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."

Wednesday, September 20, 2023

...But Already It Was Impossible to Say Which Was Which...George Orwell, Charles Addams, Animal Farm

 George Orwell, Animal Farm, 1945:

"..."Gentlemen," concluded Napoleon, "I will give you the same toast as before, but in a different form. Fill your glasses to the brim. Gentlemen, here is my toast: To the prosperity of The Manor Farm! "

There was the same hearty cheering as before, and the mugs were emptied to the dregs. But as the animals outside gazed at the scene, it seemed to them that some strange thing was happening. What was it that had altered in the faces of the pigs? Clover's old dim eyes flitted from one face to another. Some of them had five chins, some had four, some had three. But what was it that seemed to be melting and changing? Then, the applause having come to an end, the company took up their cards and continued the game that had been interrupted, and the animals crept silently away.

But they had not gone twenty yards when they stopped short. An uproar of voices was coming from the farmhouse. They rushed back and looked through the window again. Yes, a violent quarrel was in progress. There were shoutings, bangings on the table, sharp suspicious glances, furious denials. The source of the trouble appeared to be that Napoleon and Mr. Pilkington had each played an ace of spades simultaneously.

Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."

 

Artist: Charles, Addams, The New Yorker

Sunday, September 17, 2023

व्हॅन घो चे पोटॅटो इटर्स आणि माझी आई...Vincent van Gogh's Most Successful Painting and My Mother

दुसरे जेवण मिळेलच असे नाही, अशा सांपत्तिक स्थितीत त्या काळी संसार करणारी माझी आई मला सांगत असे - मिरजेत देवल टॉकीज मध्ये पडद्यावर गरम बटाटे खाणारी माणसे इंग्लिश सिनेमात (Dr. Zhivago) पाहून तिला तिच्या भुकेची जाणीव झाली...

त्यावेळेस ती बहुदा गर्भवती होती... 

त्यामुळे व्हॅन घो चे हे चित्र पाहून नेहमी मला माझी आई आठवते... 


 The Potato Eaters, 1885

Monday, September 11, 2023

No Love, No Patriotism, No Enterprise, No Religion....GA and Lucretius

ह्या ब्लॉगवरील मार्च २६ २०१८ची पोस्ट पहा. (लुक्रीशस, जीए आणि अणुंचे एकमेकावर आपोआप आदळणे.....Lucretius, GA and How the World Became Modern)

लुक्रीशस (१५ ऑक्टोबर इ. स पू ९९- इ. स पू ५५) यांचे 'ऑन दी नेचर ऑफ थिंग्ज' हे पुस्तक वाचून जी. एं. म्हणतात: "...स्वच्छ, जळजळीत दृष्टीने Lucretius ने केलेला देव, देवता, भाबड्या कल्पना यांचा विध्वंस मला आवडला होता...". (पृष्ठ २४८, 'जी. एं.ची निवडक पत्रे', खंड २, १९८८)\

जॉन ग्रे सांगतात की लुक्रीशस यांचा समाचार Santayana कसा घेतात ते:

"... Santayana professed himself a disciple of Lucretius. But it was Lucretius’ materialism he admired, not the Roman poet’s rejection of religion. Epicurean spirituality, Santayana wrote, was ‘fumbling, timid and sad’. He thought Epicurus was too concerned with the avoidance of pain and extended this criticism to Epicurus’ most famous disciple: ‘Lucretius’ notion of what is positively worthwhile or attainable is very meagre: freedom from superstition, with so much natural science as may secure that freedom, friendship, and a few cheap and healthful animal pleasures. No love, no patriotism, no enterprise, no religion.’..."
('Seven Types of Atheism')

Friday, September 08, 2023

When You See Half-Fried Eggs Instead of Sunflowers...!

 











1888 साली व्हॅन घो यांनी चितारलेले 

 


  Shusako Takaoka made a version of Sunflowers

Wednesday, September 06, 2023

Friday, September 01, 2023

Saturday, August 26, 2023

मराठी साहित्यात समुद्राच वास्तव किती सातत्याने दुर्लक्षित केलं आहे... the Dislike of the Sea is a part of the Italian Character

विलास सारंग:
"… मराठी साहित्यात समुद्राच वास्तव किती सातत्याने दुर्लक्षित केलं आहे, हे माझ्या विवेचनाच सार होतं… आपण वास्तवाच्या -वाङमयीन सामग्रीच्या- केवढ्या मोठ्या भांडाराला मुकतो आहोत, हे माझ्या लेखात निर्देशित केलं आहे...मराठी वाङमयातील समुद्राची अनुपस्थिती मराठी समाजाच्या संरचनेशी कशी निगडीत आहे, हे माझ्या लेखात स्पष्ट केलेलं आहे."

("वाङमयीन संस्कृती व सामाजिक वास्तव", 2011, पृष्ठ 66-67)

[Vilas Sarang: "....How consistently Marathi literature has ignored the reality of sea: that was the summary of my  interpretation...the huge extent of reality - literary content- we have lost has been pointed in my article. The absence of sea in Marathi literature is linked to the structure of Marathi society has been clarified in my article." ("Vangmayin Sanskruti va samajik vastav")]

जॉन विल्यम्स यांची 'ऑगस्टस' १९७२ ही एक महान कादंबरी आहे. कै सारंगांनी ती वाचली होती का याचे उत्तर माझ्याकडे नाही. 

पण त्यातील एक भाग खाली पहा:

"...It occurs to me, as we drift slowly southward, that without my having to tell them to do so, the crew, since they are under no compulsion to make haste, have instinctively kept always in sight of land, though as the wind has changed we have had to go to some trouble to make corrections to follow the irregular line of the coast. There is something deep within the Italian heart that does not like the sea, a dislike that has seemed to some so intense as to be nearly abnormal. It is more than fear, and it is more than the natural propensity of the peasant to husband his land, and to avoid that which is so unlike it. Thus the eagerness of your friend Strabo to sail blithely upon unknown seas, in search of strangeness, would bewilder the ordinary Roman, who ventures beyond the sight of land only upon the occasion of such a necessity as war. And yet under Marcus Agrippa the Roman navy has become the most powerful in the history of the world, and the battles that saved Rome from its enemies were fought upon the sea. Nevertheless, the dislike remains. It is a part of the Italian character.

It is a dislike of which the poets have been aware. You know that little poem of Horace's addressed to the ship that was bearing his friend Vergil to Athens? He advanced the conceit that the gods had separated land from land by the unimaginable depths of ocean so that the peoples in those lands might be distinct, and man in his foolhardiness launches his frail bark upon an element that ought not to be touched. And Vergil himself, in his great poem upon the founding of Rome, never speaks of the sea except in the most ominous of terms: Aeolus sends his thunder and winds upon the deep, waves are lifted so high that they obscure the stars, timbers are broken, and men see nothing..." (Book III)