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."

Tuesday, August 06, 2019

You Can Lead a Horse to Water.....The Legendary Birth Of An Idiom

You Can Lead a Horse to Water.....

“I said drink, damn it, drink!”

Artist: Maddie Dai, The New Yorker, May 2018

Sunday, August 04, 2019

ना सी फडके ...N S Phadke@125

#नासीफडके125

Today August 4 2019 is 125th birth anniversary of N S Phadke (1894-1978)

पदमभूषण कै फडके हे कित्येक वर्षे मराठी वाचकांमध्ये अत्यंत लोकप्रिय लेखक होते. मराठी लेखनावरती त्यांच्या इतके मानधन (inflation adjusted) दुसऱ्या मराठी लेखकाने मिळवले असण्याची शक्यता मला खूप कमी वाटते. (त्यांच्या पुस्तकांच्या तत्कालीन किमती पहा. काहीजणांचे पगार तेवढे किंवा कमी असायचे.)

फडके यांच्या कथा , कादंबऱ्या मला भिकार वाटतात पण विविध विषयांवरील त्यांचे कित्येक निबंध पुन्हा वाचावेसे वाटतात (close reading).. किमान त्यात बंदिस्त झालेल्या सामाजिक, राजकीय, कलेच्या, क्रीडेच्या इतिहासासाठी ....त्यांचे कित्येक विचार सुद्धा अजून ताजे वाटतात... दुर्दैवाने कै विलास सारंगांसारख्या व्यासंगी टीकाकाराने सुद्धा फडक्यांच्या ह्या बाजूचा त्यांचे मूल्यमापन करताना अजिबात विचार केला नाहीये...

Artist: Dinanath Dalal

courtesy: copyright holders of Dalal's art

Thursday, August 01, 2019

लिंड वॉर्डनी जी. एं. ची 'कमळी' काढली असती तर!....Lynd Ward, Alec Waugh and G.A.

जी. ए. कुलकर्णी:
"...तिच्या (कमळीच्या) अंगावर चढल्यावर चोळीचा खण आतून एकदम आखूड होत असे की काय कुणास ठाऊक, पण त्याचे लाल इरकली काठ दंडात अगदी रुतून जात व पाठ बरीच उघडी राहत असे. तिच्याकडे पहिले की वाटे, हिचे रक्त आता अगदी उकळायला आले आहे व ते आता काही फार वेळ दम धरणार नाही. ती एकटी असली तरी दहाजण आपल्याकडे पाहत आहेत अशाच तऱ्हेने तिचे अंग हले..."
('कवठे', पृष्ठ १८२, 'पिंगळावेळ', १९७७)

Alec Waugh , ‘Hot countries : a travel book ‘, 1930:
“...While I was staying in Moorea there was a native girl who used to paddle across the lagoon most mornings in her canoe. She did a certain amount of work about the place, but most of her time she spent with a ukulele across her knees, humming Polynesian tunes, telling us Polynesian legends. It is of her that I think when I try to picture Loti’s Rarahu. She was simple and friendly and affectionate. In the accepted sense she was not beautiful. She would have looked ugly in a photograph or in European dress. But when she danced, or sang, or swam she achieved a perfect harmony with that setting of palm trees and golden sand. She belonged there. And it was exquisite to watch het swimming under the water; the brown arms and shoulders, the scarlet and yellow pareo, the long black hair floating behind her like a comet’s fan. Here was the eternal Rarahu. And this, I told myself, was the Polynesia that existed before traders and missionaries came to tamper with it....”

Lynd Ward's wood engraving for Alec Waugh's 'Hot Countries', 1930

Sunday, July 28, 2019

The Agony of Marsyas is the Inevitable Agony of the Human Soul in its Desire to Achieve God.

#IrisMurdoch100

Iris Murdoch, 'A Fairly Honourable Defeat', 1970:

“...‘I’ll love you forever.’

‘Decent of you. Could we get in there, I wonder?’

‘No, I don’t think so. You’re Apollo and I’m Marsyas. You’ll end by flaying me.’

‘That’s an image of love, actually. Apollo and Marsyas.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘The agony of Marsyas is the inevitable agony of the human soul in its desire to achieve God.’

‘The things you know.’

‘The things you failed to learn at the Courtauld.’

‘I don’t believe it though. Someone is flayed really. And there’s only blood and pain and no love.’

‘You think our planet is like that.’

‘I think our planet is like that?’

‘No redeeming grace?’

‘None at all.’...”

The Flaying of Marsyas

Artist: Titian, c. 1570–1576

courtesy: Wikipedia

Dan Piepenbring, The Paris Review, July 2015:

“...The painting was one of Titian’s last, and it’s full of primeval fire. It’s drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which the satyr Marsyas brags that his skills on the auros, a double-piped reed instrument, are superior to Apollo’s on the lyre. The two agree to a kind of duel-cum-jam-session. But Apollo is, of course, a god, meaning he’s not just a better musician but a more temperamental one, inclined to punish all who defy him. And so he flays Marsyas alive for his hubris, a fate Ovid describes with violent relish:

As he screams, the skin is flayed from the surface of his body, no part is untouched. Blood flows everywhere, the exposed sinews are visible, and the trembling veins quiver, without skin to hide them: you can number the internal organs, and the fibres of the lungs, clearly visible in his chest. The woodland gods, and the fauns of the countryside, wept … The fertile soil was drenched, and the drenched earth caught the falling tears, and absorbed them into its deep veins.

Titian, painting with his brush and his thumb from a palette of squalid browns and reds, depicts the flaying every bit as vividly. There’s something especially gruesome about that little dog at the bottom, sniffing, if not lapping, at a puddle of blood. “Did Titian know that really human life was awful,” Murdoch writes in Henry and Cato, “that it was nothing but a slaughterhouse?” Short answer: yes....”