De Amerikaanse schrijver Michael Chabon werd geboren op 24 mei 1963 in Washington. Zie ook alle tags voor Michael Chabon op dit blog.

Uit: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

“IN LATER YEARS, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini. “To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same thing,” he would learnedly expound at WonderCon or Angoulême or to the editor of The Comics Journal. “You weren’t the same person when you came out as when you went in. Houdini’s first magic act, you know, back when he was just getting started. It was called ‘Metamorphosis.’ It was never just a question of escape. It was also a question of transformation.” The truth was that, as a kid, Sammy had only a casual interest, at best, in Harry Houdini and his legendary feats; his great heroes were Nikola Tesla, Louis Pasteur, and Jack London. Yet his account of his role—of the role of his own imagination—in the Escapist’s birth, like all of his best fabulations, rang true. His dreams had always been Houdiniesque: they were the dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind cocoon, mad for a taste of light and air.
Houdini was a hero to little men, city boys, and Jews; Samuel Louis Klayman was all three. He was seventeen when the adventures began: bigmouthed, perhaps not quite as quick on his feet as he liked to imagine, and tending to be, like many optimists, a little excitable. He was not, in any conventional way, handsome. His face was an inverted triangle, brow large, chin pointed, with pouting lips and a blunt, quarrelsome nose. He slouched, and wore clothes badly: he always looked as though he had just been jumped for his lunch money. He went forward each morning with the hairless cheek of innocence itself, but by noon a clean shave was no more than a memory, a hoboish penumbra on the jaw not quite sufficient to make him look tough. He thought of himself as ugly, but this was because he had never seen his face in repose. He had delivered the Eagle for most of 1931 in order to afford a set of dumbbells, which he had hefted every morning for the next eight years until his arms, chest, and shoulders were ropy and strong; polio had left him with the legs of a delicate boy. He stood, in his socks, five feet five inches tall. Like all of his friends, he considered it a compliment when somebody called him a wiseass. He possessed an incorrect but fervent understanding of the workings of television, atom power, and antigravity, and harbored the ambition—one of a thousand—of ending his days on the warm sunny beaches of the Great Polar Ocean of Venus. An omnivorous reader with a self-improving streak, cozy with Stevenson, London, and Wells, dutiful about Wolfe, Dreiser, and Dos Passos, idolatrous of S. J. Perelman, his self-improvement regime masked the usual guilty appetite. In his case the covert passion—one of them, at any rate—was for those two-bit argosies of blood and wonder, the pulps. He had tracked down and read every biweekly issue of The Shadow going back to 1933, and he was well on his way to amassing complete runs of The Avenger and Doc Savage.”

De Russisch-Amerikaanse dichter en schrijver Joseph Brodsky werd op 24 mei 1940 in Leningrad (het huidige St.Petersburg) geboren als Iosif Brodski. Zie ook alle tags voor Joseph Brodsky op dit blog.

Dido en Aeneas

De grote man keek door het raam,
Maar voor haar eindigde de wereld met de zoom
Van zijn brede Griekse tuniek
Die door de rijkdom van zijn plooien leek op een
Stilstaande zee.
………….Maar hij
Keek door het raam en zijn blik was op dit moment
Zo ver van deze plaats dat zijn lippen
Verstarden als een schelp waarin
Geruis verborgen ligt, en de horizon was in zijn drinkbeker
Onbeweeglijk.
……Maar haar liefde
Was niet meer dan een vis, die misschien in staat was
Achter zijn schip aan in zee te duiken,
De golven te doorklieven met een soepel lichaam
En hem zo misschien in te halen, maar hij,
Hij stapte in gedachten al aan land.
En de zee werd tot een zee van tranen.
Maar, zoals men weet, begint er juist op het moment
Van de wanhoop altijd een gunstige wind
Te waaien. En de grote held
Verliet Carthago.
……………………Zij stond
Voor de brandstapel die door haar soldaten
Onder de stadsmuur werd aangestoken
En zag hoe in het mistige schijnsel van de brandstapel
Dat beefde tussen vuur en rook
Carthago geluidloos uiteenviel

Lang voor de profetie van Cato.

Vertaald door Kees Verheul

Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 24e mei ook mijn blog van 24 mei 2020 en eveneens mijn blog van 24 mei 2018 en ook mijn blog van 24 mei 2015 deel 2.