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."

Wednesday, October 26, 2016

अरसिक किती हा मॅने, हा पोर्ट्रेट फाडून पडून राहिला...Edouard Manet Slashes His Picture by Degas


लक्ष्मीबाई टिळक:
"...कविता केली म्हणजे त्याची पहिली श्रोती मी. मी इकडे कामदारणीला सांगत असले किंवा कोणाशी काही बोलत असले म्हणजे तर त्याची कविता वाचून दाखविण्याची घाई व्हायची, आणि माझे दुर्लक्ष आहेसे दिसले म्हणजे त्याने ती कविता रागाने फाडून टाकायची. मग दत्तू-बेबीने त्याला चिडवायचे,

- "अरसिक किती हा मेला
हा कविता फाडून बाहिर गेला"-

मग त्याने हसायचे व पुन्हा ती लिहून काढायची. ठोंबऱ्याला कविता फाडण्याचा बराच नाद असावा..."

 (पृष्ठ: २८४, 'स्मृतिचित्रे', १९३४/२०००, वरदा प्रकाशन)

[ठोंबऱ्या= त्र्यंबक बापूजी ठोंबरे= बालकवी, १८९०-१९१८]

Portrait of Edouard Manet and his wife Suzanne

Artist: Edgar Degas


Alastair Smart, The Spectator, October 15 2016, review of Sebastian Smee's 'The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals and Breakthroughs in Modern Art':
"...When the old curmudgeon Edgar Degas died in 1917, a stunning trove of works by Edouard Manet — eight paintings, 14 drawings and 60 prints — was discovered in his studio. There, too, was a portrait of Manet and his wife Suzanne, painted by Degas 50 years earlier. But its right-hand third was missing — which included half of Suzanne’s body and all of the piano she was playing. For some reason, Manet had put a knife through the canvas and sent Degas packing with what remained...

...Artistic inspiration is notoriously tricky to pinpoint. What’s more, in this case we’re dealing with eight of the most brilliantly outlandish individuals in art history. They’re surely the last people whose behaviour and feats we should be trying to explain by way of a pattern.

Heaven only knows what prompted Manet to slash that picture of him by Degas — or, for that matter, why Degas decided to keep it."


In India, of course, we are used to seeing some of the greatest art mutilated by either humans or the passage of time or that has been abandoned midway and I have learned to find great beauty in them.