Friday, November 23, 2012

John Groth cartoon

I have always had a particular admiration for the cartoonist - one who can create a world in a few lines, what a South African artist has called the highest poetry, and then, to add a line or two that perfects it.  More than this, I admire a person who can take a dark subject and see the funny side without scoffing at anyone's pain... In the New Yorker magazine, during World War Two, there were cartoonists who did that so effectively.  John Groth is one of them.







Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Extraordinary Tales

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1987), Argentinian Nobel laureate, and Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914-1999) took great delight in making a collection of writings gathered from a bewildering variety of sources, called Extraordinary Tales (1967).  Here we see that dark sepia mystery again - the strange thoughts, feelings and encounters that humans hide in their ribs, writings that stick in the memory, imponderables.  

EUGENICS
A lady of quality fell so deliriously in love with a certain Mr Dodd, a Puritan preacher, that she begged her husband to allow her to use the marital bed for purposes of procreating an angel or a saint;  but, permission having been granted, the birth was normal.
                                  -  Drummond, Ben Ionsiana (c. 1618) 

NOSCE TE IPSUM
The Mahdi and his hordes were laying siege to Khartum, defended by General Gordon.  A few of the enemy passed through the lines and entered the city.  Gordon received them one by one and indicated a mirror where they might see themselves.  He thought it was only right that a man should know his own face before he died.
                                  -  Fergus Nicholson, Antologia de espejos

THE DREAM OF CHUANG TZU
Chuang Tzu dreamt he was a butterfly and, when he awoke, did not know if he was a man who had dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly who was dreaming he was a man.
                        -  From Chuang Tzu (1889), by Herbert Allen Giles


                                      

Source

Source of image unknown




Sunday, November 4, 2012

Comrade no more

BEIJING:  China's bus drivers and ticket sellers have been urged to leave communism behind, with a new training manual instructing them to call travellers "sir" or "madam" instead of "comrade", state media reported yesterday.
    Older Beijingers, a few of whom still wear "Mao suits" that were once a virtual uniform for China's hundreds of millions of citizens, will be exempt from the new ruling.
    "Old comrade" is listed as the final possible choice of address for elderly travellers, but it comes after "elder master" and "elder sir".
    A newly released manual for Beijing bus staff suggests forms of address ranging from "student" to the plain "passenger" for younger travellers, for whom comrade has a different gloss, as a slang term for gay.  -  Reuters. 

    Can we hear George Orwell, author of "Animal Farm", saying from his cloud, I told you so?

Source
Cape Times 1/6/2010