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De Australische schrijfster Colleen McCullough werd
geboren op 1 juni 1937 in Wellington. Zie ook mijn blog van 1 juni 2009 en eveneens alle tags voor Colleen McCullough op dit blog.
Uit: The Thorn Birds
The dolls golden hair tumbled down, the
pearls flew winking into the long grass and disappeared. A dusty boot came down
thoughtlessly on the abandoned dress, smearing grease from the smithy across
its satin. Meggie dropped to her knees, scrabbling frantically to collect the
miniature clothes before more damage was done them, then she began picking
among the grass blades where she thought the pearls might have fallen. Her
tears were blinding her, the grief in her heart new, for until now she had
never owned anything worth grieving for.
Frank threw the shoe
hissing into cold water and straightened his back; it didnt ache these days,
so perhaps he was used to smithying. Not before time, his father would have
said, after six months at it. But Frank knew very well how long it was since
his introduction to the forge and anvil; he had measured the time in hatred and
resentment. Throwing the hammer into its box, he pushed the lank black hair off
his brow with a trembling hand and dragged the old leather apron from around
his neck. His shirt lay on a heap of straw in the corner; he plodded across to
it and stood for a moment staring at the splintering barn wall as if it did not
exist, his black eyes wide and fixed.
He was very small,
not above five feet three inches, and thin still as striplings are, but the
bare shoulders and arms had muscles already knotted from working with the
hammer, and the pale, flawless skin gleamed with sweat. The darkness of his
hair and eyes had a foreign tang, his full-lipped mouth and wide-bridged nose
not the usual family shape, but there was Maori blood on his mothers side and
in him it showed. He was nearly sixteen years old, where Bob was barely eleven,
Jack ten, Hughie nine, Stuart five and little Meggie three. Then he remembered
that today Meggie was four; it was December 8th. He put on his shirt and left
the barn.
Colleen
McCullough (Wellington, 1 juni 1937)
Scene uit de
tv-serie met Richard Chamberlain en Rachel Ward, 1983
De Argentijnse schrijver Macedonio
Fernández werd geboren op 1 juni 1874 in Buenos Aires. Zie ook mijn
blog van 1 juni 2009 enook mijn blog van 1 juni 2010.
Uit: From The Museum of Eternas Novel (Vertaald door Margaret Schwartz)
Horrible art and the accumulated glories of
the past, which have always existed, are a result of the following: the
sonorousness of language and the existence of a public; without this
sonorousness, only thinking and creating would remain; without a clamoring
public, art would not be drowned. Under these conditions, Literature would be
pure art, and there would be many more beautiful works than there are at
present: there would be three or four Cervantes, the Cervantes of the Quijote, without the stories, Quevedo
the humorist and poet of passion, without the moralizing orator, various Gómez
de la Sernas. Well be liberated from the likes of Calderón, the Prince of
falsetto, from lack of feeling, which is poor taste itself; from the likes of
Góngora, at least from time to time, with his exclamations of Ay Fabio, o
sorrow! Wed have three Heines, each of sarcasm and sadness, or DAnnunzios to
limitlessly versify passion. Happily, we would have only the first act of Faust, and in compensation various
Poes, and various Bovarieswith their sad affliction of loveless appetite,
despicable and bloodyand this other, lacerating absurdity: Hamlets lyric of
sorrow, which convinces and breeds sympathy, despite the false psychologism of
its source. Well be free of the scientific realism of Ibsen, one of Zolas
victims, and this magnificent artist for his part will be dismantled by
sociology and theory of heresy and pathology, and instead of a dozen master
works well possess a hundred, of true, intrinsic artistic worth, not mere
copies of reality. These works will be typically literary, works of Prose, not
of didactics, without any musical language (meter, rhyme, sonorousness) or
paintings with words, that is, descriptions.
