World Malaria Day ....Summer Camp is Hot...Many Blood Types

#WorldMalariaDay
 
World Malaria Day (WMD) is an international observance commemorated every year on 25 April and recognizes global efforts to control malaria.

डोस्टोव्हस्कीची भुते आणि एडवर्ड मंच आणि जी. ए. ....The Screams of Dostoevsky, Munch and GA

".... त्यांनी आपल्या पत्रांमधून शेक्सपिअरच्या शोकांतिका, डोस्टोव्हस्कीच्या Crime and Punishment आणि Brothers Karamazov या कादंबऱ्या आणि व्यासांचे महाभारत यांच्यासंबंधी लिहिताना या थोर लेखकांचा प्रचंड आवाका , मानवी जीवनात उलथापालथ करणाऱ्या situations चे त्यांनी केलेले वास्तव आणि भेदक चित्रण , नियतीच्या अस्तित्वाची त्यांना असलेली जाणीव आणि भीषण परिस्थितीत पराभूत होत असतानाही मनाने मोडून न पडणाऱ्या त्यांना असणारी अस्था (concern) - यामुळेच त्यांचे साहित्य श्रेष्ठ झाले , असे मनोमन वाटत असल्यासारखे लिहिले आहे...."
(पृष्ठ: चोवीस- पंचवीस, 'जी.एं.ची निवडक पत्रे: खंड १', १९९५)

The director of the Tretyakov Gallery, Zelfira Tregulova, noted that Munch essentially did for art what Dostoevsky did for literature: “He turned the human soul inside out and peered into the abyss and the vortex of passions that rip people apart, revealing the complexity of human nature.”

(Alexandra Guzeva , ‘How Dostoevsky influenced Edvard Munch’)

वरील दोन परिच्छेदात किती साम्य आहे ते पहा , म्हणजे जी. ए सुद्धा एडवर्ड मंच सारखे डोस्टोव्हस्कीचे कसे विद्यार्थी होते ते आपल्याला समजते. 

आता वरील लेखातील हा एक परिच्छेद पहा :

"Munch and Dostoevsky shared an artistic weakness for sick, poverty-stricken wenches. Another of Munch’s most famous paintings, The Sick Child, which prompted a hail of indignation from critics for its “incompleteness,” was a reflection of the artist’s grief over the death of his beloved sister from tuberculosis.

“I am not entirely sure why I became attached to her, perhaps because she was always ill... If she had been lame or hunchbacked as well, I think I would have loved her even more...” says Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment."

आठवा जी.एंच्या कथेतील आजारी, गरीब माणसे (sick, poverty-stricken) आणि अत्यंत हृदयद्रावक असा त्यांच्या अनेक प्रियजनांचा (the death of his beloved) मृत्यू... 

National Gallery of Norway, Sputnik

ह्या चित्रातील गृहस्थ कोण?

When Butterfly Discovered Nabokov.....Vladimir Nabokov@120

#VladimirNabokov120

Saul Steinberg, “Portraits and Landscapes,” The Paris Review, no. 195 (Winter 2010), pp. 27-36:

 

“Just a few days after Nabokov’s death, there was an invasion of butterflies out in Springs, Long Island. It probably happens every year. But the reason I noticed the butterflies this time was the presence—or the absence—of Nabokov.

“While I was riding my bicycle, in fact, I had the pleasure of traveling with one of them: a monarch, one of those orange-and-black butterflies that migrate from Canada down to Mexico. It was right beside me, we were moving at the same speed, and the butterfly was at the same height as my head. The proximity of the butterfly transformed me into an airborne head, a cherub or a seraph, one of Raphael’s angels composed solely of a head and wings.”

 

illustrations by Jason Novak, captioned by Eric Jarosinski

क्रूसहि अधिरा बनला आहे ...Jesus on Assisted Dying

Today April 19 2019 is Good Friday 

आणि तो आल्यावर.... 
 

Artist: RGJ, The Spectator

साहित्यातील एक नायक जो त्याच्या जन्मदात्या पुस्तकापासून हळूहळू वेगळा होत गेलाय....GA, Nabokov and Don Quixote

 जी. ए. कुलकर्णी:

"... मी ज्यावेळी माझ्या शौर्याने दलितांचे रक्षण , सौंदर्याचे पूजन व सदाचाराचे आचरण करण्यासाठी माझ्या खेड्यातून बाहेर पडलो , त्यावेळी माझ्यात हीच मनःशांती होती आणि मी तर ठिकठिकाणी वेडा ठरलो !..."

(पृष्ठ २२६, 'यात्रिक', 'पिंगळावेळ', १९७७

 

Vladimir Nabokov, ‘Lectures on Don Quixote‘, 1984:

“We are confronted by an interesting phenomenon: a literary hero losing gradually contact with the book that bore him; leaving his fatherland, leaving his creator’s desk and roaming space after roaming Spain. In result, Don Quixote is greater today than he was in Cervantes’s womb. He has ridden for three hundred and fifty years through the jungles and tundras of human thought—and he has gained in vitality and stature. We do not laugh at him any longer. His blazon is pity, his banner is beauty. He stands for everything that is gentle, forlorn, pure, unselfish, and gallant. The parody has become a paragon.”

