Necessary Looking

Launched on Nov 29 2006, now 2,500+ 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."

Thursday, March 05, 2026

Stefan Zweig, Billy Wilder and The Wandering Jew

I fell in love with Bill Wilder's 'The Apartment', 1960 in early 2025. I had seen it earlier but discovered all its beauty and sadness then after watching the film multiple times.

I knew Stefan Zweig since 1960s as my father has published a couple of his novellas in Marathi translation. I have read my father's translations multiple times.

I feel their unhealed wounds of having to leave their homeland are behind their creative work.

Zweig wrote extensively about themes of exile and the "wandering Jew" in his works, and some sources suggest that the story of the Wandering Jew may be at the heart of Wilder's film "The Apartment".

Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment

Monday, March 02, 2026

Dog Show in Our Housing Society Every Morning and Evening

Mascoutah Kennel Club dog show (1901) artist : George Ford Morris, (1873 - 1960)

The women don't yet look like her but our society resembles this picture every morning and evening. Who would have thought!

Friday, February 27, 2026

Even When He's With the Girl He Loves, He Loves the Girl He is Near!

artist: Warren Miller, The New Yorker, 22 March 1976

Tuesday, February 24, 2026

ह्या कानगोष्टी कधी संपू नयेत ,,,Eugene de Blaas's The Friendly Gossips@125

हे इतके सुंदर चित्र पहिल्यांदा पाहिले आणि इतका आनंद झाला ... त्या मुलींचे सौन्दर्य तर स्मरणीय आहेच पण तो दारातील तरुण वादक कोण ? एक कथाच तयार होते....

"The Friendly Gossips", 1901 artist: Eugene de Blaas

a debate on this wonderful picture:

Curator: Let’s turn our attention to "The Friendly Gossips," an oil painting by Eugene de Blaas from 1901. The moment captured feels intimate, doesn't it?

Editor: It does. The light spills across the scene like warm honey, but those gossiping women... there’s something performative about them. All that cloth and lace feels weighty, suggestive of labor but also luxury, doesn't it?

Curator: Precisely. De Blaas was known for depicting these sorts of genre scenes, almost theatrical vignettes of everyday life. Look at the way he's framed the man in the doorway – poised, almost lurking with that mandolin – the women’s secrets are about to get some musical accompaniment!

Editor: The man seems to be a distraction! Think about the production: oil paint, canvas stretched and primed... De Blaas is carefully constructing a specific vision of domesticity, and its labor—hiding as much as he's showing us.

Curator: And perhaps that’s where the magic lies! There’s this little spark of mystery, a private world we’re invited to glimpse. The soft focus on their faces enhances the dreamlike quality, as if we are drifting between memory and fantasy.

Editor: I find the material conditions fascinating. That billowing fabric is rendered with a realism that’s almost seductive, but the act of laundry here isn't celebrated; it’s just background dressing for the real drama – gossip as social currency!

Curator: Absolutely, I find that the very brushstrokes dance across the surface. We're witnessing more than just a moment; it’s a symphony of gestures, of whispered secrets and knowing glances.

Editor: And the unspoken anxieties that women workers always had to face... or are these idle bourgeois women for whom washing laundry is just one more piece of household management to control? I am going to assume, until the evidence pushes back, that this painting uses the scene for the benefit of an upper-class consumer.

Curator: Regardless, these layers provide a mirror to our own stories, reflecting our desires, fears, and ultimately, the fleeting beauty of our shared humanity, don't you agree?