Monday, October 31, 2022

आधुनिक डॉन.... Tilting At Windmills While Waiting


William Egginton , ‘The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World ‘, 2016:

“....Predictably, famously, Don Quixote does not heed his good squire’s commonsense admonitions, but instead charges ahead, spearing the enormous sail of a windmill’s arm with his lance and being lifted, horse and all, off the ground and smashed back down in a miserable, aching heap. Sancho’s reaction to his mishap, though, is different from those that greeted all Quixote’s previous antics. Where the others treated Quixote as a spectacle, entertainment, or a nuisance, Sancho responds with compassion. Seeing his master lying next to his fallen horse and shattered lance, Sancho hurried to help him as fast as his donkey could carry him, and when he reached them he discovered that Don Quixote could not move because he had taken so hard a fall with Rocinante.

“God save me!” said Sancho. “Didn’t I tell your grace to watch what you were doing, that these were nothing but windmills, and only somebody whose head was full of them wouldn’t know that?”

From the limited outlook of his own simplicity, Sancho sees his master fail, sees the calamitous consequences of his delusions, and yet decides to accept him despite them: “‘It’s in God’s hand,’ said Sancho. ‘I believe everything your grace says, but sit a little straighter, it looks like you’re tilting, it must be from the battering you took when you fell.’”

In the space of a few pages, what started as an exercise in comic ridicule and, as the narrator insists on several occasions, a satirical send-up of the tales of chivalry, has taken on an entirely different dimension; it has begun to transform itself into the story of a relationship between two characters whose incompatible takes on the world are bridged by friendship, loyalty, and eventually love...”


Artists: Pablo Picasso, c. 1955 and, on the right, Liana Finck, The New Yorker, February 2017

Thursday, October 27, 2022

सिल्व्हिया प्लॅथ यांनी न लिहलेल पुस्तक ...Sylvia Plath@90

#SylviaPlath90
 
विलास सारंग:
"... एक प्रकारची प्रशांत आनंदमयता या कवितांवर पसरली आहे. वेदनेची जाणीव आहे, परंतु ती सुखाला, प्रसन्नतेला विझवू शकत नाही. आधुनिक कवितेत हे किती वेगळेपणाचे आहे, हे आज मला विशेषकरून जाणवत. येट्सच्या अखेरच्या कविता म्हणजे एक आकांत आहे. मिनिआपोलिसच्या पुलावरून उडी घेणाऱ्या जॉन बेरिमनच्या कविता पहा, किंवा गॅस चालू ठेवून आयुष्य संपवणाऱ्या सिल्व्हिया प्लॅथच्या कविता. सर्वत्र यातना, झगडा, आकांत..."
['विस्टन ह्यू ऑडन (१९०७-१९७३): एक  त्रोटक आठवण', 'सर्जनशोध आणि लिहिता लेखक', २००७]

"...It's violent. We're here on a visit,

With a goddam baby screaming off somewhere.
There's always a bloody baby in the air.
I'd call it a sunset, but
Whoever heard a sunset yowl like that ?
..."
('Stopped Dead', October 1962)

तर अशा या सिल्व्हिया प्लॅथ १९३२-१९६३ (Sylvia Plath)...violent, screaming, bloody, yowl...तुम्हाला सारंगांचा मुद्दा समजला !  त्या जवळ जवळ त्यांच सगळ प्रौढ-आयुष्य, आत्महत्या करेपर्यंत , क्लिनिकली डिप्रेसड होत्या. त्या नुसत्या आघाडीच्या कवयत्री नव्हत्या तर चित्रकार सुद्धा होत्या. खाली त्यांचे सुंदर सेल्फ पोर्ट्रेट पहा:



A War to End Wars, self-portrait, 26 February 1946

सौजन्य : Estate of Sylvia Plath/Mortimer Rare Book Collection, SmithCollege, Northampton, Massachusetts

तर अशा या प्लॅथबाई खालील कादंबरी लिहू शकतील का? अवघड आहे. म्हणून मग त्यांची अशी मजा केली 

 सौजन्य : Dangerous Minds on Facebook
मूळचे ते पुस्तक असे आहे :


Monday, October 24, 2022

How Did The Sphinx's Nose Break? Mob or Obelix?

