Tuesday, May 29, 2018

वक्षस्थलावरील रक्तमणी....जीए एक उत्तम रहस्यकथाकार...Murder Is Serious Business


Tom Wolfe:
“I’ve begun working on a writers’ Hippocratic oath. “The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’ Entertain is a very simple word. I looked it up in the dictionary. Entertainment enables people to pass the time pleasantly. And any writing—I don’t care if it’s poetry or what—should first entertain. It’s a very recent thing that there’s a premium put on making writing so difficult that only a charmed aristocracy is capable of understanding it.”
 

 John Gray, 'The stark moral world of Georges Simenon', February 2016:
"....Some of the best examples of what is commonly described as crime fiction – the novels of Patricia Highsmith, for instance – are studies in character which show why the protagonists act as they do by probing their states of mind. In Simenon, human beings are the sum of their impulses and behaviours; there is no enduring self behind the façade of habit. No one authors their own life; the belief that they are responsible for their actions is an illusion.

“My very first Maigrets,” Simenon writes, “were imbued with the sense, which has always been with me, of man’s irresponsibility. This is never stated openly in my writings. But Maigret’s attitude to the criminal makes it quite clear.” Simenon would have dismissed any suggestion that his romans durs were novels of ideas. He believed that ideas count for very little in human life. But the idea – or fact, as he would have called it – of human irresponsibility is at the centre of nearly everything he wrote.
That is one reason why Simenon’s work does not belong in the genre of crime fiction. In the romans durs, criminal acts are important only in signifying a final break with society. Even in the Maigrets, the question is not why a crime was committed, but how the person who committed the crime departed from a settled routine of living, and the detective resolves the conundrum by imaginatively entering into the life of the suspect. Identifying the criminal is rarely the principal focus of the story,..."

David Aberbach, TLS Times Literary Supplement,  May 1 2018:
"...Das Kapital, too, can be read as a crime novel: the factory is a crime scene, the victims are the workers; the hunt is on to catch the “criminals”, the capitalist exploiters...."

हेन्री सटन (Henry Sutton ) यांचा गार्डियन, एप्रिल १५ २०१८ चा लेख वाचला.
"...Crime fiction in its broadest sense has always been hugely influential, particularly among so-called “literary” writers. William Faulkner compared Georges Simenon to Chekhov. WH Auden adored Christie and Sayers. André Gide was an admirer of Patricia Highsmith, Albert Camus based The Stranger on The Postman Always Rings Twice, while Eleanor Catton drew on Cain’s Double Indemnity for her Man Booker prize-winning The Luminaries. Martin Amis’s novella Night Train is a homage to Elmore Leonard.

John Banville (another Man Booker winner), who writes crime fiction under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, has said that the “modernist experiment is over”, and the literary novel is “in the doldrums”, whereas crime fiction reasserts the traditional literary values of “plot, character and dialogue”. Banville’s reception among the crime-writing fraternity got off to a difficult start when he suggested at a festival that he wrote his crime fiction quickly, and his literary fiction slowly, inadvertently implying that it was easier....
... Neither landmark books, nor their many imitators, are what you’d call comforting. One of their main appeals is the fact that they make you feel uncomfortable; that they invade your headspace, adding drama, fear and anxiety. They sweep you away from the everyday. They heighten your senses, and they surprise...."

आणि हे सगळं वाचून मला वाटले, जी. ए. कुलकर्णी किती उच्च दर्जाचे रहस्यकथाकार सुद्धा  होते.  जीएंचे आवडते लेखक ग्रॅहम ग्रीन यांनी उत्तम दर्जाच्या  रहस्यकथा (उदा: ब्रायटन रॉक) लिहल्या आहेत. ह्या ब्लॉगवरील 'आरशातील उत्पात आणि कल्लोळ !....G A Kulkarni and Orson Welles' ही एप्रिल ९ २०१८ची, जीएंच्या कथेची  एका महान Noir सिनेमा (The Lady from Shanghai, 1947) बरोबर भेट घडवणारी पोस्ट हा योगायोग नव्हता.

