Leonard Cohen, Stephen King, Frédéric Beigbeder, Xavier Roelens, Fannie Flag, H.G. Wells, Johann Peter Eckermann, Max Porter, Paul Ewen

De Canadese dichter, folk singer-songwriter en schrijver Leonard Cohen werd geboren op 21 september 1934 te Montréal. Zie ook alle tags voor Leonard Cohen op dit blog.

Uit: The favorite game

“3
His father lived mostly in bed or a tent in the hospital. When he was up and walking he lied. He took his cane without the silver band and led his son over Mount Royal. Here was the ancient crater. Two iron and stone cannon rested in the gentle grassy scoop which was once a pit of boiling lava. Breavman wanted to dwell on the violence. “We’ll come back here when I’m better.” One lie. Breavman learned to pat the noses of horses tethered beside the Chalet, how to offer them sugar cubes from a flat palm. “One day we’ll go riding.” “But you can hardly breathe.” His father collapsed that evening over his map of flags on which he plotted the war, fumbling for the capsules to break and inhale.

4
Here is a movie filled with the bodies of his family. His father aims the camera at his uncles, tall and serious, bou-tonnieres in their dark lapels, who walk too close and enter into blurdom. Their wives look formal and sad. His mother steps back, urging aunts to get into the picture. At the back of the screen her smile and shoulders go limp. She thinks she is out of focus.
Breavman stops the film to study her and her face is eaten by a spreading orange-rimmed stain as the film melts. His grandmother sits in the shadows of the stone balcony and aunts present her with babies. A silver tea-set glows richly in early Technicolor. His grandfather reviews a line of children but is stopped in the midst of an approving nod and ravaged by a technical orange flame. Breavman is mutilating the film in his efforts at history. Breavman and his cousins fight small gentlemanly battles. The girls curtsy. All the-children are invited to leap one at a time across the flagstone path. A gardener is led shy and grateful into the sunlight to be pre-served with his betters. A battalion of wives is squeezed abreast, is decimated by the edge of the screen. His mother is one of the first to go. Suddenly the picture is shoes and blurred grass as his father staggers under another attack. “Help!” Coils of celluloid are burning around his feet. He dances until he is saved by Nursie and the maid and punished by his mother. The movie runs night and day. Be careful, blood, be careful.”

 

 
Leonard Cohen (21 september 1934 – 7 november 2016)

 

De Amerikaanse schrijver Stephen Edwin King werd geboren in Portland, Maine, op 21 september 1947. Zie ook alle tags voor Stephen King op dit blog.

Uit: The Outsider

“He was prepared for another of those accusing stares, but Terry only glanced at him briefly, and with no expression at all, before turning his attention to Bill Samuels, who had taken a seat in one of the three chairs on the other side of the table.
Studying Samuels now, Ralph began to get an idea of how he had risen so high so quickly. While the two of them were standing on the other side of the one-way glass, the DA had simply looked a bit young for the job. Now, facing Frankie Peterson’s rapist and killer, he looked even younger, like a law office intern who had (due to some mixup, probably) landed this interview with a big-time perp. Even the little Alfalfa cowlick sticking up from the back of his head added to the role the man had slipped into: untried youth, just happy to be here. You can tell me anything, said those wide, interested eyes, because I’ll believe it. This is my first time playing with the big boys, and I just don’t know any better.
“Hello, Mr. Maitland,” Samuels said. “I work in the county DA’s office.”
Good start, Ralph thought. You are the county DA’s office.
“You’re wasting your time,” Terry said. “I’m not going to talk to you until my lawyer gets here. I will say that I see a sizeable wrongful arrest suit in your future.”
“I understand that you’re upset, in your position, anyone would be. Maybe we can iron it out right here. Can you just tell me where you were when the Peterson boy was killed? That was on last Tuesday afternoon. If you were somewhere else, then—”
“I was,” Terry said, “but I intend to discuss that with my lawyer before I discuss it with you. His name is Howard Gold. When he gets here, I’ll want to talk to him privately. I assume that’s my right? Since I’m presumed innocent until proven guilty?”
Quick recovery, Ralph thought. A career criminal couldn’t have done it better.
“It is indeed,” Samuels said. “But if you haven’t done anything—”

 

 
Stephen King (Portland, 21 september 1947)

 

De Franse schrijver Frédéric Beigbeder werd geboren op 21 september 1965 in Neuilly-sur-Seine. Zie ook alle tags voor Frédéric Beigbeder op dit blog.

