De Amerikaanse schrijfster Lauren Groff werd geboren op 23 juli 1978 in Cooperstown, New York. Zie ook alle tags voor Lauren Groff op dit blog.
Uit: Florida
“Babe, when Satan tempted Adam and Eve, there’s a pretty good reason he didn’t transform into a talking clam.
It was my husband who said this to me.
This statement of his has begun to seem both ludicrous and dangerous, like the three-foot rat snake my younger son almost stepped on in the street yesterday, thinking it was a stick.
Poster, Text, Font, Book cover, Buy on Amazon
Riverhead Books
Walk outside in Florida, and a snake will be watching you: snakes in mulch, snakes in scrub, snakes waiting from the lawn for you to leave the pool so they can drown themselves in it, snakes gazing at your mousy ankle and wondering what it would feel like to sink their fangs in deep.
All around us, since the fall, from the same time other terrible things happened in the world at large, marriages have been ending, either in a sort of quiet drifting away or in flames. The night my husband explained original sin to me, we were drunk and walking home very early in the morning from a New Year’s Eve party. Our host, Omar Varones, had made a bonfire out of the couch upon which his wife had cuckolded him. It was a vintage midcentury modern, and he could have sold it for thousands, but it’s equally true that the flames were a stunning and unexpected soft green.
I feel like a traitor to my own when I say this, but it’s wonderful to walk beside a man who is so large that nobody would mess with him, toward the bed you share, at a time when everybody is sleeping save for the tree frogs and the sinners. I have missed my walks late at night, my dawn runs. Even though my neighborhood is a gem, there have been three rapes in three months within a few blocks of my house. Nights when I can’t sleep, when my nerves jangle me from one son’s bed to the other’s, then back to my own and then out to the couch, I can even feel in my bloodstream the new venom that has entered the world, a venom that somehow acts only on men, hardening what had once been bad thoughts into new, worse actions.
It is strange to me, an alien in this place, an ambivalent northerner, to see how my Florida sons take snakes for granted. My husband, digging out a peach tree that had died from climate change, brought into the house a shovel full of poisonous baby coral snakes, brightly enameled and writhing. Cool! said my little boys, but I woke from frantic sleep that night, slapping at my sheets, sure their light pressure on my body was the twining of many snakes that had slipped from the shovel and searched until they found my warmth.”
De Duitse dichteres Claudia Gabler werd op 28 juli 1970 geboren in Lörrach. Zie ook alle tags voor Claudia Gabler op dit blog.
Deze plek was meer dan het repertoire
Deze plek was meer dan het repertoire
van zijn geschiedenis. Woekerend en plaatsloos tegelijk.
Uit de gang duwden zich ter begroeting
oosterse grassen. Erachter copuleerde bijna
vergeten de zee. Een membraan tussen zwart
en wit manifesteerde de geaggregeerde staat van de bezoekers,
de typische Chanel-kleuren simuleerden hun bloemachtige
middenklasse. Torens van minerale hulpbronnen boorden zich
een weg naar de hemel en weer terug. De gevel reageerde
op zijn innerlijk en passerende voorbijgangers met
snel veranderende kleuren. Een visuele
referentie
aan de bewoners van de strandboxen. Uitgeputte architecten
oscilleerden tussen eb en vloed als
China’s dokters op blote voeten.
Vertaald door Frans Roumen
Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 23e juli ook mijn blog van 23 juli 2020 en eveneens mijn blog van 23 juli 2019 en ook mijn blog van 23 juli 2018 en ook mijn blog van 23 juli 2017 deel 2.