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, January 31, 2019

Are You Still Reading Ayn Rand?

#AynRand114

Feb 2 2019 is Ayn Rand's 114th birth anniversary

“The corn hasn’t quite matured if it’s still reading Ayn Rand.”

Artist: Paul Noth, The New Yorker, February 2016

Sunday, January 27, 2019

How Can You Cross This Enormous Gulf Between Nothing And Something...John Cupdike, 10 Years

#JohnUpdike

John Updike died 10 years ago on January 27 2009

John Updike:
" Ancient religion and modern science agree: we are here to give praise. Or, to slightly tip the expression, to pay attention. Without us, the physicists who have espoused the anthropic principle tell us, the universe would be unwitnessed, and in a real sense not there at all. It exists, incredibly, for us. This formulation (knowing what we know of the universe's ghastly extent) is more incredible, to our sense of things, than the Old Testament hypothesis of a God willing to suffer, coddle, instruct, and even (in the Book of Job) to debate with men, in order to realize the meager benefit of worship, of praise for His Creation. What we beyond doubt do have is our instinctive intellectual curiosity about the universe from the quasars down to the quarks, our wonder at existence itself, and an occasional surge of sheer blind gratitude for being here."

"Science aspires, like theology used to, to explain absolutely everything. But how can you cross this enormous gulf between nothing and something?”

Artist:Timothy Leo Taranto, 2014

Saturday, January 26, 2019

पहिल्या महायुद्धात ब्रिटिशांनी भारतीयांच्या मिशा सुद्धा वापरल्या....India In WWI

During the course of the war, a total of about 1.5 million Indian soldiers and non-combatants served in the Indian army; nearly 1.1 million of them were sent overseas; between 50,000 and 70,000 died.

Dr. Shashi Tharoor, Jan 21 2019:

"India had just emerged from the first World War having made enormous sacrifices, and a huge contribution in men and materiel, blood and treasure, to the British war effort, in the expectation that it would be rewarded with some measure of self-government.

Those hopes were belied. The dishonest Montagu-Chelmsford “reforms” and the punitive Rowlatt Acts, imposing severe restrictions on Indian political activity and reimposing wartime prohibitions on freedom of the press and expression, were India’s only reward...."

British postcard .WW1

Tuesday, January 22, 2019

स्थितप्रज्ञासारखीच 'उदासीन' स्पॅनिश मस्तानी...Mastani, Maharashtrian Mona Lisa!

द ग गोडसे:
"...तिचे (मस्तानीचे) विश्वसनीय पत्र नाही , तसे तिचे विश्वसनीय चित्रही नाही. एक वेळ मस्तानीचे विश्वसनीय 'पत्र' मिळणे शक्य आहे, पण मस्तानीचे विश्वसनीय 'चित्र' केवळ दुरापास्त आहे. कारण ते मुदलीच काढले जाण्याची शक्यता नव्हती...."
(पृष्ठ ११६, 'मस्तानी : मस्तानी.....", १९८९)
"...उदंड 'धीर' आणि सहिष्णू 'धारणा ' हेच शाळीग्रामांच्या दीर्घ तपस्येचे फलित असेल, तर देव्हाऱ्यातल्या 'शेष-शयनीं' शाळिग्रामाप्रमाणेच 'समाधिस्त' मस्तानीसुद्धा स्थितप्रज्ञासारखीच 'उदासीन' असल्यास नवल वाटायला नको."
(पृष्ठ २८०, 'मस्तानी : मस्तानी.....", १९८९)

Ira Mukhoty:

“...for if women’s images are denied us, we at least have their words...”

('Daughters of the Sun: Empresses, Queens and Begums of the Mughal Empire', 2018)

The Lady with a Fan, ca. 1638—1639

Artist: Diego Velázquez (1599 - 1660)

Jonathan Jones writes about the picture in The Guardian, Jan 2019:

"Who is the mysterious lady with a fan? She seems to deliberately create enigma and ambiguity. Wearing traditional Spanish dress, she gazes out of the painting as if at someone she knows. Her black headdress and shawl and white gloves set off a face that is acutely real, mottled with complex emotion. Velázquez uses the two sides of his painterly genius – his unrivalled sensual understanding of colour and texture, and capacity for rough, almost lumpen naturalism – to create a truly magical effect. She is ordinary yet glamorous, and has an elusive, paradoxical beauty. No wonder the theories about her identity range from her having been Velázquez’s wife, to a courtesan, to an exiled French aristocrat. She will always keep her secrets, because the artist planned it that way. She is the Spanish Mona Lisa."

चित्र मला अत्यंत आवडले आहे, त्यातील lumpen naturalism आणि unrivalled sensual understanding of colour and texture.... पण ती कोण आहे याचा पत्ता नाही. मग एका अर्थाने मस्तानीचे पण तसेच आहे! ती अतिशय सुंदर होती (असे म्हणतात) पण तिचे चित्र नाही.

चित्र आहे पण नाव नाही, नाव आहे पण चित्र नाही. दोघीही अनामिक. मस्तानी मी हवी तशी कल्पू शकतो. दोन्ही सुंदर स्त्रीयांनी मला वेगवेगळे स्वातंत्र्य दिले आहे.