Uit: Une vie sans fin

“Si le ciel est dégagé, on peut voir la mort toutes les nuits. Il suffit de lever les yeux. La lumière des astres défunts a traversé la galaxie. Des étoiles lointaines, disparues depuis des millénaires, persistent à nous envoyer un souvenir dans le firmament. Il m’arrive de téléphoner à quelqu’un que l’on vient d’enterrer, et d’entendre sa voix, intacte, sur sa boîte vocale. Cette situation provoque un sentiment paradoxal. Au bout de combien de temps la luminosité diminue-t-elle quand l’étoile n’existe plus ? Combien de semaines met une compagnie téléphonique à effacer le répondeur d’un cadavre ? Il existe un délai entre le décès et l’extinction : les étoiles sont la preuve qu’on peut continuer de briller après la mort. Passé ce light gap, arrive forcément le moment où l’éclat d’un soleil révolu vacille comme la flamme d’une bougie sur le point de s’éteindre. La lueur hésite, l’étoile se fatigue, le répondeur se tait, le feu tremble. Si l’on observe la mort attentivement, on voit que les astres absents scintillent légèrement moins que les soleils vivants. Leur halo faiblit, leur chatoiement s’estompe. L’étoile morte se met à clignoter, comme si elle nous adressait un message de détresse… Elle s’accroche.
Ma résurrection a commencé à Paris, dans le quartier des attentats, le jour d’un pic de pollution aux particules fines. J’avais emmené ma fille dans un néo-bistrot nommé Jouvence. Elle mangeait une assiette de saucisson de bellota et je buvais un Hendrick’s tonic concombre. Nous avions perdu l’habitude de nous parler depuis l’invention du smartphone. Elle consultait ses WhatsApp pendant que je suivais des top-models sur Instagram. Je lui ai demandé ce qu’elle aimerait le plus comme cadeau d’anniversaire. Elle m’a répondu : «Un selfie avec Robert Pattinson.» Ma première réaction fut l’effarement. Mais à bien y réfléchir, dans mon métier d’animateur de télévision, je réclame aussi des selfies. Un type qui interroge des acteurs, des chanteurs, des sportifs et des hommes politiques devant des caméras ne fait rien d’autre que de longues prises de vue à côté de personnalités plus intéressantes que lui. D’ailleurs, quand je sors dans la rue, les passants me réclament une photo en leur compagnie sur leur téléphone, et si j’accepte volontiers, c’est parce que je viens d’accomplir exactement la même démarche sur mon plateau entouré de projecteurs. Nous menons tous la même non-vie ; nous voulons briller dans la lumière des autres. L’homme moderne est un amas de 75 000 milliards de cellules qui cherchent à être converties en pixels.”

 

 
Frédéric Beigbeder (Neuilly-sur-Seine, 21 september 1965)

 

De Vlaamse dichter Xavier Roelens werd op 21 september 1976 in Rekkem (Menen) geboren. Zie ook alle tags voor Xavier Roelens op dit blog.

 

Volg vanaf daar de richtingaanwijzers

de wegen verbonden tegenstrijdige steden.
nam een man de benen, in ganzenpas
en binnen zijn te brede denkmal.

bij omlegging van het heden onthoudt de aarde
zich – zonverblind en teruggetrokken onder het asfalt.

Zo de hersenschors. Zo de maatschappij.
Zo de zonnebril. Zo de val/vrijpartij.
Zo wij. Zo jij. Zozo

sloeg een man op de vlucht naar Rio
en dwong hem tot een noodlanding.

 

leer, beleef, creëer, geniet

ik pretendeer geenszins haar te lijf te gaan

het is haar vinger delete
haar netvlies dat me
geen pixel verliest, nu ik uitgelogd wordt.

spelend met de muis lay-out ze haar lichaam
likt haar link in den Hoge, verzamelt haar netwerk
ze voedt de volgende generatie
ze downloadt, dus://

ik Error 404, als het niet stoort. gewoon
om herop te starten: ik pretendeer enz.

 

 
Xavier Roelens (Rekkem, 21 september 1976)

 

De Amerikaanse schrijfster en actrice Fannie Flagg (eig. Patricia Neal) werd geboren op 21 september in Birmingham (Alabama). Zie ook alle tags voor Fannie Flagg op dit blog.

Uit: Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven

“Then she suddenly began to wonder if she had turned off her oven before she had gone out in the yard to pick figs; or if she had fed her cat, Sonny, his breakfast yet. She also wondered what that boy in the ugly green shower cap and those other people leaning over, busy poking at her, were saying. She could see their lips moving all right, but she had not put her hearing aid on this morning, and all she could hear was a faint beeping noise, so she decided to try to take a little nap and wait for her niece Norma to come get her. She needed to get back home to check on Sonny and her stove, but she was not particularly looking forward to seeing her niece, because she knew she was going to get fussed at, but good. Norma was a highly nervous sort of a person and, after Elner’s last fall, had told her time and time again, not to get up on that ladder and pick figs. Norma had made her promise to wait and let Macky, Norma’s husband, come over and do it for her; and now not only had Elner broken a promise, this trip to the emergency room was sure to cost her a pretty penny.
A few years ago, when her neighbor Tot Whooten had gotten that needle-nosed hound fish stuck in her leg and wound up in the emergency room, Tot said they had charged her a small fortune. On reflection, Elner now realized that she probably should have called Norma; she had thought about calling, but she hadn’t wanted to bother poor Macky for just a few figs. Besides, how could she know there was a wasps’ nest up in her tree? If it weren’t for them, she would have been up and down that ladder with her figs, making fig preserves by now, and Norma would have been none the wiser. It was the wasps’ fault; they had no business being up there in the first place. But at this point she knew that all the excuses in the world would not hold much water with Norma. “I’m in big trouble now,” she thought, before she drifted off. “I may have just lost ladder privileges for life.”

 

 
Fannie Flagg (Birmingham, 21 september 1944)

 

De Britse schrijver Herbert George Wells werd geboren op 21 september 1866 in Bromley, Kent. Zie ook alle tags voor H. G. Wells op dit blog.