याचा मी केलेला अनुवाद :

"आपल्या पुढयात येती एक इंटरेस्टिंग कल्पना: साहित्यातील एक नायक जो त्याच्या जन्मदात्या पुस्तकापासून हळूहळू वेगळा होत गेलाय; त्याची पितृभूमी सोडून, त्याच्या निर्मात्याचे टेबल सोडून आणि फिरतोय अवकाशात, स्पेन फिरून झाल्यावर. त्याचा परिणाम असा की आज डॉन क्विकसोट (कीहोटे) सर्वांटिस यांच्या गर्भातून आला त्यापेक्षा मोठा आहे. गेले साडेतीनशे वर्षे तो मानवाच्या विचाराच्या जंगलातून, टुंड्रा प्रदेशांतून रपेट करतोय - आणि त्याचा जोम आणि उंची वाढली आहे. आपण त्याला आता हसत नाही. त्याच्या अंगरख्यावरचे सुचिन्ह आहे करुणा, त्याचा झेंडा आहे सौन्दर्य. जे जे सभ्य, परित्यक्त, निर्मळ , निःस्वार्थी, आणि स्त्रीदाक्षिण्यवादी आहे त्यासाठी तो उभा आहे. विडंबन एक उत्कृष्ठ वस्तू बनली आहे."

म्हणून जी ए  नाबाकोव्ह यांच्या सारखे डॉन कडे वळले आणि  हे  अविस्मरणीय वाक्य लिहले : ".... दलितांचे रक्षण, सौंदर्याचे पूजन व सदाचाराचे आचरण..."

... चांगला माणूस कसा असावा हे यापेक्षा चांगल्या शब्दात मांडताच येणार नाही....

Bush and Trump: How To Cool & Save The Earth and Notre Dame Cathedral

Artist: R K Laxman, The Times of India, June 9 2007

Donald J. Trump on Twitter on April 15 2019:

Odour From a Clammy Cave on the Eiger Glacier: Titanic

#TitanicSinking107
 
107 years ago, on April 15 1912, RMS Titanic sank

"Kilgore: I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' dink body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like [sniffing, pondering]  victory. Someday this war's gonna end..."
 (Apocalypse Now, 1979)

E O Wilson:
"Our greatest weakness, however, is our pitifully small sense of taste and smell. Over 99 percent of all living species, from microorganisms to animals, rely on chemical senses to find their way through the environment. They have also perfected the capacity to communicate with one another with special chemicals called pheromones. In contrast, human beings, along with monkeys, apes, and birds, are among the rare life forms that are primarily audiovisual, and correspondingly weak in taste and smell. We are idiots compared with rattlesnakes and bloodhounds. Our poor ability to smell and taste is reflected in the small size of our chemosensory vocabularies, forcing us for the most part to fall back on similes and other forms of metaphor. A wine has a delicate bouquet, we say, its taste is full and somewhat fruity. A scent is like that of a rose, or pine, or rain newly fallen on the earth.
We are forced to stumble through our chemically challenged lives in a chemosensory biosphere, relying on sound and vision that evolved primarily for life in the trees. Only through science and technology has humanity penetrated the immense sensory worlds in the rest of the biosphere. With instrumentation, we are able to translate the sensory worlds of the rest of life into our own. And in the process, we have learned to see almost to the end of the universe, and estimated the time of its beginning. We will never orient by feeling Earth’s magnetic field, or sing in pheromone, but we can bring all such information existing into our own little sensory realm."

Titanic has earlier appeared on this blog twice here and here.

In the past year,  I came across the following and realized how no book or movie can quite capture that: smell!

“...The fifth night of the maiden voyage was moonless: a flat sea, an unclouded sky, with stars gleaming in the frosty air. “Grand weather,” said John Poingdestre, a member of the deck crew, but “terribly cold.” After five thirty on Sunday evening, the sharp fall in temperature drove all but the hardiest passengers indoors. It was so chill that smart women in flimsy dresses retreated to their cabins early. Eloise Smith, for example, who had dined with her husband in the Café Parisien, left him at ten thirty and went to bed. Elizabeth Shutes, the American governess of the Graham family, wrote afterward: “Such a biting cold air poured into my state room that I could not sleep, and the air had so strange an odour, as if it came from a clammy cave. I had noticed the same odour in the ice cave on the Eiger glacier.” She lay in her berth shivering until she switched on her electric stove, which threw a cheerful red glow...” 

(Richard Davenport-Hines, ‘Collision’ from ‘Voyagers of the Titanic: Passengers, Sailors, Shipbuilders, Aristocrats, and the Worlds They Came From’, 2012)

Artist: Edward Sorel, The New Yorker, March 6 1995