Latest Posts by prasannachoudhary - Page 7

Estonian Art And Literature: Big Ideas In A Small Country

Skysoaked: Jibanananda Das

Reblogged from translations:

Suranjana, you better not go there You better not talk to that young man Come back, Suranjana When silver starfire fills the night

Come back to this meadow, this wave Come back here to my heart Don’t go away with him anymore Fa…

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The Opposition Path and China's Future

The Opposition Path and China’s Future.

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REVISITING NATIONALISM - 4

REVISITING NATIONALISM – 4

REVISITING NATIONALISM  – 4       

Prasanna K Choudhary

TWO VIEWPOINTS

The viewpoint that gets manifested prominently in European nationalism seeks to think in terms of absolutely opposing categories, in terms of dichotomies like God vs Satan, Good vs…

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REVISITING NATIONALISM - 3

REVISITING NATIONALISM – 3

REVISITING NATIONALISM  – 3

Prasanna K Choudhary

NATIONALISM CHALLENGED

The ideology of nationalism had to face serious challenges from the very beginning itself. Needless to say that there was always a radical opposition in Europe’s bourgeois movement,…

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REVISITING NATIONALISM - 2

REVISITING NATIONALISM – 2

REVISITING NATIONALISM  – 2       

Prasanna K Choudhary

EUROPE AND THE REST OF THE WORLD

The self-identity of European countries as ‘nations’ was invariably linked with the process of denying and destroying the identities of so many tribes, societies and…

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REVISITING NATIONALISM - 1

REVISITING NATIONALISM – 1

REVISITING NATIONALISM  – 1      

Prasanna K Choudhary

NATION, NATION-STATES AND NATIONALISM

1648.The Thirty Years’ (1618-1648) European War ended in the Treaty of Westphalia. In this devaststing war, fought in the background of the Reformation, the…

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Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as in the artist. But they do not see it because they are not trying to shed light on it. And so their past is cluttered with countless photographic negatives, which continue to be useless because their intellect has never 'developed' them. Our lives; and the lives of other people, too; because style for a writer, like colour for a painter, is a question not of technique but of vision. It is the revelation, which would be impossible by direct or conscious means, of the qualitative difference in the ways we perceive the world, a difference which, if there were no art, would remain the eternal secret of each individual. It is only through art that we can escape from ourselves and know how another person sees a universe which is not the same as our own and whose landscapes would otherwise have remained as unknown as any there may be on the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing only a single world, our own, we see it multiplied, and have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, all more different one from another than those which revolve in infinity and which, centuries after the fire from which their rays emanated has gone out, whether it was called Rembrandt or Vermeer, still send us their special light. This labour of the artist, this attempt to see something different beneath the material, beneath experience, beneath words, is the exact inverse of that which is accomplished within us from minute to minute, as we live our lives heedless of ourselves, by vanity, passion, intellect and habit, when they overlay our true impressions, so as to hide them from us completely, with the repertoire of words, and the practical aims, which we wrongly call life. To put it briefly, this art, complicated though it be, is actually the only art that is alive. .... The work carried out by our vanity, our passion, our imitative faculties, our abstract intelligence, our habits, is the work that art undoes, making us follow a contrary path, in a return to the depths where whatever has really existed lies unrecognized within us. And of course it was very tempting to recreate real life and rejuvenate one's impressions in this way. But it called for all kinds of courage, including emotional courage.

Marcel Proust, 'Finding Time Again'. Translated by Ian Patterson.

In the Shadow of the Trylon, New York World’s Fair, 1939, Stanley Rayfield

The Nightmare (alternate version) by Fussli, 1802.

All True Love Must Die: Richard Burton's Diaries : The New Yorker

Robert Frost: Darkness or Light? : The New Yorker

Best GIFs of 2012:

patakk

Best GIFs of 2012:

mrdiv

This is the one and only original manuscript of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The Morgan Library and Museum displays Charles Dickens’s original manuscript of A Christmas Carol in Pierpont Morgan’s historic Library until January 13, 2013. Dickens wrote his iconic tale in a six-week flurry of activity, beginning in October 1843 and ending in time for Christmas publication. He had the manuscript bound in red morocco as a gift for his solicitor, Thomas Mitton. The manuscript then passed through several owners before Pierpont Morgan acquired it in the 1890s. 

It reveals Dickens’s method of composition, allowing us to glimpse the author at work. he began writing the story in October 1843, completing it in only six weeks. His apparently contiguous pace of writing and revision was urgent but moldly confident. The interlinear revisions increase the story’s vividness: text is struck out with a continuous looping movement of the pen and replaced with more active verbs and fewer words to achieve greater concision. Dickens sent this manuscript to the printer in early December, and the book was published in time for the Christmas market. [The Morgan, 2012] (photo: yyz2nyc)

Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom. I thought little of the future. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration.

James Joyce in Araby

Song: “Lovesick Misery” by Sanders Bohlke

iTunes :: Amazon :: Back to Brain Pickings

Steven Spielberg’s new film Lincoln has excited great debate between reviewers, historians, and commentators. Here, Kelly Candaele leads us through the many strands of the argument:

One of the most gratifying aspects of Steven Spielberg’s movie Lincoln has been the debate that its release has generated among historians and journalists, a debate more important than the movie itself. What were the complex dilemmas that Lincoln faced as President? What were the political realities and conduct of the time? How should we interpret the decisions that Lincoln and others made? What role did slaves and free blacks play in their own liberation?

