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, October 04, 2011

Romancing Railways. Buster Keaton style.

Today October 4 2011 is 116th birth anniversary of Buster Keaton.

Paul Theroux:

"Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it."

(The Great Railway Bazaar, 1975)

The New York Times, Sept. 30 2011:

Neuroscience suggests that Apple's smartphone activates the part of the brain associated with feelings of love and compassion.

Joseph Heller:

"if you are sane enough to ask to be declared unfit to fly on dangerous missions, then you are fit to fly".

DAVID BROOKS, The NYT, Oct 6 2011:

we travel at the same speeds as we did a half-century ago, whether on the ground or in the air. We rely on the same basic energy sources. Warren Buffett made a $44 billion investment in 2009. It was in a railroad that carries coal.

One of the greatest film scenes is surely from Satyajit Ray’s “Pather Panchali” (1955): children coming face to face with a train.

But is there a film as good, even better, as Pather Panchali where trains and railways have a major role to play, where they are there almost all the time on the screen?

There is. And I was lucky to see it on Sept 29 2011 on UTV World Movies.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

It's a silent film: The General, 1926. It's available on YouTube here.

Great Orson Welles has said:

"'The General' is the greatest comedy ever made, the greatest Civil War film ever made, and perhaps the greatest film ever made."

I agree with Mr. Welles completely. In a way, 'The General' anticipates everything funny that has been created for screen since then.

My 17-year old son watched it for a while and was stunned by the stunts performed by the hero: Buster Keaton playing the character of Johnnie Gray.

I was intrigued by the way Johnnie works so smoothly around his beloved train steam-engine "General", the way a mahout works with his beloved but huge tusker.

The film is not just about steam-engines and wagons but also about tracks, communication cables, water refills, fuel etc.

Johnnie is upset not just because his fiancee Annabelle Lee (played by Marion Mack) has been kidnapped, albeit inadvertently, by the North but that they have also taken his "General".

[I too once loved steam-engines that frequented Miraj station. They certainly activated the part of my brain associated with feelings of love and compassion. One of them quite aptly called 'Genda' (गेंडा) (Rhinoceros).]

I also liked the way film makes subtle fun of the American civil war or any war in general. Its inherent contradictions.

For instance, as Johnnie enters "Southern" territory riding General and escorting Annabelle and waves at a soldier, he is fired at because he is still wearing Union uniform. So only the colour of clothing decides foe or friend!

Or Johnnie wants to enlist only to win over his girl.

Walter Kirn argues:

"...Joseph Heller's Catch-22 appeared, abruptly downgrading war's special status as an existential crucible and also, unwittingly, beginning the process of rendering four-star male novelists irrelevant. The book treats war on a par with business or politics (to Heller they were very much the same), portraying it as a system for alienating people from their own interests and estranging them from their instincts. Protocol replaces principle, figures plucked from thin air supplant hard facts, and reason becomes rigamarole." (Slate, August 2 2011)

Watching 'The General', I feel the downgrading process started in 1926.

Was this film released in India in 1920's? Did any of my grand-parents see it?

Did Shripad Krushna Kolhatkar (श्रीपाद कृष्ण कोल्हटकर), C V Joshi (चिं वि जोशी) and R K Narayan see it? If yes, did it influence their art in any manner?


The civil war is forcing Johnnie to separate from his beloved General. At the end of the film, as Johnnie and Annabelle say final goodbye to us, we see they both are seating on one of General's many body-parts, kissing passionately, but Lieutenant Johnnie is being forced to return the salutes of passing soldiers with his right arm!

(In the picture above, Johnnie is sitting to the left of Annabelle. But then it becomes difficult to kiss and return the saulte. He then comes to her right...)



Comedians at Lunch: W C Fields, Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Groucho Marx

Artist: Albert "Al" Hirschfeld (1903-2003), Published: May 1 2000

This must be one hell of a lunch!

Courtesy: Al Hirschfeld Foundation. Please visit http://www.alhirschfeldfoundation.org/splash/

CATE LINEBERRY, The New York Times October 4 2011:

"Men weren't the only ones being killed on Civil War battlefields - thousands of boys fought and died alongside them."


Boys, like Griffith Thomas who joined the 1st Wisconsin Heavy Artillery as a musician at 16, enlisted with dreams of adventure, but soon realized the severity of camp life — and the terrors of the battlefield. Young drummers were especially targeted by the enemy because their drumbeats communicated orders on the chaotic battlefield.

Credit: Wisconsin Veterans Museum

p.s. After I wrote the above I read this in Feb 2012:

Satyajit Ray:

"Buster Keaton in his film The General performs the most incredible antics in the driver's seat of a runaway train, while a full scale battle rages in the background. To say that the scene is funny in not nearly enough; it is one of the most elating aesthetic experiences in cinema."
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