Extra Years of Prolonged Life

Artist: Bob Mankoff

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

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."

Accepting Somebody For Who I Am!

Artist: Drew Dernavich, The New Yorker, June 2013

Asha Parekh@80

 #AshaParekh80

आशा पारेख मला अभिनेत्री म्हणून कधी आवडल्या नाहीत पण त्यांच्या तोंडात हिंदी सिनेमातील फार उत्कृष्ट गाणी आहेत, त्या खूप हिट सिनेमांमधून असत आणि त्या खूप छान नाच करत असत.

Dil Deke Dekho (1959)

courtesy : the current copyright holders to the movie

Immense Panorama of Futility and Anarchy...Thirsting for Redemption and Renewal...The Waste Land@100

Michiko Kakutani, ‘Ex Libris: 100+ Books to Read and Reread’, 2020:

“…After decades of being taught in high school and college, after its innovations have been widely assimilated, imitated, and satirized, The Waste Land might now strike some readers as familiar, even trite. It’s hard to appreciate just how radical it was when it was first published, breaking old rules of prosody and using new language and techniques to tackle what were then unfashionable themes of spiritual alienation and urban malaise.

But reread today, the poem’s evocation of the broken world left in the wake of World War I remains remarkably resonant. It depicts a world in which the old rules and certainties have vanished—a spiritual desert where “the dead tree gives no shelter,” where lonely people move numbly through an “Unreal City,” where the poet “can connect / Nothing with nothing.”

Eliot once observed that the poem was written as “the relief of a personal…grouse against life,” and it was, in part, a reflection of his own state of mind as he struggled with a miserable marriage and a nervous breakdown. But much the way that Kafka’s work, which was rooted in his relationship with a domineering father, yielded lasting metaphors for modern life and politics, so did Eliot’s Waste Land mirror larger dynamics in the world. It’s a world not unlike our own, haunted by a sense of loss and dislocation—a world, to use words written by Eliot in an essay about Ulysses, that presented an “immense panorama of futility and anarchy” while thirsting for redemption and renewal.”

Robert Crawford, 'Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land', 2015:

“…It was 15 December when The Waste Land became an American book. One thousand copies were printed, each stamped with an individual number, published from 105 W. 40th Street, New York. Hard at work assembling the contents for the next few issues of the Criterion, Tom opened the small, pale-jacketed volume in his London flat. Slightly heavier than it looked, underneath the dust jacket it was bound in black boards with only the words THE WASTE LAND in gold on the front board. Inside, the poem now carried its Latin and Greek epigraph (though no dedication), and was printed in large type – never more than sixteen lines of poetry per page. Thanks to this generous spacing and to the added prose ballast of the Notes, it managed to fill sixty-four pages. Throughout, the verse carried line numbers (one every ten lines), as if to bind together a work that kept threatening to explode into separate shards. The inside front-jacket flap quoted an early review by Burton Rascoe in the New York Tribune, calling The Waste Land ‘a thing of bitterness and beauty’ and, ‘perhaps, the finest poem of this generation’. The note on the rear flap began simply, ‘T. S. Eliot was born in 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri’, then went on to hail him as ‘without question the most significant of the younger American writers’. Tom, weary and very far from the city of his birth, looked at the name ‘T. S. Eliot’ in plain black print on the title page.

It was as if he had never been young.”