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, April 16, 2020

Even If We Are Wicked, It’s Still Nice To Be Here...: Albert Einstein's Favorite 'Brothers Karamazov'

Fyodor Dostoevsky: “....“Give him something, Mitya,” Grushenka kept saying; “you must make him some nice present. He’s so poor and he has to put up with so much ! . . . You know what, Mitya—I think I’ll become a nun. I’m not just saying that, I mean it—I’ll end up in a convent some day. Alyosha said something to me before I came here, something I’ll always remember. Tomorrow it’ll be the convent, but today I’ll dance! I want to have a wild time today, good people! Now what’s wrong with that? I’m sure God will forgive me. If I were God, I’d forgive everyone. ‘My dear sinners,’ I’d say to them, ‘as of today, you are all forgiven!’ Tomorrow I’ll go and ask people for forgiveness: ‘Forgive me, stupid woman that I am,’ I’ll beg them. I’m a beast, that’s what I am, and I want to pray. I gave away an onion, though. A vicious woman like me needs to pray. Mitya, let them dance; don’t interfere. Everyone in the world, without exception, is good. It’s nice to live in the world—even if we are wicked, it’s still nice to be here . . . We’re both good and bad, bad and good . . . Come over here, everybody, come over here! I want every one of you to tell me why I am so good. Because I am good, am I not, very, very good? All right then, tell me why I am so good.”

Grushenka went on and on like this, getting more and more drunk, and in the end declared that she wanted to dance all by herself. She rose from her armchair, staggering.

“Don’t give me any more wine, Mitya,” she mumbled, “don’t. Wine won’t give me peace. Everything is turning, turning, the stove is turning . . . I want to dance. I want everyone to watch me dance. I want everyone to admire how marvelously I can dance . . .”...” (Book Eight: Mitya, 'The Brothers Karamazov', 1880) (translatorAndrew R. MacAndrew)