मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि च दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… इ. स. 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Monday, January 11, 2010

Just Get yourself a Smart Belly-Dancer

John Tierney:

“After analyzing the brain chemistry of mammalian pair bonding — and, not incidentally, explaining humans’ peculiar erotic fascination with breasts — Dr. Young predicts that it won’t be long before an unscrupulous suitor could sneak a pharmaceutical love potion into your drink.”

JOANNE LIPMAN:

"The truth is, women haven’t come nearly as far as we would have predicted 25 years ago. Somewhere along the line, especially in recent years, progress for women has stalled. And attitudes have taken a giant leap backward…
… The conversation online about women, as about so many other topics, degenerated from silly and snarky to just plain ugly — and it seeped into the mainstream.
Recently, before a TV appearance, I did an Internet search on one of the interviewers so I could learn more about her — and got a full page of results about her breasts. .."

Anthony Effinger, Katherine Burton and Ian King wrote on Nov 23 2009:
"Woman Who Sank Galleon Was Beauty-Queen-Turned-Analyst Insider...Danielle Chiesi spent a lot of time in hotel ballrooms and bars during the past decade.

As an analyst at New Castle Funds LLC, a New York hedge fund firm that manages about $1 billion, she was a regular at conferences on technology stocks, where she could get face time with executives and press them on how many microprocessors and how much software they were shipping that quarter.

Chiesi wore short skirts and low-cut tops, according to people who saw her over the years. One ploy was to go barhopping with a group, and then peel someone off to talk to on the dance floor, says a person who attended conferences with her.

A blond, blue-eyed former teenage beauty queen, Chiesi used her sexuality to build sources at male-dominated tech companies, says Deborah Stapleton, president of Stapleton Communications Inc., an investor relations company in Palo Alto, California.

“It amazes me that grown, wealthy, successful, hardworking men fell for that,” Stapleton says..."

This does not amaze me because this is just history repeating!

J. B. Handelsman has said:

“Sometimes something historical gives you a better perspective. You can see the latest dumbness as just the end of a long line of dumbnesses that have been taking place for thousands of years.”

By the way, I did not know that Handelsman, my favourite cartoonist, was dead. He died on June 20, 2007.

I just loved his "Freaky Fables" that were first published by Punch magazine.

Punch became accessible to me only because of him.

I often tried to find humour in Punch in 1980's. I couldn't.

Now I realise that it was not just my dumbness because CHARLES McGRATH writes in review of 'THE BEST OF PUNCH CARTOONS: 2,000 Humor Classics' Edited by Helen Walasek:

"...But Punch had for years been running on fumes, except for the cartoons, which got better, oddly, as the rest of the magazine slipped into a kind of genteel, un-funny mediocrity...")

JBH was one of those who fought against this 'mediocrity'.

Here is a JBH fable: "Ali Baba" that has the moral : 'Don't bother with accountants, Get yourself a smart Belly-dancer.'



courtesy: Punch
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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I inclination not acquiesce in on it. I assume nice post. Specially the appellation attracted me to review the whole story.

January 14, 2010 at 4:49 PM

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