Looking at Cartoons, Getting Along

Launched on Nov 29 2006, now 2,100+ posts...This bilingual blog - 'आन्याची फाटकी पासोडी' in Marathi- is largely a celebration of visual and/or comic ...तुकाराम: "ढेकणासी बाज गड,उतरचढ केवढी"...George Santayana: " Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence"...William Hazlitt: "Pictures are scattered like stray gifts through the world; and while they remain, earth has yet a little gilding."

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."

Sunday, February 07, 2016

स्मरणरंजनाची मराठी गुऱ्हाळं ...The Nostalgia Factories

Nicholas Carr:

"Nostalgia is nothing new. It has been a refrain of art and literature at least since Homer set Odysseus on Calypso's island and had him yearn to turn back time."

Sathnam Sanghera :

“…this relentless nostalgia is unhealthy because it saps our age of character. Think of the Sixties and a host of strong images spring to mind: flower power, the Beatles, civil rights marches. Similarly vibrant images come to mind in relation to the Seventies — flares, unemptied bins, strikes — and the Eighties — braces, Filofaxes, Wham. But is there anything that can pinpoint the flavour of the Nineties and Noughties apart from the popularity of laminate flooring? The past is so massively a part of our present that it’s hard to define what the present is about.”

Which are reportedly most successful Marathi entertainers over the past year or so?

A feature film called "Katyar Kaljat Ghusali" (कट्यार काळजात घुसली) based on the popular play of the same name, first staged in 1967 and another feature "Natasamrat: Asa Nat Hone Nahi" (नटसम्राट: असा नट होणे नाही) based on another popular play of the same name (नटसम्राट) first staged in 1970.

Both the films don't reinterpret the almost 50-year old original plays but just re-present them.

I strongly believe both the movies are towering examples of the zest of middle-class, urban, young and old Marathi speaking people for nostalgia (स्मरणरंजन).

Loksatta (लोकसत्ता) dated January 24 2016 reported the books that had most demand during the Akhil Bhartiya Marathi Sahitya Sammelan (अखिल भारतीय मराठी साहित्य संमेलन) held in the same month.

Four of the top five books were first published at least forty years ago.