Dag: 30 november 2013

David Nicholls, Christophe Vekeman, Yasmine Allas, Y.M. Dangre, Reinier de Rooie, Jan G. Elburg

De Engelse schrijver David Nicholls werd geboren op 30 november 1966 in Eastleigh, Hampshire. Zie ook alle tags voor David Nicholls op dit blog.

Uit: Starter For Ten

“I want to be able to listen to recording of piano sonatas and know who’s playing. I want to go to classical concerts and know when you’re meant to clap. I want to be able to ‘get’ modern jazz without it all sounding like this terrible mistake, and I want to know who the Velvet Underground are exactly. I want to be fully engaged in the World of Ideas, I want to understand complex economics, and what people see in Bob Dylan. I want to possess radical but humane and well-informed political ideals, and I want to hold passionate but reasoned debates round wooden kitchen tables, saying things like ‘define your terms!’ and ‘your premise is patently specious!’ and then suddenly to discover that the sun’s come up and we’ve been talking all night. I want to use words like ‘eponymous’ and ‘solipsistic’ and ‘utilitarian’ with confidence. I want to learn to appreciate fine wines, and exotic liquers, and fine single malts, and learn how to drink them without turning into a complete div, and to eat strange and exotic foods, plovers’ eggs and lobster thermidor, things that sound barely edible, or that I can’t pronounce…Most of all I want to read books; books thick as brick, leather-bound books with incredibly thin paper and those purple ribbons to mark where you left off; cheap, dusty, second-hand books of collected verse, incredibly expensive, imported books of incomprehensible essays from foreign universities.”

 

   
David Nicholls (Hampshire, 30 november 1966)

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Mark Twain, Lee Klein, Adeline Yen Mah, John McCrae, Jonathan Swift, Philip Sidney

De Amerikaanse schrijver Mark Twain (pseudoniem van Samuel Langhorne Clemens) werd geboren op 30 november 1835 te Florida. Zie ook alle tags voor Mark Twain op dit blog.

Uit:The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“If you are with the quality, or at a funeral, or trying to go to sleep when you ain’t sleepy—if you are anywheres where it won’t do for you to scratch, why you will itch all over in upwards of a thousand places. Pretty soon Jim says:
“Say, who is you?  Whar is you?  Dog my cats ef I didn’ hear sumf’n. Well, I know what I’s gwyne to do:  I’s gwyne to set down here and listen tell I hears it agin.”
So he set down on the ground betwixt me and Tom.  He leaned his back up against a tree, and stretched his legs out till one of them most touched one of mine.  My nose begun to itch.  It itched till the tears come into my eyes.  But I dasn’t scratch.  Then it begun to itch on the inside. Next I got to itching underneath.  I didn’t know how I was going to set still. This miserableness went on as much as six or seven minutes; but it seemed a sight longer than that.  I was itching in eleven different places now.  I reckoned I couldn’t stand it more’n a minute longer, but I set my teeth hard and got ready to try.  Just then Jim begun to breathe heavy; next he begun to snore—and then I was pretty soon comfortable again.“ 

 

 
Mark Twain (30 november 1835 – 21 april 1910)
Scene uit de film Huckleberry Finn and His Friends, 1979

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Winston Churchill, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Rudolf Lavant, John Bunyan,Sergio Badilla Castillo, David Mamet, Wil Mara

De Britse staatsman en schrijver Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill werd geboren in Woodstock op 30 november 1874. Zie ook alle tags voor Winston Churchill op dit blog.

Uit: The Crossing

“I was born under the Blue Ridge, and under that side which is blue in the evening light, in a wild land of game and forest and rushing waters. There, on the borders of a creek that runs into the Yadkin River, in acabin that was chinked with red mud, I came into the world a subject ofKing George the Third, in that part of his realm known as the province ofNorth Carolina.
The cabin reeked of corn-pone and bacon, and the odor of pelts. It had two shakedowns, on one of which I slept under a bearskin. A rough stone chimney was reared outside, and the fireplace was as long as my father was tall. There was a crane in it, and a bake kettle; and over it great buckhorns held my father’s rifle when it was not in use. On other horns hung jerked bear’s meat and venison hams, and gourds for drinking cups, and bags of seed, and my father’s best hunting shirt; also, in a neglected corner, several articles of woman’s attire from pegs. These once belonged to my mother. Among them was a gown of silk, of a fine, faded pattern, over which I was wont to speculate. The women at the Cross-Roads, twelve miles away, were dressed in coarse butternut wool and huge sunbonnets. But when I questioned my father on these matters he would give me no answers.
My father was–how shall I say what he was? To this day I can only surmise many things of him. He was a Scotchman born, and I know now that he had a slight Scotch accent. At the time of which I write, my early childhood, he was a frontiersman and hunter. I can see him now, with his hunting shirt and leggings and moccasins; his powder horn, engraved with wondrous scenes; his bullet pouch and tomahawk and hunting knife. He was a tall, lean man with a strange, sad face. And he talked little save when he drank too many “horns,” as they were called in that country.” 

 


Winston Churchill (30 november 1874 – 24 januari 1965)

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