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."

Monday, January 02, 2017

Painting and Writing Souls...August Stindberg err Strindberg by Edvard Munch @125

Year 2017 is 125th anniversary of August Strindberg's portrait by Edvard Munch


I first came to know about  August Stindberg because I fell in love with his quote, used as an epigram by the late  G A Kulkarni's (जी कुलकर्णी) for his book "Pingla Vel"  (पिंगळा वेळ), 1977:
"Shallow people demand variety – but I have been writing the same story throughout my life, every time trying to cut nearer the aching nerve".


dated 1892, Location: Museum of Modern Art, Stockholm, Sweden 



Henrik Bering, WSJ, May 23 2012 writes:
“…While living in Paris in 1895, the Swedish author and playwright August Strindberg asked his friend Edvard Munch to create a portrait of him. Presented with the resulting lithograph, Strindberg was not entirely satisfied: Munch had misspelled his name "Stindberg"—stind is Swedish for "stout" and carries a suggestion of pompousness—and had placed a naked woman along the border, which somewhat detracted from the seriousness of the image. At their next encounter, without saying a word, Strindberg placed a revolver on the table. Munch got the message: In the new version, he corrected the spelling and removed the lady.
From then on, their friendship deteriorated rapidly. Strindberg was given to absinthe-fueled paranoia, at one point believing that assassins were lurking next-door, playing three grand pianos simultaneously. He accused Munch of trying to kill him with a stream of gas through the wall and fired off a postcard: "Your attempt to kill me by the Pettenkofer method failed. Enjoyed the evening." Munch chose to leave town in a hurry.

Despite the tumult of their friendship, the two men were vital intellectual foils, as Sue Prideaux, the author of the superb "Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream" (2005), shows in her rich "Strindberg: A Life." They were part of a generation of writers and artists who in the last decades of the 19th century rebelled—not against science as such, Ms. Prideaux writes, but against the notion that there was a materialist explanation for everything. Instead, they strove for "a great renaissance of the soul against the intellect," she writes: "Munch was considered 'to paint souls' and Strindberg to write about them. Together they slaked the great thirst for the acknowledgment of the metaphysical."…”