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."

Saturday, April 13, 2013

Then Missing WMD, Now Books? Mike Luckovich Is Back and How!

Pankaj Mishra:

 "...The Great War, wrote (Karl) Kraus, "was a disastrous failure of the imagination and an almost deliberate refusal to envisage the inevitable consequences of words and acts". It was "made possible above all by the corruption of language in politics and by some of the major newspapers". Burke's book shows that this is as true of 21st-century multi-theatre conflict, from the bloodthirsty rants of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki through the falsehoods about Iraq's WMDs in prestigious western newspapers, the martial bluster of respectable politicians and intellectuals to, most recently, the "manifesto" of the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik..."

 (Guardian, September 2 2011)

 This blog loves Mike Luckovich. Some of his absolute gems have been captured here.

For instance Changing of Guard  or What's Map (both dated November 2006) or Chelsea Clinton's Wedding  and The Godfather  (August 2010) or Did Arnold ever quit grabbing them? (May 2011)...and more.

 Even a thought of some of his pictures make me laugh alone any where, any time. My son too likes him and it's fun to recall Luckovich cartoons in his company.

And  then one day I stopped following his work. What happened?

Barack Obama replaced George W Bush in the White House.

For me, Mr. Luckovich was at his best when Mr. Bush was running the world.

I had expressed my fears on November 4 2008, when Mr. Bush rode away,  that humour around the world was going to suffer with that change and I was going to miss Mr. Bush.

I was bloody right.

Look at the following cartoon.

This is vintage Luckovich and the reason is obvious: "George W. Bush Presidential Library". The library is going to open some time in April 2013.
Now, what does the cartoonist think of this upcoming opening of a presidential library?

Not books but bombs...Weapons of Mass Destruction that were never found...Remember Iraq, WMD inspectors, war on terror etc?

Are books too missing from the library just like WMD from Iraq? There is an added edge to the picture because Mr. Bush was (is?) NOT very fond of books.





Artist: Mike Luckovich, April 2013

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