De Amerikaanse schrijver Thomas Pynchon werd op 8 mei 1937 geboren in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York. Zie ook mijn blog van 8 mei 2007 en ook mijn blog van 8 mei 2008.xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Uit: Inherent Vice

“She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to. Doc hadn’t seen her for over a year. Nobody had. Back then it was always sandals, bottom half of a flower-print bikini, faded Country Joe and the Fish T-shirt. Tonight she was all in flatland gear, hair a lot shorter than he remembered, looking just like she swore she’d never look.

“That you, Shasta? The packaging fooled me there for a minute.”

“Need your help, Doc.”

They stood in the streetlight through the kitchen window there’d never been much point putting curtains over and listened to the thumping of the surf from down the hill. Some nights, when the wind was right, you could hear the surf all over town.

Nobody was saying much. What was this? “So! You know I have an office now? Just like a day job and everything?”

“I looked in the phone book, almost went over there. But then I thought, better for everybody if this looks like a secret rendezvous.”

OK, nothing romantic tonight. Bummer. But it might be a paying gig. “Somebody’s keeping a close eye?”

“Just spent an hour on surface streets trying to make it look good.”

“How about a beer?” He went to the fridge, pulled two cans out of the case he kept inside, handed one to Shasta.

“There’s this guy,” she was saying.

There would be. No point getting emotional. And if he had a nickel for every time he’d heard a client start off this way, he would be over in Hawaii now, loaded day and night, digging the waves at Waimea, or better yet hiring somebody to dig them for him. . . . “Gentleman of the straight-world persuasion,” he beamed.”

Thomas Pynchon (Glen Cove, 8 mei 1937)

Buttons van de cameraschuwe Pynchon

De Ierse schrijver Roddy Doyle werd geboren in Dublin op 8 mei 1958. Zie ook mijn blog van 8 mei 2007 en ook mijn blog van 8 mei 2008.

Uit: Paula Spencer

“She copes. A lot of the time. Most of the time. She copes. And sometimes she doesn’t. Cope. At all.

This is one of the bad days.

She could feel it coming. From the minute she woke up. One of those days. It hasn’t let her down.

She’ll be forty-eight in a few weeks. She doesn’t care about that. Not really.

It’s more than four months since she had a drink. Four months and five days. One of those months was February. That’s why she started measuring the time in months. She could jump three days. But it’s a leap year; she had to give one back. Four months, five days. A third of a year. Half a pregnancy, nearly.

A long time.

The drink is only one thing.

She’s on her way home from work. She’s walking from the station. There’s no energy in her. Nothing in her legs. Just pain. Ache. The thing the drink gets down to.

But the drink is only part of it. She’s coped well with the drink. She wants a drink. She doesn’t want a drink. She doesn’t want a drink. She fights it. She wins. She’s proud of that. She’s pleased. She’ll keep going. She knows she will.

But sometimes she wakes up, knowing the one thing. She’s alone.

She still has Jack. Paula wakes him every morning. He’s a great sleeper. It’s a long time now since he was up before her. She’s proud of that too. She sits on his bed. She ruffles his hair. Ruffles — that’s the word. A head made for ruffling. Jack will break hearts.

And she still has Leanne. Mad Leanne. Mad, funny. Mad, good. Mad, brainy. Mad, lovely — and frightening.

They’re not small any more, not kids. Leanne is twenty-two. Jack is nearly sixteen. Leanne has boyfriends. Paula hasn’t met any of them. Jack, she doesn’t know about. He tells her nothing. He’s been taller than her since he was twelve. She checks his clothes for girl-smells but all she can smell is Jack.”

Roddy Doyle (Dublin, 8 mei 1958)

De Oostenrijkse schrijfster Gertrud Fussenegger werd geboren op 8 mei 1912 in Pilsen. Gertrud Fussenegger overleed op 19 maart van dit jaar op 96-jarige leeftijd. Zie ook mijn blog van 8 mei 2007 en ook mijn blog van 8 mei 2008.

Uit: Goethe und wir Katholiken

„Katholiken haben es mit Goethe nie ganz leicht gehabt. Nicht, das wir etwa seine Größe bestritten hatten; aber die meisten von uns - vor allem der älteren Generation - verhielten sich gegen ihn wie die Katze zum heißen Brei: mit Vorsicht und Vorbehalten. Er galt uns als Heide, Pantheist, gar Atheist - und als unerlaubt leidenschaftlicher, allzu leicht entflammbarer und flatterhafter Liebhaber desweiblichen Geschlechts. Der jüngeren Generation wurde er überdies als Konservativer, als Fiirstenknecht und verstaubter Klassiker madig gemacht.Das Jubeljahr 1999 fordert auch uns Katholiken zu einer Art Revision auf. Zweifellos: Goethes Äußerungen über unsere Kirche waren oft nicht sehr schmeichelhaft, und sein getrübtes Verhältnis zur Romantik erschwerte von Anfang an seine Rezeption durch jene, die die Religion auch in und von der Dichtung bestätigt sehen wollten. Um so lieber nahmen sich die Kirchenfernen seiner an. In unzähligen Anthologien und selektiven Ausgaben wurde, was er je an Religionskritischem von sich gegeben, gründlichst zitiert und immer wieder hervorgehoben. So hat man ihn weithin als unerbittlichen Freigeist suggeriert und sein Bild verkürzt und verzerrt.

