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."

Saturday, September 28, 2024

Brigitte Bardot@90

Ginette Vincendeau, ‘Stars and Stardom in French Cinema: In-Depth Studies of Brigitte Bardot, Jeanne Moreau, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Alain Delon, Juliette Binoche, and More ‘, 2000:

“…Bardot undoubtedly ushered in a new femininity in 1950s France. Her spectacular youthful looks, her insolent wit, her blatant promiscuous lifestyle and her outspokenness were unlike any other star of the time, in France or elsewhere. Yet, at the same time her appeal depended on 'old' values: on traditional myths of femininity and on the display of her body, though a body repackaged for the times: nude, more 'natural', on location, in colour and Cinemascope. Bardot's stardom rested on the combination and reconciliation of these opposed sets of values. My analysis in this chapter concentrates on Bardot's period of high stardom, which was surprisingly short - from the release of Et Dieu ... crea la femme in 1956 to La Verite in 1960, her highest grossing film in France1 —though I will refer to earlier and later films, in particular her two New Wave films, Vie privee (1961) and Le Mepris (1963). As discussed in Chapter 1, in box-office terms alone, Bardot's ranking is relatively low. Yet, she outstrips all the stars in this book in fame. Both during her film career and since it ended in 1973, Bardot has been extraordinarily visible through press, television shows, documentaries, postcards, books, internet sites, etc. Original posters of her films are among the most expensive, and outside France they are among the few French posters available….”


 1956

Her husband Roger Vadim directed her for the first time in 1956’s Et Dieu...Crea La Femme (...And God Created Woman). The film gained notoriety worldwide due to her overt sexuality and she became an international star.

Photograph: Allstar

 


Marcello Mastroianni@100...He Never Really Knew How to Lie and He was Lazy

Shawn Levy, "Dolce Vita Confidential: Fellini, Loren, Pucci, Paparazzi and the Swinging High Life of 1950s Rome", 2016:  

 

"...Two things distinguished the young Marcello Mastroianni, according to those who knew him best and longest, and they remained essential truths about him, in important ways, throughout his varied and extraordinary life and career.

One, in the words of his mother, was “He never really knew how to lie. . . . I’d tell him not to bother to go on. He had such a simple face, like an open book.”

The other he himself declared in interviews for decades: “I am,” he would say, explaining some decision he’d made (or, more often, hadn’t made), “lazy.”

Both traits—an inability to dissemble and an inveterate indolence—were, it happened, perfect tools for the profession in which Mastroianni would become famous. On the one hand, he was at his absolute best as an actor when cast as someone whom he understood instinctively, someone whose experiences and attitudes were so natural to him that they might as well have been his own. On the other, his aversion to preparation, to study, even to learning scripts, lent his work an air of spontaneity, discovery, and immediacy that might have been lacking if he had put in more effort...."

 


 with Claudia Cardinale in "Il bell'Antonio", 1960