Macedonio Fernández (1 juni 1874 10 februari 1952)
Onafhankelijk van geboortedata:
De Nederlandse dichter Dennis
Gaens werd geboren in Susteren in 1982. Zie ook mijn blog van 1 juni 2009 en ook mijn blog van 1
juni 2010.
veertig graden
als we de kou
hierbinnen
de ruimte geven
en onze koorts buiten
op straat laten spelen
ons zweet tussen
de groeven van klinkers
en door blaren in het asfalt
omhoog laten komen
de straat overstromen
lantaarnpalen laten smelten
dwars over de weg alleen
de stoep begaanbaar houden
met onze ruggengraat
door drempels breken
het bestemmingsplan
laten getuigen van
de onrust in onze botten
als we onze koorts
in straten laten razen
zijn we 38, 39, 40
dichterbij de zon
Dennis Gaens (Susteren, 1982)
De Britse schrijver Rhidian Brook werd
geboren in 1964 in Tenby. Zijn eerste
roman The Testimony Of Taliesin Jones won drie prijzen, waaronder de 1997
Somerset Maugham Award, en werd verfilmd met in de hoofdrol Jonathan Pryce.
Zijn tweede roman Jesus And The Adman werd gepubliceerd in 1999. Zijn derde
roman The Aftermath verscheen in april 2013. Zijn korte verhalen zijn
gepubliceerd door The Paris Review, Punch, The New Statesman, Time Out en
andere tijdschriften, en verschillende ervan werden uitgezonden op BBC Radio
4's Short Story. Zijn eerste opdracht voor de televisie Mr Harvey Lights A
Candle- werd uitgezonden in 2005 op BBC1 met Timothy Spall in de hoofdrol.
Brook schreef ook voor de BBC serie Silent Witness tussen 2005 en 2007, en de
dramaproductie Atlantis voor BBC1 in 2008. Africa United, zijn eerste lange
speelfilm kwam in het Verenigd Koninkrijk uit in oktober 2010. Brook schreef eveneens artikelen voor kranten,
waaronder The Observer, The Guardian en The Daily Telegraph. In 2005
presenteerde hij Nailing The Cross, een documentaire voor BBC1. In 2006 werkte hij mee aanj een serie
In The Blood van BBC World Service, en filmde hij de reis van zijn familie
door de aids-pandemie. Zijn boek over die reis More Than Eyes Can See- werd
in 2007 gepubliceerd door Marion Boyars. Ook levert Brooks al meer dan 12 jaar
regelmatig bijdragen aan Radio 4's "Thought For The Day.
Uit: More
Than Eyes Can See
Our biceps were still aching from the final
round of jabs when we arrived in the rural Kenyan town of Kithituni, where the
Salvation Army had pioneered a communal response to HIV/Aids. We had been
inoculated against a host of deadly diseases. We had learned all about the
pandemic, explained to Gabriel and Agnes how HIV passed from one person to
another, read books and talked to people trying to get a sense of what life
would be like in the communities we were going to. Most of what we knew about
Africa lay between the dualities of safari and catastrophe, between the
writings of the starry-eyed accounts of settlers, naturalists, hunters and
alarming news reports, movies and documentaries. None of it really prepared us
for what we found.
There were immediate cultural adjustments to
make and material discomforts to face: no cars, a "goat-powered"
internet, pit latrines for toilets, no fridge (we only had power for three
hours a day), no running hot water, and a limited amount of food produce
consisting mainly of scrawny chicken, beans, rice and the maize breeze-block
otherwise known as ugali. There
were big bugs to worry about and an over-neurotic applic ation of Deet at sundown, but we adjusted
quickly and the kids seemed to be enjoying it as much as we were. It was the
people who made it easy.
Every day, the chief patriarch and matriarch in
the area Jonathan and Agnes (every other woman seemed to be called Agnes in
Kithituni) would swing by on their way to market to check that we were OK;
hordes of children would come to play football with our children (with a
football made from plastic bags and string) or play with Gabriel's Gameboy
until the power ran out. George the baptist would stop off for tea, deliver his
home-grown onions and discuss some finer theological point. Lelu showed us how
to kill the army ants that walked in through the front door at exactly 7pm
every night. And on the 45-minute walk to market we'd learn Swahili by
practising the local greetings 100 times a day. By the time we had bought the
children two goats at Friday market (we called them Malarone and Larium after
the malaria tablets) we were well and truly part of the community and able to
thank God in three more languages.
Rhidian Brook
(Tenby, 1964)
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