De Franse dichter en schrijver Jean Genet werd geboren op 19 december 1910 in Parijs. Zie ook alle tags voor Jean Genet op mijn blog.
Uit: Querelle de Brest
“C’est donc sous le signe d’un mouvement intérieur très singulier que nous voulons présenter le drame qui se déroulera ici. Nous voulons encore dire qu’il s’adresse aux invertis. A l’idée de mer et de meurtre, s’ajoute naturellement l’idée d’amour ou de voluptés – et plutôt, d’amour contre nature. Sans doute les marins transportés (animé..; nous semble plus exact, nous le verrons plus loin) du désir et du besoin de meurtre appartiennent-ils d’abord à la Marine Marchande, sont-ils les navigateurs au long cours, nourris de biscuits et de coups de fouets, mis aux fers pour une erreur, débarqués dans un port inconnu, rembarqués sur un cargo pour un trafic douteux, pourtant il est difficile de frôler dans une ville de brouillard et de granit ces costauds de la Flotte de Guerre, balancés, bousculés par et pour des manoeuvres que nous voulons dangereuses, ces épaules, ces profùs, ces boucles, ces croupes houleuses, coléreuses, ces garçons souples et forts, sans qu’on les imagine capables d’un meurtre qui se justifie par leur intervention puisqu’ils sont dignes d’en accomplir avec noblesse tous les mouvements.
Scene uit de film Querelle van R. W. Fassbinder, 1982
Qu’ils descendent du ciel, ou remontent d’un domaine où ils connurent les sirènes et des monstres plus étonnants, à terre les marins habitent des demeures de pierres, des arsenaux, des palais dont la solidité s’oppose à la nervosité, à l’irritabilité féminine des eaux, (dans l’une de ses chansons, le matelot ne dit-il pas: « …on se console avec la mer » ?) sur des quais chargés de chatnes, de bornes, de bittes d’amarrage où, du plus loin des mers ils se savent ancrés. Ils ont pour leur stature des dépôts, des forts, des bagnes désaffectés, dont l’architecture est magnifique. Brest est une ville dure, solide, construite en granit gris de Bretagne. Sa dureté ancre le port, donne aux matelots le sentiment de sécurité, le point d’appui d’où s’élancer, elle les repose du perpétuel vague de la mer. Si Brest est légère c’est à cause du soleil qui dore faiblt:ment des façades aussi nobles que des façades vénitiennes, c’est à cause encore de la présence dans ses rues étroites des marins nonchalants, à cause enfin du brouillard et de la pluie.”
Jean Genet (19 december 1910 – 15 april 1986)
De Amerikaanse schrijver en radiopresentator Michelangelo Signorile werd geboren op 19 december 1960 in Jersey Brooklyn, New York. Zie ook alle tags voor Michelangelo Signorile op dit blog.
Uit: Outing Yourself
„I had what I guess you could call a crush on a guy at school — I mean I used to dream about kissing him — and every time I saw him in class my heart would start pounding and I’d turn red. I would then get this queasy feeling in my stomach, like I was sick, because this feeling of liking the guy made me ill, because I thought homosexuality was disgusting.
I convinced myself that I was bisexual, and that I could control the gay side and not act on it. But I soon realized that I didn’t like girls in a sexual way at all. Two years later I began dating a girl who really was bisexual — I mean, she liked girls and guys and had had relationships with both. And, well, she and I had very little sex. After a lot of long talks she eventually said to me, “You’re not bisexual. You’re gay.”
I went home that night, and for the first time wrote in my journal, “I’m gay.” Then I crossed it out. I just couldn’t face it.
DECADES SPENT WITHOUT IDENTIFYING ONESELF AS GAY
For some people, this first step of identifying oneself as gay or lesbian (or even bisexual) can take many years to complete. Doris, a fifty-four-year-old Buffalo, New York, business owner, married a man and had four children before eventually coming out as a lesbian and divorcing her husband — after thirty years of marriage. “Ever since I can remember, I wanted to be near women, to be physically close to them in a way that I really never wanted to be with men — even though I forced myself to be with men in that way,” she says.”
Michelangelo Signorile (New York, 19 december 1960)
De Amerikaanse schrijver en musicus Tristan Egolf werd geboren op 19 december 1971 in San Lorenzo del Escorial in Spanje. Zie ook alle tags voor Tristan Egolf op dit blog.
Uit: Lord of the Barnyard
“Baker is situated in Pullman Valley, a twelve-mile pothole which was gutted into the modern-day corn belt by the glaciers of a preceding ice age. The western lip of the valley rises to 425 m above sea level, with the crowning limestone peaks on the northern end towering an additional 20 m over all the rest. Between this 600 yard escarpment and the treeless barrens to the northeast lies a maze of knobs and hollows, all thick with saw-briars, sassafras, dogwood and fool’s gold. Most of the soil is fairly worn, though it was once among the most fertile in the state. The summers are hot and long, the winters brief, yet occasionally brutal. Positioned at the northeast corner of the town line, almost perfectly centered in the valley — just south of where the Patokah river veers off from its course along the eastern wall and cuts in toward the community — lies Gwendolyn Hill, home to the Ebony Steed coal company and probably the greatest key in existence to Baker’s muddled past.