 






















courtesy: "Asterix and Cleopatra", 1965 by René Goscinny, Albert Uderzo

I think the answer is: Obelix

 

Saturday, October 22, 2022

A Clockwork Orange or A Crockwork Lemon?

Artist for Anthony Burgess's book cover : David Pelham

Artist for Mad Magazine cover: I do not know, probably Norman Mingo (1896–1980)⁠



Wednesday, October 19, 2022

The Girl I Leave Behind Me...October 1918, When All Was Quiet on the Western Front

The Armistice of 11 November 1918 was the armistice signed at Le Francport near Compiègne that ended fighting on land, sea and air in World War I between the Allies and their opponent, Germany. 

Erich Maria Remarque, 'All Quiet on the Western Front', 1928

 

"...Here the trees show gay and golden, the berries of the rowan stand red among the leaves, country roads run white out to the sky line, and the canteens hum like beehives with rumours of peace.

I stand up.

I am very quiet. Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me.

————

He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.

He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come."

 


 

Saturday, October 15, 2022

...बगळे म्हणजे तृप्तीचे मूर्तिमंत प्रतीक...Durga Bhagwat and H. George Brandt


 दुर्गा भागवत, 'ऋतुचक्र' (१९५६- २००२), 'सोनेरी अश्विन', पृष्ठ ७३  

 


 House & Garden magazine cover illustrated by H. George Brandt. October 1917

Thursday, October 13, 2022

Monday, October 10, 2022

काय खर्ज लागतो एकेका बेडकाचा....Frog Concert of Pu La Deshpande and Paul Lothar Müller

आज ऑक्टोबर १० २०२२, माझ्या कै  आईचा (ज्योती गोपाळ कुलकर्णी / शकुंतला वासुदेव भाटे) ८५वा वाढदिवस 

(खालील छोटा उतारा कृतज्ञता पूर्वक, पृष्ठ ७६, 'तुझें आहे तुजपाशीं', ले: पु ल देशपांडे, १९५७-२०००)



























Artist: Paul Lothar Müller (1869-1956), 'Frog Concert' (Frog Concert), ′′ The Watchbox ", 1909


Friday, October 07, 2022

Great Music Did Not Save Them

Jonathan Jones, The Guardian, November 6 2018:
"... I Am Ashurbanipal is a portrait of the banality of empire. Just as Hannah Arendt argued that the Holocaust was perpetrated by characterless paper-pushers, not flamboyant sadists, so we find here that Assyrian atrocities – including the forced resettlement of thousands of Israelites – were not the product of random mayhem but diligent organisation..."


Stanley Tucci as Adolf Eichmann in Conspiracy,” HBO’s 2001 dramatization of the 1942 Wannsee Conference
 

General Reinhard Heydrich: Ah, Schubert. The adagio will tear your heart out.

Adolf Eichmann: [puts on a record and listens to the music] Does it tear your heart out?
Supervising Butler: [moved by the music] Beautiful, Sir.
Adolf Eichmann: I have never understood the passion for Schubert's sentimental Viennese shit.

Wikipedia: "Franz Schubert's final chamber work, the String Quintet in C major (D. 956, Op. posth. 163) is sometimes called the "Cello Quintet" because it is scored for a standard string quartet plus an extra cello instead of the extra viola which is more usual in conventional string quintets. It was composed in 1828 and completed just two months before the composer's death. The first public performance of the piece did not occur until 1850, and publication occurred three years later in 1853. Schubert's only full-fledged string quintet, it has been praised as "sublime" and as possessing "bottomless pathos," and is generally regarded as Schubert's finest chamber work as well as one of the greatest compositions in all chamber music."