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De Amerikaanse schrijver David
Vann werd geboren op 19 oktober 1966 op Adak Island, Alaska. Zie ook alle tags voor David Vann
op dit blog.
Uit: Caribou
Island
My mother was not
real. She was an early dream, a hope. She
was a place. Snowy, like here, and cold. A wooden house on a hill above a river. An overcast day, the old
white paint of the
buildings made brighter somehow by the trapped light, and I was coming home from school. Ten years old,
walking by myself, walking through dirty
patches of snow in the yard, walking up to
the narrow porch. I can't remember how my thoughts went then, can't remember who I was or what I felt like.
All of that is gone, erased. I opened
our front door and found my mother hanging
from the rafters. I'm sorry, I said, and I stepped back and closed the door. I was outside on the porch again.
You said that? Rhoda asked. You said you were sorry?
Yes.
Oh, Mom.
It was long ago, Irene said. And it was something I couldn't see even at the time, so I can't see it now.
I don't know what she looked like
hanging there. I don't remember any of it, only that it was.
Rhoda scooted closer on the couch and put her arm around her mother, pulled her close. They both
looked at the fire. A metal screen in
front, small hexagons, and the longer Rhoda
looked, the more these hexagons seemed like the back wall of the fireplace, made golden by flame. As if
the back wall, black with soot, could be
revealed or transmuted by fire. Then her eyes
would shift and it would be only a screen again. I wish I had known her, Rhoda said.
Me too, Irene said. She patted Rhoda's knee. I need to get to sleep. Busy day tomorrow.
I'll miss this place.
It was a good home. But your father wants to leave me, and the first step is to make us move out to that
island. To make it seem he gave it a
try.
That's not true, Mom.
We all have rules, Rhoda. And your father's main rule is that he can never seem like the bad guy.
He loves you, Mom.
Irene stood and hugged her daughter. Goodnight, Rhoda.
David Vann (Adak
Island, 19 oktober 1966)
De Britse schrijver Philip Pullman werd geboren op 19
oktober 1946 in Norwich als zoon van een luchtmachtofficier. Zie ook mijn
blog van 19 oktober 2010 en eveneens alle tags voor Philip
Pullman op dit blog.
Uit: The Subtle
Knife
Will, still
watching, saw the cat behave curiously.
She reached out a
paw to pat something in the air in front of her, something quite invisible to
Will. Then she leapt backwards, back arched and fur on end, tail held out
stiffly. Will knew cat-behaviour. He watched more alertly as the cat approached
the spot again, just an empty patch of grass between the hornbeams and the
bushes of a garden hedge, and patted the air once more.
Again she leapt back, but less far and with less
alarm this time. After another few seconds of sniffing, touching,
whisker-twitching, curiosity overcame wariness.
The cat stepped
forward, and vanished.
Will blinked. Then
he stood still, close to the trunk of the nearest tree, as a truck came round
the circle and swept its lights over him. When it had gone past he crossed the
road, keeping his eyes on the spot where the cat had been investigating. It
wasn't easy, because there was nothing to fix on, but when he came to the place
and cast about to look closely, he saw it.
At least, he saw it from some angles. It looked as
if someone had cut a patch out of the air, about two metres from the edge of
the road, a patch roughly square in shape and less than a metre across. If you
were level with the patch so that it was edge-on, it was nearly invisible, and
it was completely invisible from behind. You could only see it from the side
nearest the road, and you couldn't see it easily even from there, because all
you could see through it was exactly the same kind of thing that lay in front
of it on this side: a patch of grass lit by a street light.
Philip Pullman
(Norwich, 19 oktober 1946)
De Guatemalteekse schrijver Miguel Ángel Asturias werd
geboren op 19 oktober 1899 in Guatemala-Stad. Zie ook mijn
blog van 19 oktober 2010 en eveneens alle tags
voor Miguel Ángel Asturias op dit blog.
Uit: The President (Vertaald door Frances Partridge)
Nothing was
visible ahead. Behind them crept the track like a long silent snake unrolling
its fluid, smooth, frozen coils. The ribs of the earth could be counted in the
meagre dried-up marshlands, untouched by winter. The trees raised themselves to
the full height of their thick, sappy branches in order to breathe. The
bonfires dazzled the eyes of the tired horses. A man turned his back to
urinate. His legs were invisible. The time had come for his companions to take
stock of their situation, but they were too busy cleaning their rifles
with grease and bits of cotton that still smelt of woman. Death had been
carrying them off one by one, withering them as they lay in their beds, with no
advantage to their children or anyone else. It was better to risk their
lives and see what would come of that. Bullets feel nothing when they pierce a
mans body; to them flesh is like sweet warm airair with a certain substance.