Uit: God the Invisible King

“Modern religion bases its knowledge of God and its account of God entirely upon experience. It has encountered God. It does not argue about God; it relates. It relates without any of those wrappings of awe and reverence that fold so necessarily about imposture, it relates as one tells of a friend and his assistance, of a happy adventure, of a beautiful thing found and picked up by the wayside.
So far as its psychological phases go the new account of personal salvation tallies very closely with the account of “conversion” as it is given by other religions. It has little to tell that is not already familiar to the reader of William James’s “Varieties of Religious Experience.” It describes an initial state of distress with the aimlessness and cruelties of life, and particularly with the futility of the individual life, a state of helpless self- disgust, of inability to form any satisfactory plan of living. This is the common prelude known to many sorts of Christian as “conviction of sin”; it is, at any rate, a conviction of hopeless confusion. . . . Then in some way the idea of God comes into the distressed mind, at first simply as an idea, without substance or belief. It is read about or it is remembered; it is expounded by some teacher or some happy convert. In the case of all those of the new faith with whose personal experience I have any intimacy, the idea of God has remained for some time simply as an idea floating about in a mind still dissatisfied. God is not believed in, but it is realised that if there were such a being he would supply the needed consolation and direction, his continuing purpose would knit together the scattered effort of life, his immortality would take the sting from death. Under this realisation the idea is pursued and elaborated. For a time there is a curious resistance to the suggestion that God is truly a person; he is spoken of preferably by such phrases as the Purpose in Things, as the Racial Consciousness, as the Collective Mind.
I believe that this resistance in so many contemporary minds to the idea of God as a person is due very largely to the enormous prejudice against divine personality created by the absurdities of the Christian teaching and the habitual monopoly of the Christian idea. The picture of Christ as the Good Shepherd thrusts itself before minds unaccustomed to the idea that they are lambs.”

 

 
H. G. Wells (21 september 1866 – 13 augustus 1946)
Cover

 

De Duitse dichter Johann Peter Eckermann werd geboren op 21 september 1792 in Winsen (Luhe). Hij was bovenal de medewerker en vriend van Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.Zie ook alle tags voor Johann Peter Eckermann op dit blog.

Uit: Gespräche mit Goethe

“Mittwoch, den 11. Juni 1823
Diesen Morgen erhielt ich abermals eine Einladung zu Goethe, und zwar mittelst einer von ihm beschriebenen Karte. Ich war darauf wieder ein Stündchen bei ihm. Er erschien mir heute ganz ein anderer als gestern, er zeigte sich in allen Dingen rasch und entschieden wie ein Jüngling.
Er brachte zwei dicke Bücher, als er zu mir hereintrat. »Es ist nicht gut,«sagte er, »daß Sie so rasch vorübergehen, vielmehr wird es besser sein, daß wir einander etwas näher kommen. Ich wünsche Sie mehr zu sehen und zu sprechen. Da aber das Allgemeine so groß ist, so habe ich sogleich auf etwas Besonderes gedacht, das als ein Tertium einen Verbindungs- und Besprechungspunkt abgebe. Sie finden in diesen beiden Bänden die ›Frankfurter gelehrten Anzeigen‹ der Jahre 1772 und 1773, und zwar sind auch darin fast alle meine damals geschriebenen kleinen Rezensionen. Diese sind nicht gezeichnet; doch da Sie meine Art und Denkungsweise kennen, so werden Sie sie schon aus den übrigen herausfinden. Ich möchte nun, daß Sie diese Jugendarbeiten etwas näher betrachteten und mir sagten, was Sie davon denken. Ich möchte wissen, ob sie wert sind, in eine künftige Ausgabe meiner Werke aufgenommen zu werden. Mir selber stehen diese Sachen viel zu weit ab, ich habe darüber kein Urteil. Ihr Jüngeren aber müßt wissen, ob sie für euch Wert haben und inwiefern sie bei dem jetzigen Standpunkte der Literatur noch zu gebrauchen. Ich habe bereits Abschriften nehmen lassen, die Sie dann später haben sollen, um sie mit dem Original zu vergleichen. Demnächst, bei einer sorgfältigen Redaktion, würde sich denn auch finden, ob man nicht gut tue, hie und da eine Kleinigkeit auszulassen oder nachzuhelfen, ohne im ganzen dem Charakter zu schaden.«
Ich antwortete ihm, daß ich sehr gerne mich an diesen Gegenständen versuchen wolle, und daß ich dabei weiter nichts wünsche als daß es mir gelingen möge, ganz in seinem Sinne zu handeln.
»Sowie Sie hineinkommen,« erwiderte er, »werden Sie finden, daß Sie der Sache vollkommen gewachsen sind; es wird Ihnen von der Hand gehen.”

 

 
Johann Peter Eckermann (21 september 1792 – 3 december 1854)
Cover

 

Onafhankelijk van geboortedata

De Engelse schrijver Max Porter werd geboren in High Wycombe in 1981. Zie ook alle tags voor Max Porter op dit blog.

Uit: Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“I lay back, resigned, and wished my wife wasn’t dead. I wished I wasn’t lying terrified in a giant
bird embrace in my hallway. I wished I hadn’t been obsessing about this thing just when the greatest tragedy of my life occurred. These were factual yearnings. It was bitterly wonderful. I had some clarity.
Hello Crow, I said. Good to finally meet you.
And he was gone.
For the first time in days I slept. I dreamt of afternoons in the forest.
CROW
Very romantic, how we first met. Badly behaved. Trip trap. Two-bed upstairs at, spit-level, slight barbed- error, snuck in easy through the wall and up the attic bedroom to see those cotton boys silently sleeping, intoxicating hum of innocent children, lint, flack, gack-pack-nack, the whole place was heavy mourning, every surface dead Mum, every crayon, tractor, coat,
welly, covered in a lm of grief. Down the dead Mum stairs, plinkety plink curled claws whisper, down to Daddy’s recently Mum-and-Dad’s bedroom. I was Herne the hunter hornless, funt. Munt. Here he is. Out. Drunk-for white. I bent down over him and smelt his breath. Notes of rotten hedge, bluebottles.
I prised open his mouth and counted bones, snacked a little on his un-brushed teeth, flossed him, crowly tossed his tongue hither, thither, I lifted the duvet.
I Eskimo kissed him. I butterfly kissed him. I flat-flutter Jenny Wren kissed him. His lint (toe-jam-rint) fuck-sacks sad and cosy, sagging, gently rising, then down, rising, then down, rising, then down, I was praying the breathing and the epidermis whispered ‘flesh, aah, flesh, aah, flesh, aah,’ and it was beautiful for me, rising (just like me) then down (just like me)
pan-shaped (just like me) it was any wonder the facts of my arrival under his sheets didn’t lift him, stench, rot-yot-kot, wake up human (BIRD FEATHERS UP YER CRACK, DOWN YER COCK-EYE, IN YER MOUTH) but he slept and the bedroom was a mausoleum. He was an accidental remnant and I knew this was the best gig, a real bit of fun.”

