मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि 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: "… . . 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Tuesday, June 14, 2022

The Peacock Censor and the Nipples

Wikipedia: La Vie Parisienne (the Parisian life) was a French weekly magazine founded in Paris in 1863 and was published without interruption until 1970. It was popular at the start of the 20th century. Originally it covered novels, sports, theater, music and the arts. In 1905 the magazine changed hands and the new editor Charles Saglio changed its format to suit the modern reader. It soon evolved into a mildly risqué erotic publication....

Georges Paul Gaston Leonnec  या फ्रेंच कलाकाराने हे चित्र काढले आहे.  १९२५ साली. त्याचे नाव  "Le Paon Censeur" ("The Peacock Censor").

Very probably the only time the nipples on this publication's cover were censored.

यातील मजा एका शब्दच्छलात लपली आहे.

Le Paon Censeur, sounds a bit like "Le Penseur" ("The Thinker"), a well known nude statue by Rodin.



Sunday, June 12, 2022

Brain Damage or Celibacy?


Felipe Fernandez-Armesto:

“Even when Christianity began to become fashionable among the well educated and to capture the allegiance of states and empires, Christians' strong advocacy of peace and celibacy ought, by rights, to have doomed them to defeat or self-extinction. So do not dismiss this religion because most of it is skin-deep. Its very survival is surprising; its spread - however superficial - is startling: miraculous, some would say.”
“I’m weighing the risk of brain damage against a life of celibacy.”  

Artist: Mike Twohy, The New Yorker, June 2015

Thursday, June 09, 2022

तुझ्या जिभेला... शिस्नाला काही हाड...!...Bone in Tongue and Boner!


Today June 9, the date that can be represented as '69', is National Sex Day in many places around the world.

In December 2016, it was widely reported that scientists may now know why humans have no penis bone. Read one of the reports here.

I thought it was funny.

Now we all know a tongue has no bone. "Because the tongue is all muscle and no bone, it is very supple, boasting a huge range of motion and shape while preserving its volume." (Scientific American, August 2014)

In Marathi, there is a saying that the person who has no bone (हाड) in his tongue (जिभ) talks recklessly.

Therefore the implication is, if a human tongue had a bone, we would talk less recklessly.

On the other hand, if we had a bone in our penis, we would probably copulate much longer!

“...The study's lead author Matilda Brindle told The Independent one of the reasons humans had lost their penis bone was because we do not have sex for long enough to need one. "The common ancestors of both primates and carnivores had a baculum," she said. "Humans are quite weird as we're one of the few primates that doesn't have one"
Primates who mate for three minutes or more tend to have far longer penis bones than those whose intromission, or vaginal penetration, is below three minutes, she said. "The human intromission duration tends to be below two minutes, which most people wouldn't expect." In contrast, the aye-aye, a nocturnal lemur, copulates for around an hour at a time and has a very long baculum...”

But then again humans of both sexes do use their tongues for, often longer, sex!

Artist: Tom Mitchell