अजून फक्त दोन-तीन  उदाहरणे घेतो:

स्वामी (पिंगळवेळ): संपूर्ण कथा रहस्यावर आधारित.. कोण 'तो', कोण महंत, कसला मठ, काय होणार मठात, पूर्वीच्या स्वामींचे सापळे सापडणे , अफू मिळणे, एक चिट्ठी मिळणे ... कुठं चुकलेल्या बसने सुरवात, आणि कुठे शेवट!.... कल्पना करा 'त्या'ची mising person म्हणून त्याला माहित नसलेल्या कोणी FIR पण केली असेल ... एखाद्या उत्तम रहस्यकथे सारखी कथा वाहती ...आणि हे सगळ सांगताना मानवी जीवनाबद्दल तत्वज्ञान, कम्युनिसम व्यवस्थेचे , वैष्णव मठ व्यवस्थेचे रूपक (allegory) वगैरे... 

विदूषक (काजळमाया) : विजयराजचा शिरच्छेद, चंचला, 'प्रिय व्यक्तीच्या रक्ताने लांछित',  धृवशीला , डोंब, धर्मगुरू, "....तिच्या वक्षस्थलावर जणू वासना तप्त झाल्याप्रमाणे भासणार रक्तमणी होता...." ... ही कथा सुद्धा एखाद्या उत्तम रहस्यकथे सारखी वाहते ... किंबहुना ती रहस्यकथाच आहे.... 

लक्ष्मी  (पिंगळावेळ) : शेवटच्या पानापर्यंत एका गरीब कुटुंबाची 'सरळ' कथा पण शेवटच्या पानावर मला नारायण धारपांची आठवण प्रत्येकवेळा करून देते म्हणजे तीची गणना भयकथा, गूढकथा करायला हरकत नाही... 

आणखी एक विचार.... काजळमाया, १९७२ मधील 'प्रदक्षिणा' सारखी कथा पहा... त्यात दादासाहेबांचा अनैसर्गिक मृत्यू घाला... बाकी कथा आहे तशी.. झाले Domestic Noir तयार .... "In a nutshell, Domestic Noir takes place primarily in homes and workplaces, concerns itself largely (but not exclusively) with the female experience, is based around relationships and takes as its base a broadly feminist view that the domestic sphere is a challenging and sometimes dangerous prospect for its inhabitants. That’s pretty much all of my work described there." 

किंबहुना मृत्यू न बदलता सुद्धा ते डोमेस्टिक नॉर मध्ये बसेल ... "'The Family...is a cauldron for crime, bringing with it abductions, incarcerations, issues with infertility, infidelity and missing children. The home is rife with buried family secrets that come back to haunt us. This subgenre plays on the idea that the home is the safest place to be – OR IS IT..?
 
दि माल्टीज फाल्कन (The Maltese Falcon), 1930 हे एक जगप्रसिद्ध पुस्तक आहे. जीएंनी ते पुस्तक आणि त्यावर आधारित १९४१चा जॉन ह्यूस्टन यांचा सिनेमा बहुतेक बघितला असणार. 

विदूषक कथेचे दुसरे नाव काय ठेवता आले असते हे मी कल्पिले आणि त्याचे मुखपृष्ठ  माल्टीज फाल्कन सारखे तयार केले...

कुपया लक्षात घ्या हा माझा कल्पनाविलास आहे आणि त्यात मी जीएंच्या आणखी एका सर्जनशील  पैलूला सलाम करतो आहे

 
 सौजन्य : माल्टीज फाल्कनचे मुखपृष्ठ कलावंत 

हे जरी सगळे कल्पनारंजन असले तरी , प्रत्यक्षात असे कव्हर झाले असते तरी त्यात कमीपणा वाटायचे कारण नाही कारण डोस्तयोवेस्की यांची पुस्तके सुद्धा pulp मुखपृष्ठात प्रसिद्ध झाली आहेत

 सौजन्य : मुखपृष्ठ कलावंत

Sunday, May 27, 2018

नृत्यदिग्दर्शक, लेखक, कवी, नाटककार, चित्रकार, शिक्षक कृष्णदेव मुळगुंद...Krushndev Mulgund@105

आज मे २७ २०१८, कृष्णदेव मुळगुंद यांची १०५वी जन्मतिथी आहे.

'घाशीराम कोतवाल'च्या घवघवीत यशाला (मी तीन वेळा पाहिलय) संगीतकार, लेखक, दिग्दर्शकाच्या बरोबरीने कारणीभूत ठरलेले, कृष्णदेव मुळगुंद (१९१३-२००४)... नृत्यदिग्दर्शक, लेखक, कवी, नाटककार, चित्रकार, शिक्षक...

त्यांची एक सुंदर साहित्यकृती मला पाहायला मिळाली : वाङ्मय शोभा, एप्रिल १९५१



 सौजन्य: कृष्णदेव मुळगुंद यांच्या कलेचे कॉपीराईट होल्डर्स, वाङ्मय शोभा, बुकगंगा.कॉम

Saturday, May 26, 2018

I'm Ashamed Of It All, To Be Honest....

