PARIS

In the visual arts, the laugh, the ridicule and caricature have a certain regime, which is rather different from the one developed in literature, mainly because it is an expression of criticism and contempt much more immediate and politically engaged. Starting in Germany

In the forty-fifth year of his life, Mr. Matache Pisălog noticed he could no longer button up the last three buttons of his brand-new waistcoat he had had made barely three years before. He also noticed then that his belly had started following the fashion of balloons -

Paris Street in Bucharest is impassable because of the crowd. A policeman clutches at the shirt of some individual who refuses to be taken in custody and who in his turn clutches at the policeman's shirt. The public, who have forborne seeing about their business are

excerpts · Formerly people used to go to Paris to learn law; now they learn it in prison. · The newborn boy now must have four hands: one for the cigarette, one for the playing cards, a third one for the latest ointment, and the fourth for the ball and cue. · Since the

Modernism has brought to paroxysm the need of personal mythologies, immanent to Western civilization. No wonder that some of the heroes and saints of the avant-garde came from those peripheral European territories still uncharted from a spiritual point of view. By the beginning

The founder of the Theater of the Absurd (with The Bald Soprano, staged in 1950 by Nicolas Bataille at the Theatre des Noctambules in Paris, a play he had begun in the 40s while still in Romania under the title English without a Teacher), a member of the French Academy from

Not thinking about anything. Only thinking of petty little things. Not thinking about the Whole. Thinking about everything and nothing. Thinking about petty little nothings. And, if I can, I think that God thinks me, thinking under God's protection. Is God there? Does

Very few people think: very few in comparison with the nation. And which is more, as these thinkers are kept far away from the lofty secrets of politics, from the lofty secrets of science and research, and from the lofty secrets of the police and of those who secretly run

It has been said – for good reason – that the Romanian word dor [aprox. yearning] is untranslatable, which made all foreign lexicographers leave it in its original form in most literary texts. But in music there is also a dor enescian [Enescian yearning], which someone

Alfredo Casella: Enescu is delicate and sensitive, communicative too, like all Latins. Despite his spontaneous and amazingly rich inventiveness, his creation illustrates a process of will, which no artist can overlook. I have seen such a perfect accord between intention

The history of world music has witnessed many spectacular overturns in the hierarchy of values, when names of purely local interest whose death was not even announced in an obituary (Johann Sebastian Bach) became world famous personalities a century later. Quite often, internationally

For the sparkling sculptor of modern art, music represented a secret passion. It was only after the master's death that his close friends, V. G. Paleolog and Marcel Mihalovici revealed to the world the place the art of sounds took in the atmosphere of the mysterious