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."

Sunday, April 04, 2021

Remebering the Rembrandt of Pulp: James Avati

 #theRembrandtofPulp


Paula Rabinowitz, ‘American pulp : how paperbacks brought modernism to Main Street’, 2014:
"....Only months before, Victor Weybright, publisher of the NAL, had been contacted by J. D. Salinger, who requested that the paperback cover of The Catcher in the Rye not be flamboyant. He did not want Holden’s face to appear, as he was meant to be a stand-in; rather, he saw the park bench and the carousel as significant settings. This scene was deemed “a charming one” by cover illustrator James Avati in a memo to Weybright responding to Salinger’s idea. In recounting this to Salinger, Weybright explained that it “would look like a cross between the New Yorker covers and a juvenile book rather than like a substantial modern novel.” Avati’s memo praised the subtlety of Salinger’s vision for a cover that hides Holden’s face because he is not physically described in the novel, but explained that Salinger’s concept “appeals strongly to those of us who have read the story … Perhaps it might sell.” However, Avati explicated what a paperback cover is supposed to do—sell books—and described his idea: “Let us show him [Holden] coming down Broadway or Forty-Second Street expressing his pained reaction to people who LIKE movies, etc. He is very much a definable personality, a foil to the crowd. And the crowd in its varied normality and the theatre background, exciting, suggestive, provide lures which will attract a very broad audience of readers.” This notorious cover ultimately led Salinger to insist on his own design, plain geometric shapes, for the cover of Nine Stories and the uniform color field of his future books. James Avati knew what his job was: to attract “a very broad audience of readers” and “lure” them to buy books...."


Artist: James Avati, 1953