Jonathan Franzen, Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin, V. S. Naipaul, Roger Peyrefitte, Nicola Kraus
De Amerikaanse schrijver en essayist Jonathan Franzen werd geboren op 17 augustus 1959 in Western Springs, Illinois.
Uit: How to Be Alone
“What goes for the Harper's essay goes for this collection as a whole. I intend this book, in part, as a record of a movement away from an angry and frightened isolation toward an acceptance-even a celebration-of being a reader and a writer. Not that there's not still plenty to be mad and scared about. Our national thirst for petroleum, which has already produced two Bush presidencies and an ugly Gulf War, is now threatening to lead us into an open-ended long-term conflict in Central Asia. Although you wouldn't have thought it possible, Americans seem to be asking even fewer questions about their government today than in 1991, and the major media sound even more monolithically jingoistic. While Congress yet again votes against applying easily achievable fuel-efficiency standards to SUVs, the president of Ford Motor Company can be seen patriotically defending these vehicles in a TV ad, avowing that Americans must never accept "boundaries of any kind."
With so much fresh outrageousness being manufactured daily, I've chosen to do only minimal tinkering with the other essays in this book. "First City" reads a little differently without the World Trade Center; "Imperial Bedroom" was written before John Ashcroft came to power with his seeming indifference to personal liberties; anthrax has lent further poignancy to the woes of the United States Postal Service, as described in "Lost in the Mail"; and Oprah Winfrey's disinvitation of me from her Book Club makes the descriptive word "elitist" fluoresce in the several essays where it appears. But the local particulars of content matter less to me than the underlying investigation in all these essays: the problem of preserving individuality and complexity in a noisy and distracting mass culture: the question of how to be alone.”
De Ethiopische dichter en schrijver Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin werd geboren op 17 augustus 1936 in Boda bij Ambo.
Dreamer
A lover love-rejected
With a spirit dejected,
A monk God-forsaken
hose total Faith is shaken,
Are less lost than dreamer
Into whose peace a “ question “
Plunged like a knife
And woke him to life,
To search, to find his way
To dodge, to fight his way
NOT dream it away !
Guilty?
On the grave of my friend, I stood.
For blood and flesh, I stayed . . .
And with faith I prayed, and prayed;
For blood and flesh, he was robed . . .
And with doubt, I hoped, and I hoped.
On the grave of my friend, as I stayed;
… On my future, I brood .
I stood on the grave of a man.
A tomb-stone of a man, I burdened.
The grave of a man, I murdered:
And with hope, my future, I sketched,
When with prayer, my killer hand, I stretched.
On the tomb-stone, of the man, I murdered:
. . . Urrahh!!! I won!
On my victim’s carcass, I climb.
While on his tomb, I tread …
My bloody fingers, I spread:
Thus to repent, to justify, I have tried …
While I hoped, and prayed, I have cried.
And I won, my daily wine, and bread!
… Is it a crime?
De Britse schrijver Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul werd geboren op 17 augustus 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad en Tobago. Zie ook mijn blog van 17 augustus 2006.
Uit: A Bend In the River
“I awakened to where I was. I was walking on the Embankment, beside the river, walking without seeing. On the Embankment wall there are green metal lamp standards. I had been examining the dolphins on the standards, dolphin by dolphin, standard by standard. I was far from where I had started, and I had momentarily left the dolphins to examine the metal supports of the pavement benches. These supports, as I saw with amazement, were in the shape of camels. Camels and their sacks! Strange city: the romance of India in that building. And the romance of the desert here. I stopped, stepped back mentally, as it were, and all at once saw the beauty in which I had been walking -- the beauty of the river and the sky, the soft colours of the clouds, the beauty of light on water, the beauty of the buildings, the care with which it had all been arranged.
“In Africa, on the coast, I had paid attention only to one colour in nature - the colour of the sea. Everything else was just bush, green and living. Or brown and dead. In England so far I had walked with my eyes at shop level; I had seen nothing. A town, even London, was just a series of streets or street names, and a street was a row of shops. Now I saw differently. And I understood that London wasn’t simply a place that was there, as people say of mountains, but that it had been made by men, that men had given attention to details as minute as those camels.
“I began to understand at the same time that my anguish about being a man adrift was false, that for me that dream of home and security was nothing more than a dream of isolation, anachronistic and stupid and very feeble. I belonged to myself alone. I was going to surrender my manhood to nobody. For someone like me there was only one civilization and one place -- London, or a place like it. Every other kind of life was make-believe. Home -- what for? To hide? To bow to our great men? For people in our situation, people led into slavery, that is the biggest trap of all. We have nothing. We solace ourselves with that idea of the great men of our tribe, the Gandhi and the Nehru, and we castrate ourselves. ‘Here take my manhood and invest it for me. Take my manhood and be a greater man yourself, for my sake!’ No! I want to be a man myself.”
De Franse schrijver en diplomaat Roger Peyrefitte werd geboren op 17 augustus 1907 in Castres.
Uit: Les Amitiés particulières
Zie voor alle bovenstaande schrijvers ook mijn blog van 17 augustus 2007 en ook mijn blog van 17 augustus 2008.
De Amerikaanse schrijfster Nicola Kraus werd geboren op 17 augustus 1974 in New York. Zij studeerde af aan de University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Aan de New York University ontmoette zij Emma McLaughlin. Allebei werkten zij als kinderoppas. Hun eerste boek The Nanny Diaries behaalde de eerste plaats op de New York Times Best Seller list in 2002. Een filmversie verscheen in 2007. Zie ook mijn blog van 7 februari 2009.
Uit: The Nanny Diaries
“The walnut-paneled car slowly pulls me up, like a bucket in a well, toward potential solvency. As I near the appointed floor I take a deep breath; the door slides open onto a small vestibule which is the portal to, at most, two apartments. I press the doorbell.
Nanny Fact: she always waits for me to ring the doorbell, even though she was buzzed by maximum security downstairs to warn of my imminent arrival and is probably standing on the other side of the door. May, in fact, have been standing there since we spoke on the telephone three days ago.
The dark vestibule, wallpapered in some gloomy Colefax and Fowler floral, always contains a brass umbrella stand, a horse print, and a mirror, wherein I do one last swift check of my appearance. I seem to have grown stains on my skirt during the train ride from school, but otherwise I'm pulled together--twin set, floral skirt, and some Gucci-knockoff sandals I bought in the Village. She is always tiny. Her hair is always straight and thin; she always seems to be inhaling and never exhaling. She is always wearing expensive khaki pants, Chanel ballet flats, a French striped Tshirt, and a white cardigan. Possibly some discreet pearls. In seven years and umpteen interviews the I'm-momcasual-in-my-khakis-but-intimidating-in-my-$400-shoes outfit never changes. And it is simply impossible to imagine her doing anything so undignified as what was required to get her pregnant in the first place.”
Nicola Kraus (l) en Emma McLaughlin (r)
Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 17e augustus ook mijn vorige twee blogs van vandaag.
