Looking at Cartoons, Getting Along

Launched on Nov 29 2006, now 2,100+ 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"...William Hazlitt: "Pictures are scattered like stray gifts through the world; and while they remain, earth has yet a little gilding."

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."

Thursday, August 29, 2013

मुखपृष्ठ शोभा, वाङ्मय-शोभा...Mukhprushtha Shobha, Vangmay-Shobha

Tim Kreider:

"The main principles of design—in books, appliances, cars, clothing, everything—are:

1. Your product must be bold and eye-catching and conspicuously different from everyone else’s, but

2. Not too much!

Which is why the covers of most contemporary books all look disturbingly the same, as if inbred."

("The Decline and Fall of the Book Cover", The New Yorker, July 2013)

This is so true- inbred- of the covers of Marathi magazines, I see on the newsstand today. Thankfully, it was not always so.

Marathi daily Loksatta (लोकसत्ता) July 28 2013 has an article on, now defunct, Marathi magazine 'Vangmay-Shobha' 1939-1994 (वाङ्मय-शोभा). Read the article here.

If you want to read e-issues of the magazine, read them on Book Ganga website here. I think there are around 485 issues of the magazine available. They are free to download.

I did not read any of the e-issues but was fascinated by their covers. Seemingly every cover was done with pride, the one we associate today with the magazines like The New Yorker, The Economist etc.

I found the quality of covers going down in late 1970's and beyond.

The visual artists, who worked on Vangmay-Shobha, that are mentioned in Loksatta article are:

Vasant Sarwate (वसंत सरवटे), D A Bandmantri (द. अ. बंडमंत्री), Ashok Dongre (अशोक डोंगरे), Dinanath Dalal (दीनानाथ दलाल), Mulgaokar (मुळगावकर), Vasant Sahasrabuddhe (वसंत सहस्रब्रुद्धे), Padma Sahasrabuddhe (पद्मा सहस्रब्रुद्धे)...

Below is the cover dated April 1963- April Fool issue. It is either by Vasant or Padma or both Sahasrabuddhe.

It's fumy and delightful.

Those kind of child carts were used by upper middle-class and wealthy people in Miraj. We were neither. So my parents never used any. But I used to be very curios about the kids riding them. Those carts looked a bit heavy and smelly to me. I never wanted to ride in them.

Look at the girl riding the cart. She is obviously upset at her mother's doting on her sheep-dog instead of her. Even her stuffed puppy is not amused.

Look at the usage of colours red, yellow, blue and green.

Look at the onlookers. For the poor and the deprived in India, lifestyles of even middle-class people have always been a spectacle. I remember during many Diwali's, when we burst fire crackers, a lot of poor kids from the neighborhood always gathered around us to watch it. They almost had no Diwali compared to even us- mere college teacher's kids.

Look at the generally happy gentleman, who then occasionally wore a suit even for an evening walk

All in all, very pleasing experience and a good, solid start.

Artist: Vasant Sahasrabuddhe (वसंत सहस्रब्रुद्धे) or Padma Sahasrabuddhe (पद्मा सहस्रब्रुद्धे), or both 'Vangmay-Shobha', April 1963

Courtesy: the artist (s), family of the late Manohar Mahadev Kelkar (मनोहर महादेव केळकर)- founder of the magazine and Book Ganga