मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि 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: "… . . 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Wednesday, November 16, 2016

गिरगावामुळे पुसट प्रबोधन....Energized By the Squalor...M. N. Srinivas@100

Today November 16 2016 is 100th birth anniversary of M. N. Srinivas (16 November 1916 - November 30 1999)



बा सी मर्ढेकर:

"गोंधळलेल्या अन् चिंचोळ्या

गिरगावांतिल गल्लीमधें

चिमण्या अंधाराचें चाले

पुसट प्रबोधन-

..." (४५, कांही कविता, मर्ढेकरांची कविता, १९५९/१९७७) 
  
"जिथें  मारती  कांदेवाडी

टांग जराशी ठाकुरद्वारा,

खडखडते अन्  ट्रॅम वाकडी

कंबर मोडुनि, चाटित तारा ;

..." (, आणखी कांही कविता, मर्ढेकरांची कविता, १९५९/१९७७) 


"...SHAE: This city stinks Like dead bodies.
TYRION: A bit corpsey, yes.
SHAE: And shit.
Shae hops down from the balcony, and walks back into the room.
TYRION: I thought you wanted to come here.
SHAE: I love it.
TYRION: You love the smell of dead bodies and shit?
SHAE: And cum and garlic and rum.
TYRION: You can smell cum from the balcony?
SHAE: I love the stink. I love the noise. Cities make me want to fuck..."

(Game of Thrones, Season 2, Episode 1)

Steven Johnson, ‘The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World’, 2006:
“...By 1851, the subdistrict of Berwick Street on the west side of Soho was the most densely populated of all 135 subdistricts that made up Greater London, with 432 people to the acre. (Even with its skyscrapers, Manhattan today only houses around 100 per acre.) The parish of St. Luke’s in Soho had thirty houses per acre. In Kensington, by contrast, the number per acre was two.
But despite—or perhaps because of—the increasingly crowded and unsanitary conditions, the neighborhood was a hotbed of creativity. The list of poets and musicians and sculptors and philosophers who lived in Soho during this period reads like an index to a textbook on Enlightenment-era British culture. Edmund Burke, Fanny Burney, Percy Shelley, William Hogarth—all were Soho residents at various points in their lives. Leopold Mozart leased a flat on Frith Street while visiting with his son, the eight-year-old prodigy Wolfgang, in 1764. Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner also stayed in the neighborhood when visiting London in 1839–1840.
“New ideas need old buildings,” Jane Jacobs once wrote, and the maxim applies perfectly to Soho around the dawn of the Industrial Age: a class of visionaries and eccentrics and radicals living in the disintegrating shells that had been abandoned a century ago by the well-to-do. The trope is familiar to us by now—artists and renegades appropriate a decaying neighborhood, even relish the decay—but it was a new pattern of urban settlement when Blake and Hogarth and Shelley first made their homes along the crowded streets of Soho. They seem to have been energized by the squalor, not appalled by it. Here is a description of one typical residence on Dean Street, penned in the early 1850s:
[The flat] has two rooms, the one with the view of the street being the drawing-room, behind it the bedroom. There is not one piece of good, solid furniture in the entire flat. Everything is broken, tattered and torn, finger-thick dust everywhere, and everything in the greatest disorder.… When you enter the… flat, your sight is dimmed by tobacco and coal smoke so that you grope around at first as if you were in a cave, until your eyes get used to the fumes and, as in a fog, you gradually notice a few objects. Everything is dirty, everything covered with dust; it is dangerous to sit down.
Living in this two-room attic were seven individuals: a Prussian immigrant couple, their four children, and a maid. (Apparently a maid with an aversion to dusting.) Yet somehow these cramped, tattered quarters did not noticeably hinder the husband’s productivity, though one can easily see why he developed such a fondness for the Reading Room at the British Museum. The husband, you see, was a thirty-something radical by the name of Karl Marx...”

And now read this....

Nakul Krishna,  ‘Seeing Like a Sociologist: The Making of M N Srinivas’, The Caravan, March 1 2016:
“...He longed for Bombay, a city he had come to love. As he put it in an essay written in 1941 for his friend RK Narayan’s short-lived little magazine Indian Thought:
Girgaum, that synonym for dirt and noise and crowd—I felt a homesickness for it. The trams and buses going their noisy way, men and women jostling one another for want of space. The brilliant neon signs, hoots of motor horns, the cries of gharry wallahs … Solitude and loneliness are attractive to those who don’t know either … The beauty of a crowd on Chowpatty sands—I felt I would not exchange it for all the beauty of nature.

We have some of the conventional markers of modernity here—trams, neon signs, the estrangement from “the beauty of nature”—but what Srinivas craved were the sights, the sounds, the smells of the human. Anthropology for Srinivas was a sweaty, unromantic business; it was no profession for those who like their solitude...”


Sibel Kekilli as Shae and Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister in Game of Thrones Season 2 Episode 1

Courtesy: HBO and others

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