Maand: juni 2016

Down By The Carib Sea (James Weldon Johnson)

 

Dolce far niente

 

 
Caribbean Sea door Dmitry Spiros, 2013

 

Down By The Carib Sea

I
Sunrise in the Tropics

Sol, Sol, mighty lord of the tropic zone,
Here I wait with the trembling stars
To see thee once more take thy throne.

There the patient palm tree watching
Waits to say, ‘Good morn’ to thee,
And a throb of expectation
Pulses through the earth and me.

Now, o’er nature falls a hush,
Look! the East is all a-blush;
And a growing crimson crest
Dims the late stars in the west;
Now, a flood of golden light
Sweeps acress the silver night,
Swift the pale moon fades away
Before the light-girt King of Day,
See! the miracle is done!
Once more behold! The Sun!

II
Los Cigarillos

This is the land of the dark-eyed
gente,

Of the
dolce far niente,

Where we dream away
Both the night and day,
At night-time in sleep our dreams we invoke,
Our dreams come by day through the redolent smoke,
As it lazily curls,
And slowly unfurls
From our lips,
And the tips
Of our fragrant cigarillos.
For life in the tropics is only a joke,
So we pass it in dreams, and we pass it in smoke,
Smoke — smoke — smoke.

Tropical constitutions
Call for occasional revolutions;
But after that’s through,
Why there’s nothing to do
But smoke — smoke;
For life in the tropics is only a joke,
So we pass it in dreams, and we pass it in smoke,
Smoke — smoke — smoke.

 

 
James Weldon Johnson (17 juni 1871 – 26 juni 1938)

 

Zie voor de schrijvers van de 4e juni ook mijn blog van 4 juni 2015 deel 1 en ook deel 2.

Allen Ginsberg, Philippe Djian, Maarten van Buuren, Solomonica de Winter, Monika Maron, Larry McMurtry, Norbert Gstrein, Wolfgang Cordan

De Amerikaanse dichter Irwin Allen Ginsberg werd geboren in Newark, New Jersey, op 3 juni 1926. Zie ook alle tags voor Allen Ginsberg op dit blog.

Howl (Fragment)

who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses’ rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat

 

 
Allen Ginsberg (3 juni 1926 – 6 april 1997)
Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky en Gregory Corso in de korte film “Allen” van Woody Allen uit 1964

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Jim Knipfel, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Sibylle Berg, Carol Shields, Jean Nelissen, Thomas Hardy, Markies De Sade, Joy Ladin

De Amerikaanse schrijver Jim Knipfel werd geboren op 2 juni 1965 in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Zie ook alle tags voor Jim Knipfel op dit blog.

Uit: Slackjaw: A Memoir

“There, you see? Can you imagine how they would feel if you killed yourself?”
“So, what, I should go on living solely out of guilt? Guilt overhow they would feel if I were to end it? That’s not much to workwith.” I chuckled.
“See? You just laughed! If you laugh, that must meansomething. Everything’s not completely dark.”
“Well, Wagner said,” I responded, one more young man whotook his Wagner too seriously, “`Amidst laughter should we faceour doom.'”
“Who?”
“Never mind,” I told her, knowing the whole thing was amistake. It wasn’t going anywhere, and never would go anywhere.”Thanks for taking the time, but I’m suddenly real tired. I’mgoing to bed.”
“Are you still thinking about hurting yourself?”
“Well, yeah. But right now I’m just too damn tired.” Thesefew minutes on the phone with her had completely sapped whatenergy I had left. She began to say something else, but I hungup. Useless. I lay down on my mattress, still dressed, and fellasleep.
The next morning was brisk and clear outside. Therewere things I was supposed to be doing, but for the life of me, Icouldn’t remember what. I put on my hat and coat, left theapartment, and started walking in a direction I’d never gone. I hadstarted wearing a black fedora everywhere when I was sixteenyears old. At the time, I thought it made me look like Bogart. Iwas mistaken. So many of us go through life trying to be Bogartor Cagney, but we mostly end up like Elisha Cook, Jr. I certainlydid. But the hat stayed. It was my most identifiable feature.
I walked for hours, hoping I could exhaust myself and walkthe bad thoughts out of my head. Once my legs started gettingnumb, I turned around and started back home. While I walked,I took inventory, only to discover that there was nothing to count.
When I got home, I opened the door, threw my hat and coaton the mattress, snatched the razors off the desk, took them into the bathroom, and searched in vain for a comfortable spot on the tiled floor. After a few minutes I gave up on that silly notion and set to work on the right wrist.”

 

 
Jim Knipfel (Green Bay, 2 juni 1965)

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Patrick Besson, John Masefield, Ferdinand Raimund, Peter de Mendelssohn, Colleen McCullough, Macedonio Fernández, Dennis Gaens, Rhidian Brook

De Franse schrijver en journalist Patrick Besson werd geboren op 1 juni 1956 in Montreuil. Zie ook mijn blog van 1 juni 2009 en alle tags voor Patrick Besson op dit blog.

Uit: Lettre à un ami perdu

« La nuit était tombée sur cette journée grise de février. Je me rappelle les phares des voitures sous la pluie, une boule blonde sous les draps blancs, qui était la tête de la femme qui m’aimait. La femme qui m’aimait dormait toujours la tête sous les draps car elle était frileuse. Il m’arrive encore de soulever les draps et les couvertures et de chercher, mais de moins en moins souvent. C’est sans doute cela qu’on appelle guérir.
Février est comme novembre, un mois où les amours commencent ou meurent. Il y a des moments où la vie vaut la peine d’être vécue. Par exemple quand on nous présente à une femme qui correspond à ce que nous cherchons sous les draps et les couvertures. Le bon moment est quand les mots de la femme et les nôtres se suivent en ligne continue, s’attrapent et jouent les uns avec les autres comme des chats avec une balle en caoutchouc. On dit rouge, et c’est le rouge qui sort. 9, et le 9 sort. Mais combien de fois cela arrive-t-il ? Cela arrive juste assez souvent pour nous empêcher de nous tuer et c’est pourquoi nous sommes en enfer. L’enfer, en effet, n’a pas de fin.”
(..)

« Il lui aurait dit qu’ils étaient avant tout des amis, un garçon et une fille tombés par hasard dans le même esquif et qui vont essayer, malgré la tempête et le manque de provisions, d’arriver ensemble à bon port. Alors il n’y aurait eu ni coups ni déchirures, simplement deux enfants dans un grand lit, qui vont en voir de toutes les couleurs mais qui n’ont pas peur parce qu’ils savent qu’ils ont un ami.”

 
Patrick Besson (Montreuil, 1 juni 1956)

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