Necessary Looking

Launched on Nov 29 2006, now 2,500+ 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"... श्रीमंत बाळासाहेब पंतप्रतिनिधी : "बहुश्रुतता असल्याशिवाय सुसंस्कृतता नाही"

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."

Sunday, February 03, 2019

Also Practising Art for Art's Sake....Norman Rockwell@125

#NormanRockwell125 आज नॉर्मन रॉकवेल (जन्म १८९४) आणि वसंत सरवटे (जन्म १९२७) या दोघांची जन्मतिथी आहे.

John Updike, ‘Always Looking: Essays on Art’:
“...this (Norman Rockwell) most successful of twentieth-century commercial artists also practiced art for art’s sake....”

अगदी हेच वर्णन दीनानाथ दलालांना लागू होत....महाराष्ट्रातील most successful of twentieth-century commercial artists also practiced art for art’s sake....

शि द फडणीसांवरती मला रॉकवेल यांचा खूप प्रभाव जाणवतो... माझ्या मते भारतातील सामान्य जीवनाचे चित्रण करणारी, त्यात विनोद शोधणारी अशी फडणीसांची अनेक चित्रे रॉकवेल यांच्या उत्तम चित्रांच्या दर्जाची आहेत...

पण ,फडणीसांची अद्भुतता रॉकवेल यांच्या चित्रात जवळपास नाहीच... फडणीसांची चित्रकारिता सुद्धा बरीच वेगळी आहे...

Deborah Solomon:

“Rockwell had celebrated the small and local, not the global and cinematic. But the emphasis on the common man that was central to America’s sense of self in 20th-century America gave way, in the television-centered 1960s, to the worship of celebrities, whose life stories and marital crises replaced those of the proverbial next-door neighbor as subjects of interest and gossip.”

आणि जे अमेरिकेत झाल, तेच भारतात झाल ... "the worship of celebrities, whose life stories and marital crises replaced those of the proverbial next-door neighbor as subjects of interest and gossip"...

Marriage License, June 11, 1955

Christopher Finch, 1988:

"There can be little doubt that this is one of Rockwell's finest works. The idea behind it is simple enough: The artist contrasts the young couple applying for a marriage license with the elderly clerk who has seen it all a thousand times before. But the scene is evoked with such affection that it becomes suffused with complex resonances. The old clerk occupies an office that, like him, seems to belong to the past. It contains rows of dusty volumes and an ornate potbellied stove. Paint is peeling from the dingy walls and cigarette butts are scattered on the floor. But the tall sash window lets in the early-summer light, which falls on the young couple, bathing them in its glow and causing them to stand out from their surroundings. Their concentration on the task at hand is such that the surroundings have no meaning for them anyway. In this composition the play ofdarkness and light is used both to create the architecture of the painting and to produce an emotional effect on the viewer. Everything about this painting seems just right. Artists are notoriously critical of their own work, but in this instance it is impossible to think that Rockwell cannot have been satisfied with the result of his labors."

The Grocer’s Shop: a Woman Selling Grapes, 1672,

Artist: Gerrit Dou (1613-1675)

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