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, June 29, 2017

जेंव्हा जेन मॅन्सफील्ड यांचे उरोज सोफिया लॉरेन यांच्या जवळजवळ ताटात गेले...Jayne Mansfield, 50th Death Anniversary

#50YearsOn
#50YearsOnJayneMansfield

Today June 29 2017 is 50th death anniversary of Jayne Mansfield


J. G. Ballard, 'Atrocity Exhibition', 1970: 
"Were her breasts too large? No, as far as one can tell, but they loomed across the horizons of popular consciousness along with those of Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. Beyond our physical touch, the breasts of these screen actresses incite our imaginations to explore and reshape them. The bodies of these extraordinary women form a kit of spare parts, a set of mental mannequins that resemble Bellmer’s obscene dolls. As they tease us, so we begin to dismantle them, removing sections of a smile, a leg stance, an enticing cleavage. The parts are interchangeable, like the operations we imagine performing on these untouchable women, as endlessly variable as the colours silkscreened on to the faces of Warhol’s Liz and Marilyn." 

Margaret Anne Doody, London Review of Books, June 1997:
"...In the period after World War Two, by contrast, and especially throughout the Fifties, women had to try to pad out their breasts, to match the attractions of bosomy stars like Rosalind Russell, Marilyn Monroe or the egregious Jayne Mansfield. Brassieres entered the consciousness already colonised by Freud, and anxiety about bosom shape afflicted all women, even young girls who were urged to get into a ‘training bra’ as soon as they could. There was a boom in the bust..."
 
Sophia Loren and Jayne Mansfield, 1957

courtesy: Copyright holders of the picture

 I must have seen Ms. Mansfield's pictures first in Life that my father used to bring home. She then was alive. I must have learned about her death many years after the event. I don't remember when I first  saw the 60-year-old picture above. Of course, once I saw it, it was almost impossible to forget it.

After maintaining silence for decades, Ms. Loren talked about this picture to Entertainment Weekly in 2014:

"...'Look at that picture. Where are my eyes?' Sophia told the publication. 'I'm staring at her nipples because I am afraid they are about to come onto my plate.' Indeed, the beauty - whose new memoir Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: My Life will be released on Tuesday - looks put out that Jayne would let her chest be on such blatant display..."


Jocelyn Faris:
“...At 2:25 A.M. on June 29, 1967, Jayne Mansfield, Sam Brody, and Ronnie Harrison (a driver employed by Gus Stevens) were instantly killed in a freak automobile accident thirty miles from downtown New Orleans. Their car rear-ended a semi-truck in a white cloud of fog being produced by City of New Orleans mosquito spraying equipment. The three adults in the front seat received skull fractures and died instantly...

...Celebrity seekers sought to be with Jayne, even in death: "Her family had sought to avoid the sharp spotlight of publicity which the 34-year-old Miss Mansfield relished all her life. But the public craving to be near a celebrity, even in death, created a circus atmosphere in the tiny borough where she had spent several years of her early childhood . . . Spectators broke through police lines and ran across grass-covered graves to snap photographs of the bronze casket with its blanket of pink roses."...”