Nun gewiß: In den Frankfurter Bürgersohn war schon beizeiten das alte Mißtrauen gesät worden, das noch aus den Religionskriegen stammte und das er selbst später die ,,Protestantische Erbsünde" nannte: der Argwohn gegen die Kirche als Macht, der Argwohn auch gegen ihre Duldung des Menschlichen, gegen ihre nicht immer leicht durchschaubaren Formen.“

Gertrud Fussenegger (8 mei 1912 – 19 maart 2009)

De Engelse schrijfster Pat Barker werd geboren in Thornaby-on-Tees op 8 mei 1943. Zie ook mijn blog van 8 mei 2007 en ook mijn blog van 8 mei 2008.

Uit: Regeneration

“He woke to find Orme standing immediately inside the door. He wasn't surprised, he assumed Orme had come to rouse him for his watch. What did surprise him, a little, was that he seemed to be in bed. Orme was wearing that very pale coat of his. Once, in ‘C' company mess, the CO had said, ‘Correct me if I'm wrong, Orme, but I have always assumed that the colour of the British Army uniform is khaki. Not…beige.' ‘Beige' was said in such Lady Bracknellish* tones that Sassoon had wanted to laugh. He wanted to laugh now, but his chest muscles didn't seem to work. After a while he remembered that Orme was dead.”

(…)

"Your watch is brought back by a runner, having been synchronized at headquarters." A long pause. "You wait, you try to calm down anybody who’s obviously shitting himself or on the verge of throwing up. You hope you won’t do either of those things yourself. Then you start the count down : ten, nine, eight… so on. You blow the whistle. You climb the ladder. Then you double through a gap in the wire, lie flat, wait for somebody else to get out - and then you stand up. And you start walking. Not at the double. Normal walking speed." Prior started to smile. "In a straight line. Across open country. In broad daylight. Towards a line of machine-guns."

Pat Barker (Thornaby-on-Tees, op 8 mei 1943)

De Amerikaanse dichter Gary Snyder werd geboren op 8 mei 1930 in San Francisco. Zie ook mijn blog van 8 mei 2007 en ook mijn blog van 8 mei 2008.

Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout

Down valley a smoke haze

Three days heat, after five days rain

Pitch glows on the fir-cones

Across rocks and meadows

Swarms of new flies.

I cannot remember things I once read

A few friends, but they are in cities.

Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup

Looking down for miles

Through high still air.

Civilization

Those are the people who do complicated things.

     they'll grab us by the thousands

     and put us to work.

World's going to hell, with all these

     villages and trails.

Wild duck flocks aren't

     what they used to be.

Aurochs grow rare.

Fetch me my feathers and amber

         *

A small cricket

on the typescript page of

"Kyoto born in spring song"

grooms himself

in time with The Well-Tempered Clavier.

I quit typing and watch him through a glass.

How well articulated! How neat!

Nobody understands the ANIMAL KINGDOM.

         *

When creeks are full

The poems flow

When creeks are down

We heap stones.

Gary Snyder (San Francisco, 8 mei 1930)

De Franse schrijver, vertaler regisseur en diplomaat Romain Gary werd geboren op 8 mei 1914 in Vilnius, Litouwen. Zie ook mijn blog van 8 mei 2007 en ook mijn blog van 8 mei 2008.

Uit: Pour Sganarelle

"J'arrive ainsi à trois conceptions du roman que je voudrais tenter de combiner dans un roman total: un, le roman où l'imagination picaresque s'exerce vers l'aventure intérieure, vers les péripéties intérieures du psychisme, où le romancier imagine l'introspection : deux, le roman où l'imagination est plus libérée vers l'extérieur, dans les rapports de l'histoire de l'individu avec l'Histoire, dans un infini de formes et de péripéties, de personnages et d'identités; trois, le roman de la littérature, où le langage est exploré par l'imagination comme un monde en soi, ce qui aboutit aujourd'hui - l'étape flaubertienne du mot "juste" et de la perfection de la phrase rationelle étant dépassée - à l'étape du roman post-mallarméen où le sens est entièrement porté par le blanc, par ce qui n'est pas exprimé, et où ne règne qu'une sorte d'écho de la dernière syllabe du Mot-clé, qui retentit dans ce qui n'est pas dit dans la phrase comme une musique de l'inexprimable."

Romain Gary (9 mei 1914 – 2 december 1980)