 

 
Max Porter (High Wycombe, 1981)

 

De Nieuw-Zeelandse schrijver Paul Ewen werd geboren in Blenheim, Nieuw Zeeland in 1972. Zie ook alle tags voor Paul Ewen op dit blog.

Uit: Space

“New Zealand is a country that is blessed with a great deal of space. This makes it a big drawcard for overseas visitors, a fact not lost on the tourism industry, who commission epic landscape photographs, usually barren and sparse, depicting vast mountain ranges, the purest lakes and fjords, untouched
rolling countryside, and large majestic pools of bubbling mud. You could be forgiven for thinking that no people actually live there.
As a New Zealander, I have managed to see a great deal of my country. Much of this has been through the window of my mate’s brown Cortina.
In its day, Steve’s Cortina transported the pair of us on a series of epic trips around the South and North Islands. Steve always drove (apart from one late-night incident in Cromwell when I mounted the
footpath), and he always insisted the Cortina was in fact copper, not brown.
At every new town we visited, a felt pennant of that province was added to the car aerial, and these flags rippled in the southern-hemisphere winds, most being reduced to tufty dags by the end
of each given trip. To occupy ourselves while travelling through the undeniably magnificent landscape, we would sometimes play car cricket, scoring runs based on the plenitude of oncoming traffic. An approaching car, for instance, would be one run, a motorbike two, and a truck four, but a passing campervan meant the ‘batsman’ was out.
Occasionally, driving in particularly sparse countryside, such as on the west coast of the South Island, we would wait bloody ages to score a single run. Some years later, I found myself living in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and on the occasion when I attempted to play car cricket, I scored about a million runs purely in motorbike traffic before I had to pull over, cross-eyed.
One of my theories of why there’s so much space in New Zealand is grounded in the fact that so many of my compatriots are out of the country on any given day. After Germany, New Zealand has the most nationals, per head of population, living or travelling abroad at any one time. A fair counter to my argument, however, may be that most of the space they leave behind is filled, in turn, with German tourists. Despite having loads
of space at home, New Zealanders love to spend time in places where there isn’t much space at all. Like aeroplanes. With backpacks crammed full of undies, T-shirts and woollen socks, they blast off, funded by student loans, attempting to bridge the vast gap between their country and the rest of the world.”

 

 
Paul Ewen (Blenheim, 1972)

Leonard Cohen, Stephen King, Frédéric Beigbeder, Xavier Roelens, Fannie Flag, H.G. Wells, Johann Peter Eckermann, Max Porter, Paul Ewen

De Canadese dichter, folk singer-songwriter en schrijver Leonard Cohen werd geboren op 21 september 1934 te Montréal. Zie ook mijn blog van 21 september 2010 en eveneens alle tags voor Leonard Cohen op dit blog.

Uit: The favorite game

“Breavman knows a girl named Shell whose ears were pierced so she could wear the long filigree earrings. The punctures festered and now she has a tiny scar in each earlobe. He discovered them behind her hair. A bullet broke into the flesh of his father’s arm as he rose out of a trench. It comforts a man with coronary thrombosis to bear a wound taken in combat. On the right temple Breavman has a scar which Krantz bestowed with a shovel. Trouble over a snowman. Krantz wanted to use clinkers as eyes. Breavman was and still is against the use of foreign materials in the decoration of snowmen. No woollen muf-flers, hats, spectacles. In the same vein he does not approve of inserting carrots in the mouths of carved pumpkins or pinning on cucumber ears.
His mother regarded her whole body as a scar grown over some earlier perfection which she sought in mirrors and windows and hub-caps. Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh. It is easy to display a wound, the proud scars of combat. It is hard to show a pimple.
Breavman’s young mother hunted wrinkles with two hands and a magnifying mirror. When she found one she consulted a fortress of oils and creams arrayed on a glass tray and she sighed. Without faith the wrinkle was anointed. “This isn’t my face, not my real face.” “Where is your real face, Mother?” “Look at me. Is this what I look like?” “Where is it, where’s your real face?” “I don’t know, in Russia, when I was a girl.” He pulled the huge atlas out of the shelf and fell with it. He sifted pages like a goldminer until he found it, the whole of Russia, pale and vast. He kneeled over the distances until his eyes blurred and he made the lakes and rivers and names become an incredible face, dim and beautiful and easily lost. The maid had to drag him to supper.”

