Out in My Old Town Love Canoe

Rachel Cooke:

In the end, though, it's difficult to go along with Wolf's central contention, which is that women can only harness their creativity when in a fulfilled sexual relationship – a thesis based largely, it seems, on a reading of Edith Wharton and George Eliot, and the relationship of Georgia O'Keeffe with Alfred Stieglitz. Her evidence is crudely selective, and strangely unimaginative. Hasn't it ever occurred to her that, sometimes, happiness writes white? Didn't she wonder about the sex lives of art's great spinsters? But it's also, I think, an unhappily reductive way of looking at the world. Sex is a huge part of life. But it's not everything, and we do ourselves a disservice if we try to suggest otherwise.

(Guardian, September 16 2012, review of 'Vagina: A New Biography' by Naomi Wolf)

In middle class culture of  Maharashtra, water for recreational purpose is almost absent. Reasons are not hard to figure: Hardly any perennial lakes and rivers.

Contrast that with gardens built by the Mughals in the Islamic style of architecture. Two of their most important features are running water and a pool to reflect the beauties of sky and garden. No Yamuna river, no Taj Mahal perhaps.

When water, canoe, man, woman, moon come together in the night, they mean  romance and its occasional delightful expression such as in the picture below.

Artist: S D Phadnis (शि. द. फडणीस) courtesy: Official website of S D Phadnis

I said romance but not sex.

I recently read "Love Boats: The Delightfully Sinful History of Canoes".

"Before the youth of America fooled around at drive-ins and necked on Lover’s Lane, they coupled in canoes. Boatloads of them. In the early 1900s, canoes offered randy young guys and gals a means of escape to a semi-private setting, away from the prying eyes of their pious Victorian chaperones...

...As further proof that canoeing had become a hotbed for teenage delinquents, in 1913 the Minneapolis Parks Board refused to issue permits for canoes with unpalatable names. Local newspapers published some of the offensive phrases that slipped past the board the previous summer, including “Thehelusa,” “Kumomin Kid,” “Kismekwik,” “Damfino,” “Ilgetu,” “Aw-kom-in,” “G-I-Lov-U,” “Skwizmtyt,” “Ildaryoo,” “Win-kat-us,” “O-U-Q-T,” “What the?,” “Joy-tub,” “Cupid’s Nest,” and “I Would Like to Try It.” The commissioners unanimously agreed to outlaw phrases lacking obvious moral and grammatical standards, though a few of these clever pre-text-message abbreviations clearly had them scratching their heads...

...But this floating, petting paradise would not last. “When motorcars became more available in the early ’20s, courting in canoes sort of fell off,” says (Roger) Young. “Guys were getting into their Model Ts or Model As and going off with girls for a Sunday drive instead of canoeing.” And what went on in the backseats of those cars? Well, that’s a whole different story."

Following picture too has water, canoe, man, woman, moon together. But the desires are less poetic and more carnal than in the picture above!

 

A comic postcard advertising Old Town Canoes makes an open joke of their preferred use. 

Image courtesy: Benson Gray

Go back to Phadnis's picture above. I can't imagine man and woman  in that canoe making out little latter. I feel even suggestion of sex will spoil that mood. But then maybe I am now old. 

Is She J E Millais's "Mariana" or Ray's "Charulata"?

I consider myself lucky that I saw "The pre-Raphaelites at Tate Britain - audio art tour" on Guardian, September 11 2012.

I spent hours going through it.

When I saw following picture, I was reminded of Satyajit Ray's "Charulata", 1964.

Charulata is a "story of a lonely housewife, known as Charu (Madhabi Mukherjee), who lives a wealthy, secluded and idle life in 1870's Calcutta."

("Charulata" has been on this blog before here and here.)

"Mariana" by John Everett Millais (1829 – 1896) dated 1851

"This painting is an allegory of Victorian sexual repression and the longings of women trapped in dreary lives. Mariana is a character from Shakespeare’s 'Measure for Measure', a play that satirises sexual hypocrisy. Millais’ contemporary, the poet laureate, Alfred Tennyson, laments the domestic incarceration of Shakespeare’s character in his poem Mariana, which Millais quoted when he unveiled this painting: "She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary, / I would that I were dead!’""

 


"Christian saints in a stained glass window literally obstruct Mariana’s view of the outside world, while an altar lit by a lamp reveals that she is eking out her youth in prayer."

"Desolate autumnal leaves blow through the house. Time is passing, it is late in the season. Life is passing Mariana by."

"The Lady of Shalott" is a Victorian ballad by the English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892). Trapped in a sterile existence and melancholy of leaves suggests that well.