And they whistle like birds. the time had come to take stock, but they were too
busy sharpening the machetes the leaders of the revolution had brought from an
ironmonger whose shop had been burned down. The sharpened edge was like the
smile on a negros face.
Miguel Ángel
Asturias (19 oktober 1899 9 juni 1974)
Monument in Buenos Aires
De Amerikaanse schrijfster Fannie
Hurst werd geboren op 19 oktober 1889 in Hamilton, Ohio. Zie ook mijn
blog van 19 oktober 2010 en eveneens alle tags voor Fanny Hurst
op dit blog.
Uit: Every Soul Hath Its Song
In this age of
prose, when men's hearts turn point-blank from blank verse to the business of
chaining two worlds by cable and of daring to fly with birds; when scholars,
ever busy with the dead, are suffering crick in the neck from looking backward
to the good old days when Romance wore a tin helmet on his head or lace in his
sleeves--in such an age Simon Binswanger first beheld the high-flung torch of
Goddess Liberty from the fore of the steerage deck of a wooden ship, his small
body huddled in the sag of calico skirt between his mother's knees, and the
sky-line and clothes-lines of the lower East Side dawning upon his
uncomprehending eyes.
Some decades later,
and with an endurance stroke that far outclassed classic Leander's, Simon
Binswanger had swum the great Hellespont that surged between the Lower East
Side and the Upper West Side, and, trolling his family after, landed them in
one of those stucco-fronted, elevator-service apartment-houses where home life
is lived on the layer, and the sins of the extension sole and the self-playing
piano are visited upon the neighbor below. Landed them four stories high and
dry
in a strictly
modern apartment of three dark, square bedrooms, a square dining-room
ventilated by an airshaft, and a square pocket of a kitchen that looked out
upon a zigzag of fire-escape. And last a square front-room-de-resistance, with
a bay of four windows overlooking a distant segment of Hudson River, an
imitation stucco mantelpiece, a crystal chandelier, and an air of complete
detachment from its curtailed rear.
But even among the
false creations of exterior architects and interior decorators, home can find a
way. Despite the square dining-room with the stag-and-tree wall-paper design
above the plate-rack and a gilded radiator that hissed loudest at mealtime,
when Simon Binswanger and his family relaxed round their after-dinner table,
the invisible cricket on the visible hearth fell to whirring.
Fannie Hurst (19
oktober 1889 23 februari 1968)
De Engelse dichter, schrijver en essayist James Leigh Hunt werd geboren op 19 oktober 1784 in
Southgate, Middlesex. Zie ook mijn
blog van 19 oktober 2010 en eveneens alle tags voor Leigh Hunt
op dit blog.
May and the
Poets
There is May in books forever;
May will part from Spenser never;
May's in Milton, May's in Prior,
May's in Chaucer, Thomson, Dyer;
May's in all the Italian books:--
She has old and modern nooks,
Where she sleeps with nymphs and elves,
In happy places they call shelves,
And will rise and dress your rooms
With a drapery thick with blooms.
Come, ye rains, then if
ye will,
May's at home, and with me still;
But come rather, thou, good weather,
And find us in the fields together.
On Receiving a
Crown of Ivy from John Keats
It is a lofty feeling, yet a kind,
Thus to be topped with leaves;--to have a sense
Of honour-shaded thought,--an influence
As from great nature's fingers, and be twined
With her old, sacred, verdurous ivy-bind,
As though she hallowed with that sylvan fence
A head that bows to her benevolence,
Midst pomp of fancied trumpets in the wind.
It is what's within us crowned. And kind and great
Are all the conquering wishes it inspires,
Love of things lasting, love of the tall woods,
Love of love's self, and ardour for a state
Of natural good befitting such desires,
Towns without gain, and hunted solitudes.
Leigh Hunt (19 oktober 1784 28 augustus 1859)
Cover biografie
Zie voor nog meer
schrijvers van de 19e oktober ook mijn vorige
blog van vandaag.
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