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."

Friday, July 30, 2021

After We Invented Fire...

Artist: Jason Adam Katzenstein, The New Yorker, 2019

Tuesday, July 27, 2021

रेम्ब्राँन्टच्या चित्रांत छाया आणि प्रकाश...How Gerrit van Honthorst Lit Up Rembrandt’s Way

जीएंच्या रेम्ब्राँन्ट यांच्या बद्दलच्या दोन भाष्या कडे पहा:

"रेम्ब्राँन्टच्या चित्रांत छाया आणि प्रकाश यांना जे थोर वजन प्राप्त होते, ते कधी एकदा तरी आयुष्यात माझ्या शब्दांना लाभावे एवढीच माझी प्रार्थना आहे."

"... अद्यापही एखाद्या Rembrandt किंवा Vermeer सारख्या अद्वितीय चित्रकाराच्या कृतीची मी Tolerable copy करू शकतो, पण (काव्याप्रमाणेच) मला स्वतंत्र चित्रदृष्टी नाही. पण यामुळे झाले काय , तर एखाद्या मासिकात काव्याकडे ज्याप्रमाणे प्रथम लक्ष जाते, त्याप्रमाणेच चित्राकडे जाते...."

Jonathan Jones, The Guardian, June 25 2021:

"Christ Before the High Priest, c.1617, by Gerrit van Honthorst

The intensely focused light that picks out Christ from nocturnal shadow in this scene of the arrested religious leader’s interrogation is an unmissable clue that Honthorst painted it under the influence of Caravaggio. This Dutch artist made the journey from Utrecht to Rome where he saw Caravaggio’s art. His patron there, Vincenzo Giustiniani, was a banker and aristocrat who had one of the best collections of Caravaggio and had known the savage painter well. But Caravaggio’s sharp lights and darks undergo a change in Honthorst’s sombre scene. The blacks become brown, the candlelight is buttery. This warmer chiaroscuro and golden glow seem positively Rembrandtesque. Honthorst took his version of the Caravaggio style home and it caught on with Dutch painters, lighting Rembrandt’s way."

Christ Before the High Priest, c.1617, by Gerrit van Honthorst

Sunday, July 25, 2021

ऋषी स्टीवन वाइनबर्ग ...ग्यान्या-व्यान्याची भेट...Steven Weinberg 1933-2021

“The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.”

“The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”

"...The dream that behaviorists and Marxists had of changing human nature seems to me the worst sort of exaggeration of the capabilities of science. In Three Sisters, Chekhov has Baron Tuzenbach reply to Vershinin's utopian dreams.

Well, maybe we'll fly in balloons, the cut of jackets will be different, we'll have discovered a sixth sense, maybe even developed it -- I don't know. But life will be the same -- difficult, full of unknowns, and happy. In a thousand years, just like today, people will sigh and say, oh, how hard it is to be alive. They'll still be scared of death, and won't want to die.

Facing a new millennium we can share some of Vershinin's hopes for utopia, but when it comes to judging the chances of really changing the way we live, no doubt most of us would side with Tuzenbach..."

(recycling my post dated November 21 2010)

For Scientific American November 2010, Amir D. Aczel says:

"For years the cosmos and the atom have been at odds with one another. If any physicist can reconcile them, it's Steven Weinberg."

Maybe. But for me, Weinberg reached an exalted status not because what he may still do in science or his Nobel prize but when I read his this line in one of the greatest pieces of prose I have read: "...Whatever purposes may be served by rewarding the talented, I have never understood why untalented people deserve less of the world's good things than other people..."

(Five and a Half Utopias, The Atlantic, January 2000)

No ism, no right/left, no ideology, no religion, no holy text...I trust only a poet-saint or a sage to write a line of this profundity. I hope some day a Marathi Vinda (विंदा) will write what happened when Weinberg and Dnyaneshwar (ज्ञानेश्वर) met! May I suggest a title for the poem:'Gyanya-Weinya Chi Bhet' (ग्यान्या-व्यान्याची भेट)]. And doesn't he look the Rishi/sage part in following lovely picture?

Picture courtesy: Jeff Wilson and Scientific American, November 2010