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, April 18, 2018

ग्लोरिया ग्रॅहम आणि मीना कुमारी....The Girls Who Couldn't Say No

Annette Bening as Gloria Grahame, 2017:
"...You want to leave me? People have been walking out on me my whole life, honey..."

Meena Kumari:
"Badi Bechari Hai
Meena Kumari
Jisko Lagi Hai
Dil Ki Bimari" (quoted in Vinod Mehta's 'Meena Kumari: The Classic Biography', 1972/2013)

'Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool', २०१७ हा अतिशय चांगला चित्रपट नुकताच पहिला.  ग्लोरिया ग्रॅहम (Gloria Grahame) १९२३-१९८१ यांच्या जीवनावर तो आधारित आहे.

अॅनेट बेनिंग (Annette Bening) यांचा उत्कृष्ट अभिनय हे या सिनेमाचे सर्वात मोठे वैशिष्ट्य म्हणता येईल.

(मोठे करून पहा : त्यात लिहले आहे : The Girl Who Can't Say No)
 सौजन्य : Lionsgate (UK) and Sony Pictures Classics (USA)
तो पाहत असताना स्व. मीना कुमारींची (१९३३-१९७२) आठवण येत राहिली.

दोघीही महान अभिनेत्र्या.... दोघींबद्दल निंफोमॅनियाक हे विशेषण वापरल गेलेल... काही असो, दोघी प्रेमाला भुकेल्या...

सिनेमा बघून हेही वाटल: मीना कुमारींच्या जीवनावर या दर्जाचा सिनेमा हिंदीत कधी निघेल का?

Gaby Wood, LRB, March 2018: 
"...Ray would go on to say of his marriage to Grahame: ‘I didn’t like her very much. I was infatuated with her, but I didn’t like her very much.’ As if in homage to Ray’s dislike, his biographer Patrick McGilligan refers to Grahame several times as a ‘sexy blonde actress’, and writes that ‘many of those who knew Grahame considered her a nymphomaniac.’ It wasn’t just those who knew her. In Peter Turner’s succinct, sad memoir, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool (recently made into a film with an uncanny Annette Bening in the lead), Grahame is a washed-up Hollywood star about to die of cancer – but hers is a complicated decrepitude. Hair matted, make-up mouldering, asking to be ‘burped’ like a baby, she is even so billed in British repertory theatres as ‘the girl who can’t say no’..."

Vinod Mehta, ‘Lucknow Boy: A Memoir’, 2011:
“....Was Meena Kumari, as rumoured, a nymphomaniac? The word denotes ‘uncontrolled sexual desire in a woman’. I could come to no definite conclusion on the issue which the publishers were very keen for me to investigate. All I found was that she was widely believed to have slept around. Ashok Kumar, Rajendra Kumar, Raaj Kumar, Dharmendra, Sawan Kumar and several others allegedly received her favours after she had had a quarter bottle of her favourite brandy.
I was told about one admirer she fornicated with casually who thought he had a good thing going. After a night of satisfactory lovemaking, he knocked the next afternoon on the door of her make-up room, ‘Kaun?’ (who?), asked the lady. The admirer gave his name. She again asked, ‘Kaun?’ The admirer again gave his name, this time providing more details, reminding the actress of their union the previous night. ‘Raat gayi, baat gayi’ (The night has gone, so has the matter), she answered nonchalantly.

I do not know whether it is true today, but in the ’70s there was a battery of hangers-on attached to a star. They could be distant relatives, secretaries, legal counsels, hairdressers, brothers-in-law, chauffeurs, etc. These people’s fantasies of making it big courtesy the star were at once sad and gripping. The fantasists were, happily, a valuable source of classified information, which helped me reconstruct Meena Kumari’s life. To be sure, they would crazily exaggerate their importance, influence and proximity to the star. One hanger-on invited me to inspect a secret bedchamber, with lots of mirrors, tucked away in his office. This is where he claimed he serviced the actress...”