Despite the fact that the film focuses on a short period of time in Lincoln’s presidency and deals primarily with the political cut and thrust associated with the passage of the 13th Amendment, there is a real sense in which the film can be described as deeply philosophical. Lincoln is portrayed as a man of discipline, concentration, and energy, all characteristics that sociologist Max Weber defined as part of the serious politician’s vocation. By forging an effective and realized political character — one aspect of Weber’s definition of charismatic authority — an astute politician can change the nature of power in society. By controlling his all-too-human vanity, he can avoid the two deadly political sins of lack of objectivity and irresponsibility. For Weber, a certain “distance to things and men” was required to abide by an “ethic of responsibility” for the weighty decisions that leaders are often required to make.

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The immense hope, and forbearance Trailing out of night, to sidewalks of the day  Like air breathed into a paper city, exhaled  As night returns bringing doubts  That swarm around the sleeper’s head  But are fended off with clubs and knives, so that morning  Installs again in cold hope  The air that was yesterday, is what you are,  In so many phases the head slips form the hand.  The tears ride freely, laughs or sobs:  What do they matter? There is free giving and taking;  The giant body relaxed as though beside a stream  Wakens to the force of it and has to recognize  The secret sweetness before it turns into life—  Sucked out of many exchanges, torn from the womb,  Disinterred before completely dead—and heaves  Its mountain-broad chest. “They were long in coming,  Those others, and mattered so little that it slowed them  To almost nothing. They were presumed dead,  Their names honorably grafted on the landscape  To be a memory to me. Until today  We have been living in their shell.  Now we break forth like a river breaking through a dam,  Pausing over the puzzled, frightened plain,  And our further progress shall be terrible,  Turning fresh knives in the wounds  In the gulf of recreation, that bare canvas  As matter-of-fact as the traffic and that day’s noise.”  The mountain stopped shaking; its body  Arched into its own contradiction, its enjoyment,  As far from us lights were put out, memories of boys and girls  Who walked here before the great change,  Before the air mirrored us,  Taking the opposite shape of our effort,  Its inseparable comment and corollary  But casting us further and further out.  Wha—what happened? You are with  The orange tree, so that its summer produce  Can go back to where we got it wrong, then drip gently  Into history, if it wants to. A page turned; we were  Just now floundering in the wind of its colossal death.  And whether it is Thursday, or the day is stormy,  With thunder and rain, or the birds attack each other,  We have rolled into another dream.  No use charging the barriers of that other:  It no longer exists. But you,  Gracious and growing thing, with those leaves like stars,  We shall soon give all out attention to you.

—John Ashbery, “Spring Day” Art Credit Lottie Hedley

Ladies of the Zenana (Womens Quarters) on a Terrace at Night - 17th Century Rajput Painting

Artist : Ruknuddin

Ruknuddin was active at the court in Bikaner ca. 1650-97. especially under the patronage of Anup Singh. Ruknuddin was a master of color and patterns. In this work, the exquisitely rendered folds of Vishnu’s robe, the semitransparent fabrics of the women presenting gifts to the divine couple, and the subtle shading of the faces are obviously reminiscent of Mughal painting. Beautiful women, even in a secular context, were among Ruknuddin’s favorite subjects. If one compares such pictures from the 1660s and 1670s as a group, one is particularly struck by the porcelain-like treatment of the faces that recurs in works of this period. Ruknuddin accompanied the rulers of Bikaner on their military campaigns to the Deccan, which were conducted as part of their contractural service to the Mughal court. He is associated with a number of portraits painted there in a distinctly Mughal manner, reflecting his exposure to further currents of influence. (via)

—Jessica Greenbaum, Poetry, July/August 2012 At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Lisa Russ Spaar reviews Greenbaum’s The Two Yvonnes, mentioning “the abecedarian ‘A Poem for S.,’” above.

Prasanna Choudhary's Vizify Bio

"The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless. .... The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away. ... Fear prophets, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them. ... Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth. ..."

Umberto Eco, 'The Name of the Rose', Vintage Books, London, 2004.

"In India all religions hold in common the idea of two indivisible elements, a male and female principle, Purusha and Prakrti, or Shiva and Shakti. The two elements originate in a single primordial being which manifests a 'desire to create'. From a unitary state of repose this emergent, but creative, tension gives birth to the universe and the multiplicity of beings and things of this world in a state of unceasing instability and flux, of time and constant change, of birth, reproduction, decay, death and rebirth. Out of a permanent coition of opposites the many are born, and with them confusion, antagonism, separateness. But the universe longs to regain its primordial state of oneness, and seeks to reverse the fragmentation. The return path, or restoration of lost unity, is the business of religion, yoga, ritualized sex, and its opposite : rigorous asceticism. These comprise a tool-kit of diverse, and divergent, religious techniques."

Richard Lannoy and Harry Baines, 'The Eye of Love', Grove Press, Inc., New York, 1976.