'Mariana' Images are courtesy: Tate Photography; Some commentary is courtesy: Guardian
 
"Mariana as she stretches her sensual body is desperately bored in what looks like a 19th-century vicarage. Her pose emphasises her curvaceous hips and slender waist as Millais hymns rebellious desire."

Millais goes for bored Mariana's sexuality, her longing to be a woman in puritanical setting. Without showing us her curves, Ray does something similar to Charu by making her sexually desire Amal, her husband's cousin.

'Charulata' images are courtesy: RDB Productions and Big Home Video

Ray's film is based on   Rabindranath Tagore's  novella "Nastanirh". Did Tagore ever see or hear about Millais's "Mariana"? 

Singapore Fulfills R K Laxman's Vision!

Jeremy Grant wrote in FT on Aug 26 2012:

"A Singapore property developer is targeting the super rich with parking problems by marketing luxury apartments that allow owners to keep their cars next to their living rooms, even if they are on the top floor of the 30-storey block...Singapore, along with Hong Kong, is home to more Maseratis, Ferraris and Lamborghinis per capita than anywhere else in the world..."

On March 6 2009, this is the entry I posted on this blog:

The Times of India March 3, 2009: "Bookings for Nano will start from March 23: Tata Motors has advanced the booking date for its Nano, touted as the world's cheapest car, in India by three weeks,"



Artist: R K Laxman, The Times of India, September 1 2007


Artist: Tom Cheney, The New Yorker, 9 March 2009, Cartoon Caption Contest 183

my caption:

"I told you: our neighbour's drawing room was right above our bedroom."

Evgeny Morozov:

"The Khannas also heap praise on Singapore, “a seamlessly efficient cosmopolitan world capital of finance and, increasingly, innovation.” Alas, they do not explain how Singapore has become so “seamlessly efficient.” Perhaps this quotation from Lee Kuan Yew, its first long-time ruler—conveniently omitted by the Khannas—may shed some light: “Everytime anybody wants to start anything which will unwind or unravel this orderly, organized, sensible, rational society, and make it irrational and emotional, I put a stop to it without hesitation.” The Khannas approvingly note that Singapore is “the leading role model in city-state Technik for entities from Abu Dhabi to Moscow to Kuala Lumpur.” That all three aforementioned cities are situated in despicable authoritarian regimes—which might explain why they look up to Singapore—does not much trouble the Khannas. They recently announced that they are moving to Singapore. Good. The autocratic city and the apologists for autocracy deserve each other."

(The New Republic, "The Naked and the TED", Aug 2 2012)

Wanted for Sedition- Aseem Trivedi in Great Company

Curtis White in Lapham's Quarterly October 2011:

"...When John Murray published the works of Lord Byron in London in the early 19th century, he risked prosecution and jail if the work was found blasphemous or libelous by the powerful. Byron, notoriously, didn’t help things, deliberately writing his poetry out along the razor’s edge of public tolerance, just as he lived his life. In another example, Shelley wrote to his publisher, Thomas Hookham, regarding the appearance of his poem Queen Mab: “If you do not dread the arm of the law, or any exasperation of public opinion against yourself, I wish that it should be printed and published immediately.” Hookham must have had such fears because he refused to publish the atheistic and revolutionary poem (Tory legislation against “blasphemous and seditious” literature was the order of the day). As a consequence, the first edition of the work was self-published in a run of a few hundred copies for distribution among friends. Even so, in 1817, the poem’s radical politics and atheism were used against Shelley in his suit to gain the custody of his children; he lost the suit and never saw them afterwards. In England, still in reactionary posture after the French Revolution and Napoleon, poets and writers like Shelley, Byron, and Leigh Hunt found it safer to flee the country in order to write. They conducted their on-going dialogue with their native land through their brave, nerve-wracked, and sometimes imprisoned publishers..."

The Hindu, September 9 2012:

"Award-winning political cartoonist and anti-corruption and Internet freedom crusader Aseem Trivedi (25) was remanded in police custody till September 16 by a holiday court in Bandra on Sunday. He was arrested on Saturday night on charges of sedition, cybercrime, and insulting the national flag, Parliament and the Constitution through his work..."

"Reward for information leading to the apprehension of --- Jesus Christ Wanted -- for Sedition, Criminal Anarchy - Vagrancy, and Conspiring to Overthrow the Established Government. Dresses poorly, said to be a carpenter by trade, ill-nourished, has visionary ideas, associates with common working people the unemployed and bums. Alien - beleived to be a Jew Alias: 'Prince of Peace, Son of Man'-'Light of the World' etc etc Professional Agitator Red beard, marks on hands and feet the result of injuries inflicted by an angry mob led by respectable citizens and legal authorities."

Artist: Art Young, The Masses, 1917

courtesy: Wikimedia Commons