 
Leonard Cohen (21 september 1934 – 7 november 2016)

Lees verder “Leonard Cohen, Stephen King, Frédéric Beigbeder, Xavier Roelens, Fannie Flag, H.G. Wells, Johann Peter Eckermann, Max Porter, Paul Ewen”

Leonard Cohen, Stephen King, Frédéric Beigbeder, Xavier Roelens, Fannie Flag, H.G. Wells, Johann Peter Eckermann

De Canadese dichter, folk singer-songwriter en schrijver Leonard Cohen werd geboren op 21 september 1934 te Montréal. Zie ook mijn blog van 21 september 2010 en eveneens alle tags voor Leonard Cohen op dit blog.

Uit: The favorite game

“He began his tour through the heart streets of Montreal. The streets were changing. The Victorian gingerbread was going down everywhere, and on every second corner was the half-covered skeleton of a new, flat office building. The city seemed fierce to go modern, as though it had suddenly been converted to some new theory of hygiene and had learned with horror that it was impossible to scarpe the dirt out of gargoyle crevices and carved grapevines, and therefore was determined to cauterize the whole landscape.
But they were beautiful. They were the only beauty, the last magic. Breavman knew what he knew, that their bodies never died. Everything else was fiction. It was the beauty they carried. He remembered them all, there was nothing lost. To serve them. His mind sang praise as he climbed a street to the mountain.
For the body of Heather, which slept and slept.
For the body of Bertha, which fell with apples and a flute.
For the body of Lisa, early and late, which smelled of speed and forests.
For the body of Tamara, whose thighs made him a fetishist of thighs.
For the body of Norma, goosefleshed, wet.
For the body of Patricia, which he had still to tame.
(…)

The jukebox wailed. He believed he understood the longing of the cheap tunes better than anyone there. The Wurlitzer was a great beast, blinking in pain. It was everybody’s neon wound. A suffering ventriloquist. It was the kind of pet people wanted. An eternal bear for baiting, with electric blood. Breavman had a quarter to spare. It was fat, it loved its chains, it gobbled and was ready to fester all night.
Breavman thought he’d just sit back and sip his Orange Crush. A memory hit him urgently and he asked a waitress for her pencil. On a napkin he scribbled:
Jesus! I just remembered what Lisa’s favorite game was. After a heavy snow we would go into a back yard with a few of our friends. The expanse of snow would be white and unbroken. Bertha was the spinner. You held her hands while she turned on her heels, you circled her until your feet left the ground. Then she let go and you flew over the snow. You remained still in whatever position you landed. When everyone had been flung in this fashion into the fresh snow, the beautiful part of the game began. You stood up carefully, taking great pains not to disturb the impression you had made. Now the comparisons. Of course you would have done your best to land in some crazy position, arms and legs sticking out. Then we walked away, leaving a lovely white field of blossom-like shapes with footprint stems.”


Leonard Cohen (Montréal, 21 september 1934)
In 1988

Lees verder “Leonard Cohen, Stephen King, Frédéric Beigbeder, Xavier Roelens, Fannie Flag, H.G. Wells, Johann Peter Eckermann”

Leonard Cohen, Stephen King, Frédéric Beigbeder, Xavier Roelens, Fannie Flag, H.G. Wells

De Canadese dichter, folk singer-songwriter en schrijver Leonard Cohen werd geboren op 21 september 1934 te Montréal. Zie ook mijn blog van 21 september 2010 en eveneens alle tags voor Leonard Cohen op dit blog.

Take This Waltz
(After Lorca)

Now in Vienna there are ten pretty women.
There’s a shoulder where death comes to cry.
There’s a lobby with nine hundred windows.
There’s a tree where the doves go to die.
There’s a piece that was torn from the morning,
and it hangs in the Gallery of Frost—
Ay, ay ay ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz,
take this waltz with the clamp on its jaws.

I want you, I want you, I want you
on a chair with a dead magazine.
In the cave at the tip of the lily,
in some hallway where love’s never been.
On a bed where the moon has been sweating,
in a cry filled with footsteps and sand—
Ay, ay ay ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz,
take its broken waist in your hand.

This waltz, this waltz, this waltz, this waltz
with its very own breath
of brandy and death,
dragging its tail in the sea.

There’s a concert hall in Vienna
where your mouth had a thousand reviews.
There’s a bar where the boys have stopped talking,
they’ve been sentenced to death by the blues.
Ah, but who is it climbs to your picture
with a garland of freshly cut tears?
Ay, ay ay ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz,
take this waltz, it’s been dying for years.

There’s an attic where children are playing,
where I’ve got to lie down with you soon,
in a dream of Hungarian lanterns,
in the mist of some sweet afternoon.
And I’ll see what you’ve chained to your sorrow,
all your sheep and your lilies of snow—
Ay, ay ay ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz
with its “I’ll never forget you, you know!”

And I’ll dance with you in Vienna,
I’ll be wearing a river’s disguise.
The hyacinth wild on my shoulder
my mouth on the dew of your thighs.
And I’ll bury my soul in a scrapbook,
with the photographs there and the moss.
And I’ll yield to the flood of your beauty,
my cheap violin and my cross.
And you’ll carry me down on your dancing
to the pools that you lift on your wrist—
O my love, O my love
Take this waltz, take this waltz,
it’s yours now. It’s all that there is.

 
Leonard Cohen (Montréal, 21 september 1934)

Lees verder “Leonard Cohen, Stephen King, Frédéric Beigbeder, Xavier Roelens, Fannie Flag, H.G. Wells”

80 Jaar Leonard Cohen, Stephen King, Frédéric Beigbeder

80 Jaar Leonard Cohen

De Canadese dichter, folk singer-songwriter en schrijver Leonard Cohen werd geboren op 21 september 1934 te Montréal. Leonard Cohen viert vandaag zijn 80e verjaardag. Zie ook mijn blog van 21 september 2010 en eveneens alle tags voor Leonard Cohen op dit blog..