As I turn 58....


Artist: Will McPhail, The New Yorker, October 2017

Wednesday, May 23, 2018

It’s Getting Them Wrong That Is Living.....Philip Roth


#PhilipRoth19332018
George Orwell, 'Reflections on Gandhi', 1949:
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals.”

Philip Roth, "American Pastoral", 1997:
“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another’s interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful consideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that—well, lucky you.”

If you are fond of perfection, you think the objective of life is to be happy and successful at the end of it  and if you spend enormous amount of time and energy in trying to understand another person, the above two quotes are perfect antidotes for you. 

These two go against a lot of conventional wisdom dished out by a lot of written word.

Tuesday, May 22, 2018

It's Your Husband, Mrs. Kulkarni. He's Come Unravelled Again

Today May 22 2018 is our 31st wedding anniversary




Artist: Charle Barsotti (1933-2014), The New Yorker, April 2008

Saturday, May 19, 2018

डी डी टी चा वास येत असलेला उंदीर आणि नऊ लाख सव्वीस हजार पाचशे साठावे बीळ....Municipality and Mice

The Times of India, March 23 2018:

“Former state minister Eknath Khadse on Thursday said he smelt a rat in the government’s claim that nearly 3.2 lakh rodents were killed in a week in Mantralaya by a contractor in 2016.

“If the contractor is to be believed, he killed 45,628 rats in a day or 31 rats per minute,” the senior BJP leader said during a discussion on budgetary allocations in the assembly. He pointed out that BMC had killed 6 lakh rats across the city in 2015 and 2016. "The contractor was paid Rs 1.5 for every rat,” he told reporters outside the assembly later....”

Financial Times, UK, May 9 2018:
"Victory has been declared in the world's largest rodent eradication programme. The campaign to clear millions of rats and mice from the remote South Atlantic island of South Georgia involved dropping 300 tonnes of poison from helicopters at a cost £10m."

खालील कात्रण हे 'वाङ्मय शोभा' ऑगस्ट १९५१ च्या अंकातील 'पुण्याचे आरोग्यखाते' या डॉक्टर द नि मुळे यांच्या माहितीपर  लेखातील आहे.

कितीतरी गोष्टी लिहण्यासारख्या आहेत पण सध्या ही एक.


 ९,२६,५५९ हा नेमका आकडा वाचून मला हसू आले आणि खालील चित्राची पुन्हा एकदा आठवण झाली

कलावंत : सॅम ग्रॉस, दि न्यू यॉर्कर 

दोन मांजर एक बीळ वॉच करत आहेत , घरची लोक डिनर आणि सिनेमा बघायला गेली आहेत...

मी थोडी वेगळी कॅप्शन तयार केली...

"हे नऊ लाख सव्वीस हजार पाचशे साठावे बीळ आहे...मला डी डी टी चा वास येत असलेला उंदीर अजिबात आवडत नाहीत... तसही भविष्यात  पर्यावरणाला चांगल नाही म्हणून डी डी टी  बॅन होणारच आहे म्हणा..."

Wednesday, May 16, 2018

आजही अनेक मास्टर ऑफ द युनिव्हर्स दिसतात....Tom Wolfe, Thank You

#TomWolfe 
#MasteroftheUniverse
त्यांच्या लेखनातील कित्येक गोष्टी समजत नसल्यातरी मी टॉम वूल्फ यांना गेली जवळ जवळ २५वर्षे फॉलो केले होते. त्यांचे जे लेखन वाचायला मिळायचे ते वाचायचो. विशेषतः त्यांचे लेख.

त्यांची कादंबरी मात्र फक्त एकच वाचली आहे "The Bonfire of the Vanities", १९८७....मी कधीच त्यांचा मास्टर ऑफ द युनिव्हर्स होऊ शकणार नव्हतो, ना माझे ते कधी ध्येय होते.

माझ्या २०-२५वर्षाच्या कॉर्पोरेट करिअर मध्ये अशी अनेक पुरुष , क्वचित स्त्री, ज्यांच्या कडे बघून मास्टर ऑफ द युनिव्हर्स आठवायचे....आजही अनेक मास्टर ऑफ द युनिव्हर्स दिसतात.... 