Sometime during the postwar industrial mobilization that swept across the corn belt and brought towns like Baker alive with manufacturing plants, a Bostonian entrepreneur by the name of Glendan Castor moved into an old Antebellum home on the north end of town. Castor had purchased three square miles of land in Pullman Valley with the intention of founding a mining operation. It was a fundamentally sound investment, as the land was cheap and the availability of an expendable labor force seemingly inexhaustible — New England money goes a long way in the corn belt. However, what he did not foresee was the endless chain of complications that would come about as the result of his chosen site for operations. Had he known what lay beneath the surface of Gwendolyn Hill, he very well may have packed up and headed back to Boston straightaway.
As it was, the establishment of the company was fraught with disastrous setbacks right from the beginning. Unbeknownst to all concerned at the time, Gwendolyn Hill had been the original site of an early European settlement/trading post, of which most existing records had vanished. In addition, Pullman Valley had been previously inhabited by a tribe of Shawnee Indians.”
Tristan Egolf (19 december 1971 – 7 mei 2005)
De Deense schrijver, dichter, fotograaf en componist Jens Fink-Jensen werd geboren op 19 december 1956 in Kopenhagen. Zie ook alle tags voor Jens Fink-Jensen op dit blog.
Über dem sterbenden Land
Unter:
Zerrissene Berglandschaften
Mit Streifen von Schnee
Zwischen zwei Schichten Plexiglas:
Eine Fliege aufgewachsen und gestrandet
In endlosen Ketten von Abschieden
Und Ankünften bei welchen ich selbst
Das schwächste und berstende Glied bin
Über:
Frostklare Sonne und diesige Träume
Erwartung Gewissheit
Innen:
Sehnsucht. Fast bevor
Der Abschied sich in mir gesetzt hat.
Der nächste Fremde
Du bist mein nächster Fremder
Wie ein umherirrendes Filmende
Aus Tausend und einer Nacht
Sehe ich dich durch Frost und Wind
Du bist mir so willkommen in meinem Herzen
Wie mein Fernweh nach deinen Ländern
Und doch wundern mich deine Läden
Wo du Düfte hergebracht hast
Die selbst Abenteurer verblassen lassen
Und wie du umgehen kannst mich zu hassen
Wegen all der verschlossenen Träume
Über die du so gern sprechen würdest
Aber wo ich es immer viel zu eilig habe
Ordentlich zuzuhören
Und dir es vielleicht auch schwer fällt
Sie in Worte zu kleiden die ich verstehe.
Vertaald door Christian A. Christiansen
Jens Fink-Jensen (Kopenhagen, 19 december 1956)
De Nederlandse dichteres Hanny Michaelis werd geboren in Amsterdam op 19 december 1922. Zie ook alle tags voor Hanny Michaelis op dit blog.
Het morgenraam schuift
Het morgenraam schuift blauw en blinkend
rechthoekig door mijn dromen heen.
Splinters geluid doorboren mij
en blijven steken in mijn hoofd.
De klok slaat waarschuwend alarm
en dreigend rolt de kamer op mij aan.
Terwijl ik wankel op het slappe koord
waarlangs de slaap geschrokken vlucht,
vangen je armen mij beschermend op
en in hun warmte raak ik met de dag verzoend.
Maar ergens blijft het heimwee hangen
– als een verraad – naar het eenzelvige gebied
waaruit de morgen mij verstoten heeft
en waarheen jij me niet kunt vergezellen.
Als de laatste ballon
Als de laatste ballon
de mist is ingegaan,
het laatste kaartenhuis
in elkaar is gevallen
en de laatste zeepbel
uiteengespat, zal ik komen
met knikkende knieën
in de zekerheid dat ik
niet word afgewezen.
Hanny Michaelis (19 december 1922 – 11 juni 2007)
Cover van een publicatie over haar huwelijk met Gerard Reve
De Italiaanse schrijver Italo Svevo (pseudoniem van Aron Hector Schmitz) werd geboren op 19 december 1861 in Triëst. Zie ook alle tags voor Italo Svevo op mijn blog
Uit: Zeno’s Conscience (Vertaald door Berye de Zoete)
“I am sure a cigarette had a more poignant flavor when it is the last. The others have their own special taste, too, peculiar to them, but it is less poignant. The last has an aroma all its own, bestowed by a sense of victory over oneself and the sure hope of health and strength in the immediate future…Once when I was a student I changed my lodgings, and had to have the walls of my room repapered at my own expense because I had covered them with dates. Probably I left that room just because it had become the tomb of my good resolutions, and I felt it impossible to form any fresh ones there.
I had a partiality for certain dates because their figures went well together. I remember one of last century which seemed as if it must be the final monument to my vice: “Ninth day of the ninth month in the year 1899.” Surely a most significant date! The new century furnished me with other dates equally harmonious: First day of the first month of the year 1901.” Even today I feel that if only that date could repeat itself I should be able to begin a new life.”
Italo Svevo (19 december 1861 – 13 september 1928)
Cover
Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 19e december ook mijn blog van 19 december 2011 deel 2.