मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि 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: "… . . 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Thursday, March 13, 2014

On a Clear Day I Can See Mona Lisa's Sisters !

Toby Lichtig, The Times Literary Supplement, September 4 2013:


"...In his foreword, Gekoski tells the story of Kafka and Max Brod’s visit to the Louvre in 1911. The pair travelled from Milan and queued to get into the room that housed the “Mona Lisa”. Eventually, they pushed their way to the front. But they had not come to see the painting: they had come to see its absence. One week earlier, it had been stolen..." 

(review of Rick Gekoski's 'LOST, STOLEN OR SHREDDED- Stories of missing works of art and literatur') 

"On a Clear Day I Can't See My Sister" is the eleventh episode of The Simpsons' sixteenth season, that originally aired on March 6, 2005.

It had the following image:


Several copies of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa are exposed for sale in front of the Sprawl Mart

courtesy: Matt Groening, Fox Broadcasting Company and The Simpsons Park

The Times of India reported on Feb 4 2012: "500 yrs on, Mona Lisa's 'twin sister' discovered"


Likely artist: Francesco Melzi, one of Leonardo's favourite pupils

"The Mona Lisa at the Prado in Madrid was thought to be just another fine copy, with added eyebrows and an odd black background. But curators at Spain's national art museum yesterday announced a startling discovery: the painting was actually executed by an artist in Leonardo da Vinci's workshop at the same time as the original."

(Independent, UK, February 2 2012)

Before I came across the above, I had discovered one more 'sister' of Mona Lisa !

'Surely the most famous smile in the world, so to superimpose it on the most famous doll in the world had to be done. The Mona Lisa’s dress is fairly simple but very complicated to replicate in Barbie size'


Artist: French artist Jocelyne Grivaud re-created famous artworks using the Mattel dol,

Photograph: Jocelyne Grivaud; Corbis and The Guardian, Jan 29 2012

Jocelyne Grivaud says aboout the creation:

"This design needed time to take root, as often. The whole story began one day, in November 1967, with a present, all tenderness.

It was pink, vaporous and extremely delicate. With the patience of an angel, my mother had secretly knitted a dressing gown and tiny bootees for my Barbie. It seems to me there were more clothes, but these bootees, with their little pink knots on top totally fascinated me.

Then I grew up. The doll vanished, but I kept in mind the elegance and grace of my Barbie as well as a little bootee deep down my secret box.

One day, the idea of extending the happy part of my childhood through pictures I love took shape. Barbie is often criticized for being too blonde, too superficial, too skinny, too “ideal marketing”, too “this” and too “that”…. My aim was to adjust this so famous profile to different emblematic representations.

Here’s my personal contribution as a birthday present to my mascot, Barbie, superimposed on the vision of artists whose work I greatly appreciate.

Let me thank them all for creating such intense pictures. Many thanks to Ruth Handler for creating this dolly model that enraptured me throughout my childhood."