...इथे डायनोसार नुस्ता जिवंतच नाही तर तारुण्याने मुसमुसलेला आहे. ...The Comet Isn’t Coming, It Has Arrived

Wendy Doniger, LRB, February 1999:

“...A more compelling metaphor, it seems to me, is offered by the capitalist implications of ‘a Stegosaurus made of money’, a dino at the Smithsonian that was rumoured to be ‘made from worn money withdrawn from circulation’. This image of extinct money also has the advantage of placing the dino saur where it belongs, as not the symbol but the product of capitalism; as Mitchell himself notes, it is ‘a cross between an idol and a cash cow’....”

Kevin McGuire in a Facebook comment: ".... "Spank me!" she screams,but the T-Rex couldn't reach with his little arms so he ate her entire body in one bite...."
 

लंडन रीव्हयू ऑफ बुक्स (LRB) मध्ये फेब्रुवारी २२ २०१८च्या अंकात फ्रांसीस गुडींग (Francis Gooding) यांनी
'Palaeoart: Visions of the Prehistoric Past' by Zoë Lescaze या पुस्तकाचे परिक्षण लिहले आहे.  

१९७०च्या दशकांपासून मी डायनोनवर प्रेम केलय आणि त्यांना 'follow ' केलय. माझ्या आयुष्यातच डायनो कसे दिसायचे यावर प्रचंड उलथापालथ झाली आहे. रंगीत का पाली सारखे? पिसे का बिनपिसे? वगैरे..... 

"What colour was a Tyrannosaurus rex? How did an Archaeopteryx court a mate? And how do you paint the visual likeness of something no human eye will ever see? Far from bedevilling the artists who wanted to depict prehistoric creatures and their lost worlds, Zoë Lescaze’s book shows that such conundrums have in fact been invitations to glorious freedom. For nearly two hundred years the resulting genre – now known as palaeoart – has been a playground wherein tyrannosaurids, plesiosaurs and their fellows have not only illustrated scientific knowledge, but acted as scaled and feathered proxies for the anxieties of contemporary life. Lescaze argues that they should be seen as ‘roads to understanding our relationship to the past and our place within the present’. Despite these garish images of dinosaur combat and primeval cataclysm having held at best the status of kitsch, it is impossible to deny the extraordinary success of the genre. None of us has ever seen one, but who doesn’t know what a dinosaur looks like?"

भारतात या दोनशे वर्षात पेलिओ आर्ट (palaeoart) निर्माण झाल्याचे  दिसत नाही. १९व्या शतकातील मराठी लेखनात डायनो चे उल्लेख तरी आहेत का? मी तरी वाचले नाहीयेत. सर्वसामान्य भारतीय माणसाला डायनोसार परिचित केंव्हा झाले याची मला माहिती नाही. शालेय अभ्यास क्रमात ते केंव्हा आले हे ही माहित नाही. 

६.५ कोटी वर्षांपूर्वी पृथ्वीवर आदळलेल्या लघुग्रहामुळे (asteroid) डायनासोर यांचा नाश झाला असे म्हणतात. आपल्या काळात असा सर्वनाशी लघुग्रह पुन्हा येणार का? त्याचे उत्तर परीक्षणात दिले आहे. 

".... Lescaze doesn’t bring us all the way to modern palaeoart. Instead, she ends with the 1970s work of Ely Kish, whose painting is unusual in its focus on extinction. Featuring decayed corpses, dried-out skeletons, and parched creatures dying in the desert, and drawing on an increasing anxiety about environmental damage, Kish’s work showed the great dying of the dinosaurs. It’s a pertinent note to end on, and it’s the one thing that’s beyond debate: however they were feathered, furred or coloured, and whether they were sluggish or nimble, dim-witted or highly intelligent, all these dinosaurs are utterly dead, for ever. Prey or predator, they are all extinct. Adorno suggests that the dream of a living dinosaur signals the hope, born in guilt, that other living things might survive the disaster humankind is inflicting on the natural world, even if we don’t. If the cosmic memento mori provided to us by these strange paintings of resurrected ancient creatures was once oblique, it is not any more. We are already well into the sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history, and it is being caused by us. The comet isn’t coming, it has arrived."

