me. Like everyone else who reads I pick up what I like and walk past what I don’t like. Having dropped out of school in the third grade I never had reading assignments which forced me to plow through any book I didn’t want to. So Shakespeare was my joy…the complete works of Charles Dickens a delight among hundreds of other books and plays, and history has been an especial picnic wherein, among others, I’ve feasted on the eleven volumes of Durant for the last 15 years, reading them over I don’t how many times…as I sit here now plunking away I see his “Rousseau and Revolution”, “The Renaissance” and “Caesar and Christ” laid out on the plywood slab that serves as my desk. That’s over 2,100 pages of sheer pleasure in those three volumes alone. Also here I see Dr Joseph’s two books, a copy of another Gilgamesh book, a book on Greek sculpture of the classical age, a book of anatomical drawings from the Great Masters and at one end a small plaster replica of an ancient Assyrian bowl I’m carving and have been for six years now, off and on; it’s very intricate.

Behind me is a sculpture stand with the beginnings of a full figure of Gilgamesh…on another work surface sits a larger than life-size bust of Richard III, still in clay…and on another table to my right is an 18 inch male figure in wax that still needs work…and this all crammed into the kitchen of a large empty house because it’s so damn cold here so I use the stovetop for warmth. I tell you, there ought to be more money in it for betraying your people…I have to talk to my Muslim masters…this is no way to treat a stupid spy.

This is all by way of saying that I’m now going to force myself to read Aprim’s fucking book, as busy as I am and as much as I can think of many more pleasant ways to spend my time…at least I’ll read the one that deals with Badr Khan’s attack on the Nestorians. I have to see how his version compares to Dr Joseph’s, See, Aprim has written a version he likes and approves of because he’s no scholar or academic either…and we like what he tells us, so we think he’s got history right. Dr Joseph has written a version that draws from all available sources, regardless of what they say…even if they contradict what we think we know. Since we think of history as whatever flatters us, we naturally think all historians work from the same cozy principle…and since Aprim, with whom we agree, is a “friend” of ours and a “true patriot to assyria”…and since Dr Joseph isn’t interested in being anyone’s friend or enemy…and turns out a scholarly work which just happens to make piffle of Aprim’s version, Dr Joseph must be an UNfriend of ours. A six year-old couldn’t have put it better, “like me-good…don’t like me-bad.” End of his-story.

But I’m getting ahead of myself…I have to read Aprim’s book…that’s only fair if I’m to understand what it is I THINK I’m going to pick apart…which is more than any of our religio-nationalists will do with Dr Joseph’s books.

Sigh. Look at what I have to read compared to what they WON’T read….it’s enough to make a traitor demand a raise.



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