De Amerikaanse schrijver John Green werd geboren in Indianapolis, Indiana, op 24 augustus 1977. Zie ook alle tags voor John Green op dit blog.

Uit: Turtles All The Way Down

“At the time I first realizedI might be fictional, my weekdays were spent at a publicly funded institution on the north side of Indianapolis called White River High School, where I was required to eat lunch at a particular time—between 12:37 P.M. and 1:14 P.M.—by forces so much larger than myself that I couldn’t even begin to identify them. If those forces had given me a different lunch period, or if the tablemates who helped author my fate had chosen a differ­ent topic of conversation that September day, I would’ve met a different end—or at least a different middle. But I was beginning to learn that your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell.
Of course, you pretend to be the author. You have to. You think, I now choose to go to lunch, when that monotone beep rings from on high at 12:37. But really, the bell decides. You think you’re the painter, but you’re the canvas.
Hundreds of voices were shouting over one another in the cafeteria, so that the conversation became mere sound, the rushing of a river over rocks. And as I sat beneath fluorescent cylinders spewing aggressively artificial light, I thought about how we all believed ourselves to be the hero of some personal epic, when in fact we were basically identical organisms colo­nizing a vast and windowless room that smelled of Lysol and lard.
I was eating a peanut butter and honey sandwich and drinking a Dr Pepper. To be honest, I find the whole process of masticating plants and animals and then shoving them down my esophagus kind of disgusting, so I was trying not to think about the fact that I was eating, which is a form of thinking about it.
Across the table from me, Mychal Turner was scribbling in a yellow-paper notebook. Our lunch table was like a long­ running play on Broadway: The cast changed over the years, but the roles never did. Mychal was The Artsy One. He was talking with Daisy Ramirez, who’d played the role of my Best and Most Fearless Friend since elementary school, but I couldn’t follow their conversation over the noise of all the others.
What was my part in this play? The Sidekick. I was Daisy’s Friend, or Ms. Holmes’s Daughter. I was somebody’s something.
I felt my stomach begin to work on the sandwich, and even over everybody’s talking, I could hear it digesting, all the bacteria chewing the slime of peanut butter-the students inside of me eating at my internal cafeteria. A shiver con­ vulsed through me.“

 

 

De Nederlands-Zwitserse schrijver, tekstschrijver, componist, zanger en pianist Drs. P (eig. Heinz Hermann Polzer) werd geboren in het Zwitserse Thun op  24 augustus 1919. Zie ook alle tags voor Drs. P op dit blog.

 

Venus van Milo

Het schrijnt mij van mijn hart tot in mijn d
Ze is zo koud, en toch zo lief, zo licht
En haar gebrek vervult mij met erb
Och, kon ik haar slechts troosten en verw
Al was het met een incompleet gedicht.

 

Telescoop

Dit maal komt telescooprijm aan bod
Een bij ’t zien al te snappen methode
Om de tijd die u zwaar valt te doden
Doe dit niet met breedvoerige oden –
Volg de nieuwe verskunstige mode
Vindt u dit nog te moeilijk? Mijn God!

Men maakt zich boos op die neutronenbom
In Nederland, in ’t Kremlin, zelfs in Rome…
Zijn oorlogswapens, door de bank genomen
Dan iets waarbij je lekker weg kunt dromen?
Dus met of zonder – kome maar wat kome
En ’t komt er geen seconde later om.

Voor dichters ga ik zelden plat
Tentije, J.J.L. ten Kate
En nog een aantal kan ik haten
Of minstens ongelezen laten
Maar ik waardeer in hoge mate
Light verse, mits goed – als in dit blad.

 

Streekroman

‘Marie trekt naar de stad en wordt frivool.
Boer Teunis stopt de kousen, zorgt voor pap.
De achterlijke Wobbe groeit als kool’.

Hij maakt een paard nerveus en krijgt een trap.
Zijn toekomst oogde toch al niet zo best
En nu ontgaat hem ook het vaderschap.

Boer Teunis sterft. Het vee krijgt runderpest
En Wobbe kan het niet meer aan. Maar dan…
Marie (nog mooi) terug in ’t oude nest!

‘Een nieuwe ramp! De vlam slaat in de pan!
Wat is hij flink, die jonge brandweerman.’

 

 

De Engelse komiek, schrijver, acteur en presentator Stephen John Fry werd geboren in Londen op 24 augustus 1957. Zie ook alle tags voor Stephen Fry op dit blog.

Uit: Mythos

“These days the origin of the universe is explained by proposing a Big Bang, a single event that instantly brought into being all the matter from which everything and everyone are made.
The ancient Greeks had a different idea. They said that it all started not with a bang, but with CHAOS.
Was Chaos a god – a divine being – or simply a state of nothingness? Or was Chaos, just as we would use the word today, a kind of terrible mess, like a teenager’s bedroom only worse?
Think of Chaos perhaps as a kind of grand cosmic yawn. As in a yawning chasm or a yawning void.
Whether Chaos brought life and substance out of nothing or whether Chaos yawned life up or dreamed it up, or conjured it up in some other way I don’t know. I wasn’t there. Nor were you. And yet in a way we were, because all the bits that make us were there. It is enough to say that the Greeks thought it was Chaos who, with a massive heave, or a great shrug, or hiccup, vomit or cough, began the long chain of creation that has ended with pelicans and penicillin and toadstools and toads, sea-lions, seals, lions, human beings and daffodils and murder and art and love and confusion and death and madness and biscuits.
Whatever the truth, science today agrees that everything is destined to return to Chaos. It calls this inevitable fate entropy: part of the great cycle from Chaos to order and back again to Chaos. Your trousers began as chaotic atoms that somehow coalesced into matter that ordered itself over aeons into a living substance that slowly evolved into a cotton plant that was woven into the handsome stuff that sheathes your lovely legs. In time you will abandon your trousers – not now, I hope – and they will rot down in a landfill or be burned. In either case their matter will at length be set free to become part of the atmosphere of the planet. And when the sun explodes and takes every particle of this world with it, including the ingredients of your trousers, all the constituent atoms will return to cold Chaos. And what is true for your trousers is of course true for you.
So the Chaos that began everything is also the Chaos that will end everything.
Now, you might be the kind of person who asks, ‘But who or what was there before Chaos?’ or ‘Who or what was there before the Big Bang? There must have been something.”

 

 

Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 24e augustus ook mijn blog van 24 augustus 2017 en ook mijn blog van 24 augustus 2014 deel 2.