सर्वनाशी  धूमकेतू पोचला आहे-  ६वे मास एक्सटिन्क्शन जोरात चालू आहे आणि ते आपणच करतोय! ते सुरु असतानाच वर उल्लेखलेली 'the dream of a living dinosaur' नावाची आशा, इच्छा अद्भुतात (fantasy) बदलते आणि Dinosaur Beast Erotica होते.   इथे डायनो नुस्ता जिवंतच नाही तर तारुण्याने मुसमुसलेला आहे. म्हणजे ही इरोटिका सुद्धा पेलिओआर्टचाच भाग आहे. 

courtesy: copyright holders

'घरकुली' एकटी आणि अडकलेली 'कुलवधू'...Henrik Ibsen@190

#HenrikIbsen190
Today March 20 2018 is 190th birth anniversary of Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)

Ibsen's 'A Doll's House', 1879 became a very popular play in Maharashtra of 20th century.  The play  was translated into Marathi - Gharkul (घरकुल ), 1941 by Anant Kanekar (अनंत काणेकर). Also M G Rangnekar's (मो.ग.रांगणेकर) play 'Kulvadhu' (कुलवधू) is inspired by it.

I have also felt that Jabbar Patel's (जब्बार पटेल), 1982 Marathi movie 'Umbartha' (उंबरठा )- featuring brilliantly acted Nora by Smita Pail (स्मिता पाटील)- was influenced by it.

This is how Ibsen's play ends: 

"...Nora (taking her bag). Ah, Torvald, the most wonderful thing of all would have to happen.

Helmer. Tell me what that would be!

Nora. Both you and I would have to be so changed that—. Oh,

Torvald, I don‘t believe any longer in wonderful things happening.

Helmer. But I will believe in it. Tell me? So changed that—?

Nora. That our life together would be a real wedlock. Good‐bye. (She goes out through the hall.)

Helmer (sinks down on a chair at the door and buries his face in his hands). Nora! Nora! (Looks round, and rises.) Empty. She is gone. (Ahope flashes across his mind.) The most wonderful thing of all—?

(The sound of a door shutting is heard from below.)"

I read the play while in school and it made a deep impression on me. 

Hilton Als says in The New Yorker, March 10 2014:

"...Actually, part of what makes the story feel so desperate and urgent in our hearts—we never want it to end—is that it so resembles life’s rhythms, with its various elisions and polite misdeeds and yearnings, and yet it’s better than reality, since “A Doll’s House” cannot be explained away, or treated merely as a distant object; once it enters our consciousness, it sweeps us up in its emotional irresolution. It is a knowing work but an innocent one.."

The most wonderful thing I read about it was: The sound of a door shutting was not just heard below but all over Europe!

As I have said earlier on this blog,  I was always scared in my childhood if mother would do Nora some day and later I had the same fear about my wife. 

Hilton Als concludes  his review with these words: "...Before Nora leaves, she tells Torvald that he’s a stranger to her, and she can’t live in a house with a stranger. But that’s not true. Torvald was Nora’s self, or that part of herself which was once ravenous for the security that comes from being a citizen of a limited, calculable world."

I agree with Mr. Als: Most of us want to be a citizen of a limited, calculable world.

                                                             Isolated and trapped?

'Room in New York', 1932

Artist: Edward Hopper (1882-1967)

Gail Levin, ‘Edward Hopper: the art and the artist’, 1980:

“...In ‘Room in New York’, an oil painting of 1932, a man reads his newspaper, while the woman he is ignoring turns halfheartedly toward a piano and picks out a tune. The viewer, looking in through the window, has been assigned the role of voyeur...”

' मी लाय' कत्तल@50...Kill Anything that Moves

#MaiLaiMassacre50  #मीलायकत्तल

Today March 16 2018 is 50th anniversary of one of the sorriest chapters in human history: The Mai Lai Massacre (मी लाय कत्तल), Vietnam

Barbara W. Tuchman , ‘The March of Folly : From Troy to Vietnam’, 1984:

“Ignorance was not a factor in the American endeavor in Vietnam pursued through five successive presidencies, although it was to become an excuse. Ignorance of country and culture there may have been, but not ignorance of the contra-indications, even the barriers, to achieving the objectives of American policy. All the conditions and reasons precluding a successful outcome were recognized or foreseen at one time or another during the thirty years of our involvement. American intervention was not a progress sucked step by step into an unsuspected quagmire. At no time were policy-makers unaware of the hazards, obstacles and negative developments. American intelligence was adequate, informed observation flowed steadily from the field to the capital, special investigative missions were repeatedly sent out, independent reportage to balance professional optimism—when that prevailed—was never lacking. The folly consisted not in pursuit of a goal in ignorance of the obstacles but in persistence in the pursuit despite accumulating evidence that the goal was unattainable, and the effect disproportionate to the American interest and eventually damaging to American society, reputation and disposable power in the world.

