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."

Tuesday, October 11, 2016

Cartoonists' Take On Groping and Grabbing (& Divided and Deluded) America

Donald Trump:

“‘I’m automatically attracted to beautiful women,’ he told NBC presenter Billy Bush. ‘I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything.. Grab them by the p***y. You can do anything.’”

Piers Morgan. Daily Mail, UK, October 10 2016:

“...Yet there was one huge problem: her husband Bill, sitting just a few yards away in the front row.

The world knows him as a brilliant politician, but also as a serial seducer of epic proportions who, while he was President of the United States, even had sexual relations with a young intern in the Oval Office.

In comparison to Bill, many view Trump as a choirboy when it comes to women.

Earlier last night, Trump hosted a press event with four women: Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and Kathy Shelton.

Broaddrick claimed Bill Clinton raped her when he was Arkansas attorney general, and that Hillary intimidated her into silence when her husband launched his own bid to be president.

Willey was a former White House volunteer aide who alleges Bill Clinton sexually assaulted her during his first term as president.

Jones is a former Arkansas state employee who sued Bill Clinton for sexual harassment.

Shelton was a 12-year-old rape victim whose attacker was defended by Hillary Clinton in her lawyer days. A tape later emerged showing Hillary chuckling when talking about the case and suggesting she knew her client was guilty. She used a legal technicality to get him a substantially reduced sentence....”

Gideon Rachman, FT, October 11 2016:

“...And for all his flaws, no one doubted that Nixon had the experience and the intelligence to be president.

By contrast, Mr Trump is manifestly unqualified and has thrown the US system into confusion, leaving the press and the Republican party floundering. The fact that more than 40 per cent of Americans, and a majority of whites, are probably going to vote for him suggests that the US is in deep trouble. We can, by now, all list the ingredients that have helped create this sickness — economic stagnation, inequality, illegal immigration, the rise of social media — but the outcome threatens the prestige of democracy worldwide.

If Mrs Clinton makes it to the White House there will be relief across the west and a certain disappointment in Moscow and, perhaps, Beijing. But it will be very hard to erase the memory of this campaign. It has presented an image of a troubled, divided and deluded US to the rest of the world. As a result, it has already dealt a serious blow to the prestige and power of the west.”

I wrote a post on Mr. Arnold Schwarzenegger on May 16 2011 here.

PTI / The Times of India on May 11 2011:

"One of America's most high profile couples, former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and wife Maria Shriver, have announced their separation after 25 years of marriage...During the 2003 elections to elect the next governor of California, reports surfaced about Schwarzenegger's lengthy history of groping women. At the time, Shriver defended her husband, helping him to victory..."

My post carried the following brilliant (and naughty) cartoon by Mike Luckovich: