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"... श्रीमंत बाळासाहेब पंतप्रतिनिधी : "बहुश्रुतता असल्याशिवाय सुसंस्कृतता नाही"

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."

Saturday, June 11, 2016

Art is Long-lasting, Life is Longish: Frank Modell, Anatol Kovarsky

Bob Mankoff announced deaths of two cartoonists on June 10 2016 with these wonderful words:

"Ars longa, vita brevis. For cartoonists, especially long-lived ones like Frank Modell, who died two weeks ago, at the age of ninety-eight, or Anatol Kovarsky, who passed away last week, at ninety-seven, it’s often the other way around. That just comes with the territory. The job of the cartoonist is to connect with your time, for a time, not for all time."

True but artists like Mondell and Kovarsky will continue to connect, at least for a while, even after they are now gone.

Frank Modell appeared seven times on this blog from January 1 2007 to April 23 2009...here are two of them:

The New Yorker, November 5 1960

The New Yorker, January 12 1957

Mr. Anatol Kovarsky appeared two times October 19 2007 and February 3 2014 (when I said :
Mr. Kovarsky is 94 years old and still drawing!)

The New Yorker, May 10 1947

The New Yorker

Tuesday, June 07, 2016

शुक्राच्या तोर्‍यात आला होता प्रिन्स...Prince@58

Today June 7 2016 is 58th birth anniversary of Prince Rogers Nelson

"...I've seen the future and it will be
I've seen the future and it works
If there's life after, we will see
So I can't go like a jerk.."

बा. सी. मर्ढेकर (B S Mardhekar):

"दंवांत आलिस भल्या पहांटीं
शुक्राच्या तोर्‍यांत एकदां;
जवळुनि गेलिस पेरित अपुल्या
तरल पावलांमधली शोभा...

...दवांत आलिस भल्या पहाटीं
अभ्रांच्या शोभेंत एकदां;
जवळुनि गेलिस पेरित अपुल्या
मंद पावलांमधल्या गंधा.”
(# 25, "मर्ढेकरांची कविता", "Mardhekar's Poetry", 1959)

Courtesy: BBC News

Sunday, June 05, 2016

Lolita and Hurricane: Butterfly (Genitalia) Effect!

Today June 5 2016 is World Environment Day

“In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state. The name, coined by Edward Lorenz for the effect which had been known long before, is derived from the metaphorical example of the details of a hurricane (exact time of formation, exact path taken) being influenced by minor perturbations such as the flapping of the wings of a distant butterfly several weeks earlier.” (Wikipedia)

Vladimir Nabokov, ‘Lolita’, 1955:

“...She was musical and apple-sweet. Her legs twitched a little as they lay across my live lap; I stroked them; there she lolled in the right-hand corner, almost asprawl, Lola the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice, losing her slipper, rubbing the heel of her slipperless foot in its sloppy anklet, against the pile of old magazines heaped on my left on the sofa—and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and to improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty—between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock...”

Artist: Charlie Hankin, The New Yorker, May 2016

This picture is another example of how a good cartoon just spreads its wings, like an albatross!

Cartoonbank.com describes this picture with "Keywords: butterfly effect, bar, pick-up lines, dating, butterflies"

In recent weeks and months, there have been a few articles on the subject of great Vladimir Nabokov and butterflies.

In one of them, from NAUTILUS, Susie Neilson says: "How Butterfly Genitalia Inspired Nabokov’s Masterpieces… The work on the inner mechanics of butterfly evolution caused his works to develop a much more complex inner mechanism. If we look at the three novels—Pnin, Lolita, and Pale Fire—after he was doing his dissections, we see that he’s created a nest of inner structures that are much more intricate than in his previous novels, and hidden in the same way that a butterfly’s genitalia are hidden. Butterfly genitalia are the primary means of classifying distinct species, which is why Nabokov spent so much time examining them. So I think he was in some ways trying to mimic nature, and the fine mechanical perfection he found in butterflies, by crafting that very detailed precision into his works."

So it was quite amusing to read a butterfly's pick-up line in the cartoon: “Remember that hurricane a thousand miles away? That was me!”