"....The world was upside down. What was he, a Master of the Universe, doing down here on the floor, reduced to ransacking his brain for white lies to circumvent the sweet logic of his wife? The Masters of the Universe were a set of lurid, rapacious plastic dolls that his otherwise perfect daughter liked to play with. They looked like Norse gods who lifted weights, and they had names such as Dracon, Ahor, Mangelred, and Blutong. They were unusually vulgar, even for plastic toys. Yet one fine day, in a fit of euphoria, after he had picked up the telephone and taken an order for zero-coupon bonds that had brought him a $50,000 commission, just like that, this very phrase had bubbled up into his brain. On Wall Street he and a few others—how many?—three hundred, four hundred, five hundred?—had become precisely that…Masters of the Universe. There was…no limit whatsoever! Naturally he had never so much as whispered this phrase to a living soul. He was no fool. Yet he couldn’t get it out of his head. And here was the Master of the Universe, on the floor with a dog, hog-tied by sweetness, guilt, and logic…Why couldn’t he (being a Master of the Universe) simply explain it to her? Look, Judy, I still love you and I love our daughter and I love our home and I love our life, and I don’t want to change any of it—it’s just that I, a Master of the Universe, a young man still in the season of the rising sap, deserve more from time to time, when the spirit moves me—...."

त्यांचा आवडता विषय होता दुसऱ्या महायुद्धानंतर सुबत्ता आलेला अमेरिकन समाज... भारतात अशी सुबत्ता मध्यमवर्गाकडे १९९० नंतर आली आहे पण दुर्दैवाने भारतात टॉम वूल्फ नाहीत. 

त्यांची माझी आवडती एक दोन अवतरणे वाचा:

"In Democracy in America, Tocqueville (the inevitable and ubiquitous Tocqueville) saw the American sense of equality itself as disrupting the stream, which he called “time’s pattern”: “Not only does democracy make each man forget his ancestors, it hides his descendants from him, and divides him from his contemporaries; it continually turns him back into himself, and threatens, at last, to enclose him entirely in the solitude of his own heart.” A grim prospect to the good Alexis de T.—but what did he know about . . . Let’s talk about Me!
Tocqueville’s idea of modern man lost “in the solitude of his own heart” has been brought forward into our time in such terminology as alienation (Marx), anomie (Durkheim), the mass man (Ortega y Gasset), and the lonely crowd (Riesman). The picture is always of a creature uprooted by industrialism, packed together in cities with people he doesn’t know, helpless against massive economic and political shifts—in short, a creature like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, a helpless, bewildered, and dispirited slave to the machinery. This victim of modern times has always been a most appealing figure to intellectuals, artists, and architects. The poor devil so obviously needs us to be his Engineers of the Soul, to use a term popular in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. We will pygmalionize this sad lump of clay into a homo novus, a New Man, with a new philosophy, a new aesthetics, not to mention new Bauhaus housing and furniture.

But once the dreary little bastards started getting money in the 1940s, they did an astonishing thing—they took their money and ran. They did something only aristocrats (and intellectuals and artists) were supposed to do—they discovered and started doting on Me! They’ve created the greatest age of individualism in American history! All rules are broken! The prophets are out of business! Where the Third Great Awakening will lead—who can presume to say? One only knows that the great religious waves have a momentum all their own. Neither arguments nor policies nor acts of the legislature have been any match for them in the past. And this one has the mightiest, holiest roll of all, the beat that goes . . . Me . . . Me . . . . Me . . . Me . . ."

अमेरिकन लोकशाही 
 "“I have never wanted to cover politics, except in Caribbean countries. The United States is so stable that political victories consist of minor variations. Our government is like a train on a track, and there are people on the right-hand side and on the left screaming at the train. But the train has no choice: it’s on a track! It just keeps going. And it’s really quite marvellous how stable that situation is. You can’t suddenly have parliament deciding there has to be an election.

And when the most unbelievable things happen, there’s no backlash. For example, when Richard Nixon was forced out of office, he really had no choice. Now did a junta rise up? No. Were there any demonstrations by Republicans? No. I don’t even know of anybody throwing a brick through a saloon window – [even] a drunk Republican. Everybody, like me, sat back and watched it on TV. It was an event on television...nothing really.”"

"Our government is like a train on a track, and there are people on the right-hand side and on the left screaming at the train. But the train has no choice: it’s on a track! It just keeps going. And it’s really quite marvellous how stable that situation is."... तुम्ही ठरवा आपल्या लोकशाहीचे गेल्या सत्तर वर्षात काय झालय ते... 

Artist : Kathryn Rathke, 1843 Magazine, May 2018