Suzanne

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river.
You can hear the boats go by,
You can spend the night beside her.
And you know she’s half crazy,
But that’s why you want to be there.
And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China.
And just when you mean to tell her that you have no love to give her,
Then she gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer
That you’ve always been her lover.

And you want to travel with her,
And you want to travel blind,
And you know she will trust you,
For you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind.

And Jesus was a sailor, when he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower.
And when he knew for certain, only drowning men could see him,
He said: “All men will be sailors then, until the sea shall free them.”
But he himself was broken
Long before the sky would open,
Foresaken, almost human,
He sank beneath your wisdom, like a stone

And you want to travel with him
And you want to travel blind
And you think maybe you’ll trust him
For he’s touched your perfect body with his mind.

Now Suzanne takes your hand and she leads you to the river.
She’s wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters.
And the sun pours down like honey on our Lady of the Harbor.
And she shows you where to look, among the garbage and the flowers.
There are heros in the seaweed,
There are children in the morning,
They are leaning out for love,
They will lean that way forever,
While Suzanne holds the mirror.

And you want to travel with her,
And you want to travel blind,
And you know you can trust her
For she’s touched your perfect body with her mind.

 

I wonder how many people in this

I wonder how many people in this city
live in furnished rooms.
Late at night when i look out at the buildings
I swear I see a face in every window
looking back at me
and when I turn away
I wonder how many go back to their desks
and write this down.

 

I’m your man

 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuCpTi0EtbU&w=560&h=315]

 

 

 
Leonard Cohen (Montréal, 21 september 1934)

Lees verder “80 Jaar Leonard Cohen, Stephen King, Frédéric Beigbeder”

Leonard Cohen, Stephen King, Frédéric Beigbeder, Xavier Roelens, Fannie Flag, H.G. Wells, Johann Peter Eckermann

De Canadese dichter, folk singer-songwriter en schrijverLeonard Cohen werd geboren op 21 september 1934 te Montréal. Zie ook mijn blog van 21 september 2010 en eveneens alle tags voor Leonard Cohen op dit blog..

 

 

Song

 

I almost went to bed
without remembering
the four white violets
I put in the button-hole
of your green sweater

 

and how i kissed you then
and you kissed me
shy as though I’d
never been your lover

 

 

 

Now of Sleeping

 

Under her grandmother’s patchwork quilt
a calico bird’s-eye view
of crops and boundaries
naming dimly the districts of her body
sleeps my Annie like a perfect lady

 

Like ages of weightless snow
on tiny oceans filled with light
her eyelids enclose deeply
a shade tree of birthday candles
one for every morning
until the now of sleeping

 

The small banner of blood
kept and flown by Brother Wind
long after the pierced bird fell down
is like her red mouth
among the squalls of pillow

 

Bearers of evil fancy
of dark intention and corrupting fashion
who come to rend the quilt
plough the eye and ground the mouth
will contend with mighty Mother Goose
and Farmer Brown and all good stories
of invincible belief
which surround her sleep
like the golden wheather of a halo

 

Well-wishers and her true lover
may stay to watch my Annie
sleeping like a perfect lady
under her grandmother’s patchwork quilt
but they must promise to whisper
and to vanish by morning –
all but her one true lover.

 

 

 

Leonard Cohen (Montréal, 21 september 1934)

In de jaren zestig

Lees verder “Leonard Cohen, Stephen King, Frédéric Beigbeder, Xavier Roelens, Fannie Flag, H.G. Wells, Johann Peter Eckermann”

Leonard Cohen, Stephen King, Frédéric Beigbeder, Fannie Flag, H.G. Wells, Johann Peter Eckermann

De Canadese dichter, folk singer-songwriter en schrijverLeonard Cohen werd geboren op 21 september 1934 te Montréal. Zie ook mijn blog van 21 september 2010 en eveneens alle tags voor Leonard Cohen op dit blog..

 

I Have Not Lingered In European Monosteries

I Have Not Lingered In European Monosteries
and discovered among the tall grasses tombs of knights
who fell as beautifully as their ballads tell;
I have not parted the grasses
or purposefully left them thatched.

I have not held my breath
so that I might hear the breathing of God
or tamed my heartbeat with an exercise,
or starved for visions.
Although I have watched him often
I have not become the heron,
leaving my body on the shore,
and I have not become the luminous trout,
leaving my body in the air.

I have not worshipped wounds and relics,
or combs of iron,
or bodies wrapped and burnt in scrolls.

I have not been unhappy for ten thousands years.
During the day I laugh and during the night I sleep.
My favourite cooks prepare my meals,
my body cleans and repairs itself,
and all my work goes well.

 

The only tourist in Havana turns his thoughts homeward

let us govern Canada,
let us find our serious heads,
let us dump asbestos on the White House,
let us make the French talk English,

not only here but everywhere,
let us torture the Senate individually

until they confess,
let us purge the New Party,
let us encourage the dark races

so they’ll be lenient

when they take over,
let us make the CBC talk English,
let us all lean in one direction

and float down

to the coast of Florida,
let us have tourism,
let us flirt with the enemy,
let us smelt pig-iron in our back yards,
let us sell snow

to under-developed nations,
(It is true one of our national leaders
was a Roman Catholic?)
let us terrorize Alaska,
let us unite

Church and State,
let us not take it lying down,
let us have two Governor Generals

at the same time,
let us have another official language,
let us determine what it will be,
let us give a Canada Council Fellowship

to the most original suggestion,
let us teach sex in the home

to parents,
let us threaten to join the U.S.A.

and pull out at the last moment,
my brothers, come,
our serious heads are waiting for us somewhere

like Gladstone bags abandoned

after a coup d’état,
let us put them on very quickly,
let us maintain a stony silence

on the St. Lawrence Seaway.