The question raised is why did the policy-makers close their minds to the evidence and its implications? This is the classic symptom of folly: refusal to draw conclusions from the evidence, addiction to the counter-productive. The “why” of this refusal and this addiction may disclose itself in the course of retracing the tale of American policy-making in Vietnam...”

Nick Turse:

“As I came to see the indiscriminate killing of South Vietnamese noncombatants — the endless slaughter that wiped out civilians day after day, month after month, year after year throughout the Vietnam War — was neither accidental nor unforeseeable.”

Kendrick Oliver, History Today, February 2006:

“...The silence that generally surrounds the massacre in contemporary American discourse contrasts not just with the urgent babble of voices offering opinions on the subject at the turn of the 1960s, but also with the persistence of debates about the Vietnam War as a whole...

... Americans, indeed, were far more interested in the character and fate of the perpetrators than those of their victims. As many media commentators noted, there seemed to be nothing in the background of the soldiers involved that explained how they had come to engage so willingly in slaughter...”

Max Hastings, London Review of Books, January 25 2018:

"...The damage inflicted by My Lai on the image of the US and its armed forces as ‘crusaders for freedom’ persists to this day. As so often with stories of this kind, the institutionalised cover-up and the surge of public support for those who carried out the offences, make even uglier reading than the narrative of the original massacre. The apologists for C Company, and indeed for the US army, tried to make a case that, while it may not have been entirely acceptable to murder Vietnamese peasants, it was understandable and excusable. .."

Photo courtesy: Ronald Haeberle, November 1969/ Getty

Viet Thanh Nguyen, ‘Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War', 2016:

“...On a smaller scale and in the middle of the country, the Son My museum that commemorates the My Lai massacre focuses on the singular tragedy of the five hundred people murdered—some raped—by American troops. The aftermath of their story is the same as the common narrative, the triumphant revolution eventually transforming the war-blasted landscape of village and province with verdant fields, new bridges, lively schools, and lovely people. While the photographs that decorate these museums feature real people, the captions underlining them have stamped them flat, as in the Son My museum’s display of Ronald Haeberle’s most famous photograph, underwritten with this: “The last moment of life for villager women and children under a silk cotton tree before being murdered by the U.S. soldiers.” Whoever these civilians and soldiers were in their complex lives and complicated histories, they exist in the caption as victims and villains in a drama that justifies the revolution and the party. The caption as genre echoes the slogan as genre, from Follow Uncle Ho’s Shining Example to Nothing Is More Precious than Independence and Freedom. Slogans like these exemplify the Communist Party’s story of itself, which has become, for now, the official story of the country and the nation...”

महात्मा फुले आणि आईड्स ऑफ मार्च....Mahatma Phule and Ides of March

#IdesOfMarch

Josephine Quinn, The New York Review of Books, March 2018:

"...Altogether, later sources plausibly claim, Caesar fought more than four million Gauls, killed one million, and took as many prisoners—most of whom would have been sold into slavery. The Germans too suffered terrible losses, including one episode when Caesar imprisoned a delegation of German migrants who came to negotiate a truce, stormed their camp, killed the men who resisted, and then sent his cavalry to run down and slaughter the women and children as they fled. Those who were not caught drowned in the Rhine. Other sources tell us that 400,000 people died. Was that the culture then? Not everyone’s, it seems, or not exactly: although the Senate voted sacrifices of thanksgiving on news of the victory, Cato the Younger and other senators proposed that Caesar be extradited to the Germans, not for the massacre itself, but for breaking a truce...."

महात्मा फुले यांनी जुलियस सीझरच्या हत्येबद्दल लिहल आहे..... आज मार्च १५, २०१८ला त्याची नोंद....   

Richard Johnson as Cassius, John Gielgud as Julius Caesar, and Jason Robards as Brutus in Stuart Burge’s film Julius Caesar, 1970
courtesy: International Pictures/Photofest