Friday, March 29, 2019

Afterlife Surplus Baggage Charge


Toby Wilkinson, WSJ, February 2011:

“...But there is a final lesson from ancient Egyptian history that those urging regime change should heed. Today, tanks stand guard beside the Pyramids of Giza, the grandest symbols of authoritarian rule ever built. The pyramids sum up the unbridled confidence of ancient Egypt at the height of its power. The pyramid-builders must have assumed that the glories of pharaonic civilization would last forever. What brought the Age of the Pyramid to an end in 2175 B.C. was not war, invasion, or pestilence, but a political vacuum following the demise of a long-lived ruler...”

So what happened to the ruler after death?

Artist: RGJ, The Spectator, UK, 2013


Some of the funniest cartoons I have seen, over the past ten years or so, are from the screens of The Spectator, UK. Its cartoonists are spartan, make do with whatever space they are allotted and are NOT always politically correct.

Btw- look at the character manning excess baggage counter....Anubis, a god associated with mummification!

Tuesday, March 26, 2019

60-Year Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler

#RaymondChandler 

Today March 26 2019 is 60th death anniversary of Raymond Chandler.


"So we just sat there, and she started crying softly like the rain on the window. And we didn't say anything. Maybe she had stopped thinking about it, but I hadn't. I couldn't because it was all tied up with something I'd been thinking about for years. Since long before I ever ran into Phyllis Dietrichson. Because, you know how it is Keyes, in this business you can't sleep for trying to figure out all the tricks they could pull on you. You're like the guy behind the roulette wheel, watching the customers to make sure they don't crook the house. And then one night, you get to thinking how you could crook the house yourself. And do it smart. Because you've got that wheel right under your hands. You know every notch in it by heart. And you figure all you need is a plant out front, a shill to put down the bet. And suddenly the doorbell rings and the whole setup is right there in the room with ya. [pause] Look, Keyes, I'm not trying to whitewash myself. I fought it, only I guess I didn't fight it hard enough. The stakes were $50,000 dollars, but they were the life of a man too, a man who'd never done me any dirt except he was married to a woman he didn't care anything about. And I did."
(screenplay of one of the greatest noir films of all time,  'Double Indemnity', 1944)
 

“....They watched me go out and didn’t say goodnight. I walked down the long corridor to the Hill Street entrance and got into my car and drove home.

No feelings at all was exactly right. I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between the stars. When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of the traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and looked at the glare of the big angry city hanging over the shoulder of the hills through which the boulevard had been cut. Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent. Twenty-four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick; bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.

It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is. I didn’t have one. I didn’t care.

I finished the drink and went to bed...”
('The Long Goodbye', Raymond Chandler, 1953)


Saturday, March 23, 2019

इतिहासकार आणि चित्रकार....Felipe Fernández-Armesto and Paul Cézanne

Felipe Fernández-Armesto :

 “...When painting a still life, Paul Cézanne used to switch between vantage points, sometimes overnight, sometimes during a single painting session. He was seeking momentary sensations, fleeting perceptions to combine in a single composition. When you see his version of a bowl of apples, for instance, the visible curves of the rim of the bowl look as if they can never meet. Cézanne painted strangely distended melons, because he wanted to capture the way the fruit seems to change shape from different angles. In his assemblages of odds and ends, the distortions of vision, as each object assumes its own perspective, are sometimes baffling, sometimes maddening, always intriguing. He painted the same subjects over and over again, because with every fresh look you see something new, and every retrospect leaves you dissatisfied with the obvious imperfections of partial vision.
The past is like a painting by Cézanne—or like a sculpture in the round, the reality of which no single viewpoint can disclose. I do not say so to occlude reality or subvert truth. On the contrary, I think objective reality (by which I mean, at least, what looks the same by agreement among all honest observers) lies somewhere out there, remote and hard of access—at the summation, perhaps of all possible subjective perspectives. Whenever we shift position, we get another glimpse; then, like Cézanne, we return to our canvas and try to fit it in with all the rest...” 

(‘THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION: Why evolutionary theory fails to match historical reality’ from ‘A FOOT IN THE RIVER: Why Our Lives Change—and the Limits of Evolution’, 2015)

Paul Cézanne हे किती महान कलावंत होते हे आपल्याला पुन्हा एकदा समजत आणि चित्रकारात आणि चांगल्या इतिहासकारात काय साम्य असायला पाहिजे ते ही समजते. 

वर उल्लेखिलेले "The Basket of Apples", १८९५ हे चित्र पहा:


विकिपीडिया त्याबद्दल सांगत :

“...The piece is often noted for its disjointed perspective. It has been described as a balanced composition due to its unbalanced parts; the tilted bottle, the incline of the basket, and the foreshortened lines of the cookies mesh with the lines of the tablecloth. Additionally, the right side of the tabletop is not in the same plane as the left side, as if the image simultaneously reflects two viewpoints...”


Wednesday, March 20, 2019

मराठीतील एक मोठा कवी पब्लिक डोमेन मध्ये आला....So What!

जानेवारी २ २०१९ रोजी, मी गार्डियन मध्ये 'The drought is over': mass US copyright expiry brings floodof works into public domain' या नावाचा लेख वाचला. केवढी excitement आहे त्या लेखात:

"... “The public domain has been frozen in time for 20 years, and we’re reaching the 20-year thaw,” the center’s director Jennifer Jenkins told the Smithsonian. The magazine predicted that the release’s impact on culture and creativity could be huge, because “we have never seen such a mass entry into the public domain in the digital age”. Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, told the Smithsonian: “We have shortchanged a generation. The 20th century is largely missing from the internet.”
The expiration means anyone can publish an edition, to take one example, of Agatha Christie’s The Murder on the Links. That novel, alongside thousands of other books, will become part of the repository of texts on sites such as the Internet Archive and Google Books. Writers will be able to use it as inspiration, creating new works or sequels based on it. Students will be able to quote freely from it; theatre producers will be able to adapt it.
“We can’t predict what uses people are going to make of the work we make available,” Mike Furlough, executive director of HathiTrust, told the magazine. “And that’s what makes it so exciting.”..."


बा सी मर्ढेकर आज २० मार्चला ६३वर्षांपूर्वी, १९५६ साली,  वारले.

Copyright law of India प्रमाणे त्यांच्या साहित्यावरील copyright , माझ्या हिशेबाने, जानेवारी १ २०१७ ला संपला ("lifetime of the author + sixty years from the beginning of the calendar year next following the year in which the author dies" )

तसे असून सुद्धा गेल्या २६ महिन्यात, मी अजून एकही मर्ढेकरांच्या कवितेचे मुद्रण (मौज सोडून) कोणी केल्याचे पाहिले नाही.. त्यांच्या कादंबऱ्यांचे , समीक्षेचे , नाटिकांचे तर सोडाच... 

मराठीतील एक मोठा कवी पब्लिक डोमेन  मध्ये आला ही गोष्ट महत्वाची आहे असे कुणाला वाटल्याचे दिसत नाही.

आता कोणीतरी विलास सारंगांनी केलेला त्यांच्या अनेक कवितांचा इंग्लिश मधील अनुवाद प्रसिद्ध केला पाहिजे

ते असो , पण मर्ढेकर मात्र आता, ज्या पब्लिक डोमेन वर्गात तुकारामाचा नंबर फार मोठ्या फरकाने (साहित्यिक गुणवत्ता) पहिला आहे, अशा वर्गात, मागच्या बाकावर का असेना, जाऊन बसले!