 


Leonard Cohen (Montréal, 21 september 1934)

Lees verder “Leonard Cohen, Stephen King, Frédéric Beigbeder, Fannie Flag, H.G. Wells, Johann Peter Eckermann”

Leonard Cohen, Stephen King, Frédéric Beigbeder, Fannie Flag, H.G. Wells, Johann Peter Eckermann

De Canadese dichter, folk singer-songwriter en schrijverLeonard Cohen werd geboren op 21 september 1934 te Montréal. Zie ook mijn blog van 21 september 2010 en eveneens alle tags voor Leonard Cohen op dit blog..

 

Dear Diary

“You are greater than the Bible
And the Conference of the Birds
And the Upanishads
All put together

“You are more severe
Than the Scriptures
And Hammurabi’s Code
More dangerous than Luther’s paper
Nailed to the Cathedral door

“You are sweeter
Than the Song of Songs
Mightier by far
Than the Epic of Gilgamesh
And braver
Than the Sagas of Iceland.

“I bow my head in gratitude
To the ones who give their lives
To keep the secret
The daily secret
Under lock and key

“Dear Diary
I mean no disrespect
But you are more sublime
Than any Sacred Text

“Sometimes just a list
Of my events
Is holier than the Bill of Rights
And more intense.”

 

I Wonder How Many People

I wonder how many people in this city
live in furnished rooms.
Late at night when i look out at the buildings
I swear I see a face in every window
looking back at me
and when I turn away
I wonder how many go back to their desks
and write this down.

Leonard Cohen (Montréal, 21 september 1934)

In 1969

Lees verder “Leonard Cohen, Stephen King, Frédéric Beigbeder, Fannie Flag, H.G. Wells, Johann Peter Eckermann”

Leonard Cohen, Stephen King, Frédéric Beigbeder, Fannie Flag, H.G. Wells, Johann Peter Eckermann

De Canadese dichter, folk singer-songwriter en schrijver Leonard Cohen werd geboren op  21 september 1934 te Montréal. Zie ook mijn blog van 21 september 2007 en ook mijn blog van 21 september 2008 en ook mijn blog van 21 september 2009.

Uit: The favorite game

“For all the bodies in and out of bathing suits, clothes, water, going between rooms, lying on grass, taking the print of grass, dancing discipline, leaping over horses, growing in mirrors, felt like treasure, slobbered over, cheated for, all of them, the great ballet line, the cream in them, the sun on them, the oil anointed.
A thousand shadows, a single fire, everything that happened, twisted by telling, served the vision, and when he saw it, he was in the very center of things.
Blindly he climbed the wooden steps that led up the side of the mountain. He was stopped by the high walls of the hospital. Its Italian towers looked sinister. His mother was sleeping in one of them.
He turned and looked at the city below him.
The heart of the city wasn’t down there among the new buildings and widened streets. It was right over there at the Allan, which, with drugs and electricity, was keeping the businessmen sane and their wives from suicide and their children free from hatred. The hospital was the true heart, pumping stability and erections and orgasms and sleep into all the withering commercial limbs. His mother was sleeping in one of the towers. With windows that didn’t quite open.
The restaurant bathed the corner of Stanley and St. Catherine in a light that made your skin yellow and the veins show through. It was a big place, mirrored, crowded as usual. There wasn’t a woman he could see. Breavman noted that a lot of the men used hair tonic; the sides of their heads seemed shiny and wet. Most of them were thin. And there seemed to be a uniform, almost. Tight chinos with belts in the back, V-neck sweaters without shirts.
He sat at a table. He was very thirsty. He felt in his pocket. Shell was right. He didn’t have much money.
No, he wouldn’t go to New York. He knew that. But he must always be connected to her. That must never be severed. Everything was simple as long as he was connected to her, as long as they remembered.
One day what he did to her, to the child, would enter his understanding with such a smash of guilt that he would sit motionless for days, until others carried him and medical machines brought him back to speech.
But that was not today.”

cohen

Leonard Cohen (Montréal, 21 september 1934)

 

De Amerikaanse schrijver Stephen Edwin King werd geboren in Portland, Maine, op 21 september 1947. Zie ook mijn blog van 21 september 2008 en ook mijn blog van 21 september 2009.

Uit: It

„The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years – if it ever did end – began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.

The boat bobbed, listed, righted itself again, dived bravely through treacherous whirlpools, and continued on its way down Witcham Street toward the traffic light which marked the intersection of Witcham and Jackson. The three vertical lenses on all sides of the traffic light were dark this afternoon in the fall of 1957, and the houses were all dark, too. There had been steady rain for a week now, and two days ago the winds had come as well. Most sections of Derry had lost their power then, and it was not back on yet.

A small boy in a yellow slicker and red galoshes ran cheerfully along beside the newspaper boat. The rain had not stopped, but it was finally slackening. It tapped on the yellow hood of the boy’s slicker, sounding to his ears like rain on a shed roof … a comfortable, almost cozy sound. The boy in the yellow slicker was George Denbrough. He was six. His brother William, known to most of the kids at Derry Elementary School (and even to the teachers, who would never have used the nickname to his face) as Stuttering Bill, was at home, hacking out the last of a nasty case of influenza. In that autumn of 1957, eight months before the real horrors began, and twenty-eight years before the final showdown, Stuttering Bill was ten years old.

