De Amerikaanse schrijver Dave Eggers werd geboren op 12 maart 1970 in Chicago. Zie ook alle tags voor Dave Eggers op dit blog.
Uit: Zeitoun
“And when Abdulrahman first witnessed the sardines circling in the black he could not believe the sight, the beauty of the undulating silver orb below the white and gold lantern light. He said nothing, and the other fishermen were careful to be quiet, too, paddling without motors, lest they scare away the catch. They would whisper over the sea, telling jokes and talking about women and girls as they watched the fish rise and spin beneath them. A few hours later, once the sardines were ready, tens of thousands of them glistening in the refracted light, the fishermen would cinch the net and haul them in.
They would motor back to the shore and bring the sardines to the fish broker in the market before dawn. He would pay the men and boys, and would then sell the fish all over western Syria – Lattakia, Baniyas, Damascus. The fishermen would split the money, with Abdulrahman and Ahmad bringing their share home. Their father had passed away the year before and their mother was of fragile health and mind, so all funds they earned fishing went toward the welfare of the house they shared with ten siblings.
Abdulrahman and Ahmad didn’t care much about the money, though. They would have done it for free.
Thirty-four years later and thousands of miles west, Abdulrahman Zeitoun was in bed on a Friday morning, slowly leaving the moonless Jableh night, a tattered memory of it caught in a morning dream. He was in his home in New Orleans and beside him he could hear his wife Kathy breathing, her exhalations not unlike the shushing of water against the hull of a wooden boat. Otherwise the house was silent. He knew it was near six o’clock, and the peace would not last. The morning light usually woke the kids once it reached their second-story windows. One of the four would open his or her eyes, and from there the movements were brisk, the house quickly growing loud. With one child awake, it was impossible to keep the other three in bed.”
De Amerikaanse schrijver Jack Kerouac werd geboren op 12 maart 1922 in Lowell, in de Amerikaanse staat Massachusetts. Zie ook alle tags voor Jack Karouac op dit blog.
Uit: On The Road
“I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road. Before that I’d often dreamed of going West to see the country, always vaguely planning and never taking off. Dean is the perfect guy for the road because he actually was born on the road, when his parents were passing through Salt Lake City in 1926, in a jalopy, on their way to Los Angeles. First reports of him came to me through Chad King, who’d shown me a few letters from him written in a New Mexico reform school. I was tremendously interested in the letters because they so naively and sweetly asked Chad to teach him all about Nietzsche and all the wonderful intellectual things that Chad knew. At one point Carlo and I talked about the letters and wondered if we would ever meet the strange Dean Moriarty. This is all far back, when Dean was not the way he is today, when he was a young jailkid shrouded in mystery. Then news came that Dean was out of reform school and was coming to New York for the first time; also there was talk that he had just married a girl called Marylou.
One day I was hanging around the campus and Chad and Tim Gray told me Dean was staying in a cold-water pad in East Harlem, the Spanish Harlem. Dean had arrived the night before, the first time in New York, with his beautiful little sharp chick Marylou; they got off the Greyhound bus at 50th Street and cut around the corner looking for a place to eat and went right in Hector’s, and since then Hector’s cafeteria has always been a big symbol of New York for Dean. They spent money on beautiful big glazed cakes and creampuffs.
All this time Dean was telling Marylou things like this: “Now, darling, here we are in New York and although I haven’t quite told you everything that I was thinking about when we crossed Missouri and especially at the point when we passed the Booneville reformatory which reminded me of my jail problem, it is absolutely necessary now to postpone all those leftover things concerning our personal lovethings and at once begin thinking of specific worklife plans…” and so on in the way that he had in those early days.”
Jack Kerouac (12 maart 1922 – 21 oktober 1969)
Neal Cassidy, zijn dochter Cathy en Jack Kerouac
De Amerikaanse dichteres en schrijfster Naomi Shihab Nye werd geboren op 12 maart 1952 in St. Louis, Missouri. Zie ook alle tags voor Naomi Shihab Nye op dit blog.
Uit: Habibi
“Pals
Are dreams thinner at thirty-three thousand feet?
When their plane landed at Tel Aviv, Poppy was talking so fast, Liyana couldn’t pay close attention to details. Normally she liked to notice trees first — their leaves and shapes — when she arrived in a new place. Then she’d focus on plants, signs, and, gradually, people. Liyana believed in working up to people. But Poppy leaned across the aisle jabbering so fast, she could barely notice the color of the sky.
“When we go through the checkpoint for passports, let me do the talking, okay? We don’t let them stamp our passports here. They stamp a little piece of paper instead. And don’t leave anything on the plane. Look around! Did you check under the seats? We’ll go to the hotel first and rest awhile, then we’ll call the village. My family will come in to see us. They won’t expect us to travel all the way out to visit them today. Make sure you have everything. Did you get those pistachios? What about that book Rafik was reading?”
