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."

Friday, February 01, 2008

Earworm - I Did Not Know What You Were Called!

I remember an incident from 1970's at my home in Miraj.

When my mother was away and father was cooking, he hummed a song. My sister picked it up and started singing it herself. That angered my father so much that she really got an earful from him that day.

I learnt a lesson.

Now I know what happened. My sister had got earworm-ohrwurms. She just couldn’t help it.

I remember Isaq Mujawar इसाक मुजावर in 1970’s writing a long article in Marathi magazine Rasarang रसरंग on phenomenon of “Hammer Music” in Hindi film music industry. The article talked about the tactics new music directors and their corporates were deploying to succeed.

Mujawar perhaps meant using earworms.

I also remember one particular Ganesh festival from 1970’s in the neighbourhood when they only played songs of Dada Kondke’s दादा कोंडके Songadya सोंगाड्या (1971) for all ten days.

I had my quota of earworms for the whole year.

What are earworms?

Michael Johnson has written about it: “I can't get that tune out of my head” (December 20, 2007).

“…the exasperating phenomenon of tunes that get stuck on the brain – ohrwurms…

… At least one professor, James Kellaris of the University of Cincinnati, is looking to discover what makes them so irritating and so persistent.

Whatever it is, it's hard to escape the earworm at this time of year, with shopping malls and public streets bombarding you with holiday tunes. It matters not whether you like the music. In fact the less you like it, the longer it seems to hang around in the memory cells, circling the mind relentlessly.

When this happens, the neurologist Oliver Sacks writes, "the music has entered and subverted part of the brain, forcing it to fire repetitively . . . as may happen with a tic or a seizure."

… Musical memory takes many curious forms. Researchers say the constant repetition of popular music - inescapable today in iPods, portable CD players, on the radio, in the air everywhere - trains us from childhood to expect certain patterns of notes. This enables worn-out melodies to take up residence comfortably in the brain, where the patterns have been deeply etched.

Musicians, unlike the rest of us, exploit this cranial quirk and put way hours of material that they then can summon at will.

The continuous exercising of the brain's musical ability leaves physical tracks…”

Earworm machine:


Artist: Tom Cheney 13 May 1991 The New Yorker
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