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."

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Will Rakhi Sawant’s Reveal-all Book Outsell Bhakti Literarture in India?

The Telegraph, UK’s website on September 23, 2007 and Times of India on September 25, 2007 report:
“Fears for the future of the literary novel have been heightened by the revelation that a book by Katie Price, the surgically enhanced model, has outsold the entire Booker Prize shortlist.

Sales for the Man Booker Prize contenders show that the combined efforts of the cream of Britain's literary talent cannot match the appeal of Crystal, by Katie Price, the topless model better known as Jordan.

Figures that make grim reading for lovers of highbrow literature show that Crystal is beating the combined sales of all six works on the Man Booker shortlist…

The revelation has thrown the literary world into depression…

Told of Ms Price's victory, one agent who has represented Booker shortlisted authors in this and previous years, admitted: "Depressed? That could be a bit of an understatement. Literary fiction just doesn't sell in the quantities it used to….

Ms Price, 29, who came to public attention as a topless model whose natural attractions had been considerably enlarged by the surgeon's knife, has written two novels. Angel, about a young woman who becomes a model, was published in 2006, selling 300,000 copies in six weeks..."

I am not surprised.

P L Deshpande, Marathi humourist and entertainer, once punned: “Theirs is a Draksh (Marathi word for GRAPE) culture while ours is a Rudraksh culture”. He implied the Christian use of grape wine as part of religious ceremony while Indians use Rudraksh. (For Indians, no other bead is so auspicious and powerful as Rudraksh….The seed of Rudraksh has been given a very special place and it is credited with mystical and divine properties. The botanical name of the Rudraksh plant is 'ELAEOCARPUS GRANITRUS'.)

He could as well have said- theirs is a “sexulture”.

In US it seems, ‘old’ wealthy men- tycoons, Hollywood honchos, politicos-are busy marrying women of their daughter’s age and producing babies as fast as possible.

In olden days India, you could find mother and daughter pregnant during the same period. In US, you have similar scenes now. Mother, daughter and perhaps a granddaughter expecting a child!

In India serious vernacular language books hardly sell and titillation-thanks to Indian cinema- sells big time but I still feel Indians are not obsessed with sex as much as the West and for sure best selling books in India are not written by topless models.


Artist: Peter Arno The New Yorker September 10,1960


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