“Poppy’s nervous,” her mother whispered to Liyana. “He hasn’t been here in five years.”
He was making Liyana nervous, too. Jitterbug bazooka. He didn’t like it when she said foolish words lined up, like mousetrap taffy-puller. That’s what she did inside her head when she got nervous. Poppy hadn’t told his family their exact arrival time on purpose. “They don’t need to come to the airport and make a big scene,” he said.
Powder-puff peanut. She’d be good. She wouldn’t talk at Customs. She wouldn’t say, Yes I’m carrying my worst American habits in the zipper pouch of my suitcase and I plan to let them loose in your streets. There’s a kiss in there, too! I’ll never tell.
Right away, the Israeli agents singled Liyana’s family out and made them stand off to the side in a troublemaker line with two men who looked like international zombies. Other travelers — sleek Spaniards, Irish nuns — zoomed right through. The women soldiers at the gate seemed meaner than the men. They all wore dull khaki uniforms. Big guns swung on straps across their backs.”
De Amerikaanse schrijver, journalist en columnist Carl Hiaasen werd geboren op 12 maart 1953 in Plantation, Florida. Zie ook alle tags voor Carl Hiaasen op dit blog.
Uit: Chomp
„Mickey Cray had been out of work ever since a dead iguana fell from a palm tree and hit him on the head.
The iguana, which had died during a hard freeze, was stiff as a board and weighed seven and a half pounds. Mickey’s son had measured the lifeless lizard on a fishing scale, then packed it on ice with the turtle veggies, in the cooler behind the garage. This was after the ambulance had hauled Mickey off to the hospital, where the doctors said he had a serious concussion and ordered him to take it easy.
And to everyone’s surprise, Mickey did take it easy. That’s because the injury left him with double vision and terrible headaches. He lost his appetite and dropped nineteen pounds and lay around on the couch all day, watching nature programs on television.
“I’ll never be the same,” he told his son.
“Knock it off, Pop,” said Wahoo, Mickey’s boy.
Mickey had named him after Wahoo McDaniel, a professional wrestler who’d once played linebacker for the Dolphins. Mickey’s son often wished he’d been called Mickey Jr. or Joe or even Rupert—anything but Wahoo, which was also a species of saltwater fish.
It was a name that was hard to live up to. People naturally expected somebody called Wahoo to act loud and crazy, but that wasn’t Wahoo’s style. Apparently nothing could be done about the name until he was all grown up, at which point he intended to go to the Cutler Ridge courthouse and tell a judge he wanted to be called something normal.”
De Amerikaanse schrijver Edward Albee werd geboren op 12 maart 1928 in Washington DC. Zie ook alle tags voor Edward Albee op dit blog.
Uit: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
“Act One,
MARTHA: That I am. So, I actually fell for him. And the match seemed…practical too.
You know, Daddy was looking for someone to…
GEORGE: Just a minute, Martha…
MARTHA: …take over, some time, when he was ready to…
GEORGE [stony]: Just a minute, Martha…
MARTHA: …retire, and so I thought…
GEORGE: STOP IT, MARTHA!
MARTHA [irritated]: Whadda you want?
GEORGE [too patiently]: I’d thought you were telling the story of our courtship, Martha…
I didn’t know you were going to start in on the other business.
MARTHA [so-thereish]: Well, I am!
GEORGE: I wouldn’t, if I were you.
MARTHA: Oh…you wouldn’t? Well, you’re not!
GEORGE: Now, you’ve already sprung a leak about you-know-what…
MARTHA [a duck]: What? What?
GEORGE: …about the apple of our eye…the sprout…the little bugger… [Spits it out] … our son… and if you start on this other business, I warn you, Martha, it’s going to make me angry.
Scene uit de film van Mike Nichols met Richard Burton en Elizabeth Taylor (1966)
MARTHA [laughing at him]: Oh, it is, is it?
GEORGE: I warn you.
MARTHA [incredulous]: You what?
GEORGE [very quietly]: I warn you.
NICK: Do you really think we have to go through…?
MARTHA: I stand warned! [Pause…then, to HONEY and NICK] So, anyway, I married the S.O.B., and I had it all planned out…He was the groom…he was going to be groomed. He’d take over some day…first he’d take over the History Department, and then, when Daddy retired, he’d take over the college… you know? That’s the way it was supposed to be.
[To GEORGE, who is at the portable bar with his back to her]
You getting angry, baby? Hunh? [Now back] That’s the way it was supposed to be. Very simple. And Daddy seemed to think it was a pretty good idea, too. For a while. Until he watched for a couple of years! [To GEORGE again] You getting angrier? [Now back] Until he watched for a couple of years and started thinking maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all…that maybe Georgie-boy didn’t have the stuff…that he didn’t have it in him!”
Edward Albee (Washington DC, 12 maart 1928)
In de jaren 1970
Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 12e maart mijn blog van 12 maart 2012 deel 2.