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."

Wednesday, February 21, 2018

विस्टन ह्यू ऑडन यांनी मागितले - "धैर्य दे अन् नम्रता दे..." आणि त्यांना ते मिळाले!...W H Auden@111

#WHAuden111

बा सी मर्ढेकरांवर (१९०९-१९५६) ज्यांचा समर्थ रामदासांइतका प्रभाव होता, ज्यांच्या न्यूयॉर्क मधील एका भेटीवरती विलास सारंगांनी अधुनिक मराठीतील एक सर्वोत्कृष्ट निबंध लिहला, त्या डब्ल्यू एच ऑडेन (१९०७-१९७३) यांची आज फेब्रुवारी २१ २०१८ रोजी १११वी जयंती आहे.

ऑडेन यांच्या बाबतची, माझ्या डोळ्यात अक्षरशः पाणी आणणारी, वाक्य मागच्या वर्षी LRB मधील एका लेखात वाचली:

Mark Ford: "...I think there’s a humility in Auden which is one of the most striking characteristics, and unusual characteristics, of a great poet, that often great poets have a kind of hard self-belief or egocentrism which survives all their various kind of … the trajectory of their careers, and the ways in which their thoughts or idioms develop. But Auden, from beginning to end, despite the kind of seemingly prophetic or didactic or like a preacher-man aspect of his poetry, there is a kind of humility in it. And when I was re-reading his poetry in preparation for this, I just found myself weeping at that particular aspect of Auden – not just the beauty of the poetry, particularly the early poetry, I just found it overwhelming … Paid on Both Sides, Poems (1930) – I just found them just so moving to read. But I also felt that there was a humility in his concept of poetry which was very distinctive and very powerful...."

Seamus Perry:
"...Yes, and Alan Bennett captures that very beautifully, I think, in his piece in the LRB in 1985, so perhaps we should end with what Bennett says. Bennett’s saying how happily Auden lacked a lot of characteristics that are usually associated with the masculine, and Bennett says, ‘He didn’t care much for fame, for instance, or go in for self-advertisement, was careless about his reputation and was unmoved by criticism.’..."
('Auden Anxieties', LRB, August 2017)