Bill had made the boat beside which George now ran. He had made it sitting up in bed, his back propped against a pile of pillows, while their mother played Fur Elise on the piano in the parlor and rain swept restlessly against his bedroom window.“

king

Stephen King (Portland, 21 september 1947)

 

De Franse schrijver Frédéric Beigbeder werd geboren op 21 september 1965 in Neuilly-sur-Seine.Zie ook mijn blog van 21 september 2008 en ook mijn blog van 21 september 2009.

Uit: Nouvelles sous ecstasy

“L’hymne des plages, selon moi, n’est pas Sea, Sex and Sun de Serge Gainsbourg mais plutôt J’aime regarder les filles de Patrick Coutin. C’est une chanson magnifique : “J’aime regarder les filles qui marchent sur la plage / Quand elles se déshabillent et font semblant d’être sages.” Chaque fois que je m’allonge sur du sable, j’entends cette ode à la frustration sexuelle, cette apologie du voyeurisme balnéaire. Je pense à ces milliers d’après-midi écrasants, passés à observer les demoiselles dorées, en monokini, à Bidart, Biarritz ou St Tropez, sans jamais oser les aborder. Je suis convaincu que ces inombrables heures de contemplation timide ont fait de moi l’ignoble obsédé sexuel que je suis devenu.

Leur poitrine gonflée par le désir de vivre / Leurs yeux qui se demandent : mais quel est ce garçon ? Il y a un crescendo violent dans la chanson de Coutin qui traduit bien l’impuissance exaspérée du vacancier hétérosexuel, anéanti par la chaleur, cerné par une atroce beauté incontrôlée. Les filles gambadent, soulèvent le sable brûlant, crient des prénoms de garçons plus bronzés que lui. Elles sortent de l’eau les tétons mauves ; les poils taillés de leur sexe se collent contre le slip de bain. Elles embrassent des surfeurs australiens, ou des disc-jokeys camarguais.
Elles ignorent les garçons malingres et verdâtres qui lisent des livres, la bite enfoncée dans leur serviette éponge. (…) Pourquoi laisse-t-on les filles de seize ans se balader en liberté sur les bords de mer ?”

beigbeder

Frédéric Beigbeder (Neuilly-sur-Seine, 21 september 1965)

 

De Amerikaanse schrijfster en actrice Fannie Flagg (eig. Patricia Neal) werd geboren op 21 september in Birmingham (Alabama). Zie ook mijn blog van 21 september 2009.

Uit: Standing in the Rainbow

‚Almost everyone in town that had an extra room took in a boarder. There were no apartment buildings or hotels as of yet. The Howard Johnson was built a few years later but in the meantime bachelors needed to be looked after and single women certainly had to have a respectable place to live. Most people considered it their Christian duty to take them in whether they needed the few extra dollars a week or not, and some of the boarders stayed on for years. Mr. Pruiet, a bachelor from Kentucky with long thin feet, boarded with the Haygoods so long that they eventually forgot he was not family. Whenever they moved, he moved. When he finally did die at seventy-eight, he was buried in the Haygood family plot with a headstone that read:

 Mr. PRUIET

STILL WITH US

PAID IN FULL

The homes on First Avenue North were located within walking distance of town and school and were where most of the town’s boarders lived.

At present the Smith family’s boarder is Jimmy Head, the short-order cook at the Trolley Car Diner; the Robinsons next door have Beatrice Woods, the Little Blind Songbird; the Whatleys up the street have Miss Tuttle, the high school English teacher. Ernest Koonitz, the school’s band director and tuba soloist, boards with Miss Alma, who, as luck would have it, has a hearing problem. But soon the Smith family will take in a new boarder who will set in action a chain of events that should eventually wind up in the pages of history books. Of course they won’t know it at the time, especially their ten-year-old son, Bobby. He is at the moment downtown standing outside the barbershop with his friend Monroe Newberry, staring at the revolving red and white stripes on the electric barber’s pole“

.flagg

Fannie Flag (Birmingham, 21 september 1944)
DVD Cover

 

De Britse schrijver Herbert George Wells werd geboren op 21 september 1866 in Bromley, Kent. Zie ook mijn blog van 21 september 2007 en ook mijn blog van 21 september 2008 en ook mijn blog van 21 september 2009.

Uit: The War of the Worlds

„The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves about the sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles, and the light and heat it receives from the sun is barely half of that received by this world. It must be, if the nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our world; and long before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its surface must have begun its course. The fact that it is scarcely one seventh of the volume of the earth must have accelerated its cooling to the temperature at which life could begin. It has air and water and all that is necessary for the support of animated existence.
Yet so vain is man and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer up to the very end of the nineteenth century expressed any idea that intelligent life might have developed there far, or indeed at all, beyond its earthly level. Nor was it generally understood that since Mars is older than our earth, with scarcely a quarter of the superficial area and remoter from the sun, it necessarily follows that Mars is not only more distant from life’s beginning but also nearer its end.
The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet has already gone far indeed with our neighbor. Its physical condition is still largely a mystery, but we know now that even in its equatorial region the midday temperature barely approaches that of our coldest winter. Its air is much more attenuated than ours, its oceans have shrunk until they cover but a third of its surface, and as its slow seasons change huge snowcaps gather and melt about either pole and periodically inundate its temperate zones. That last stage of exhaustion, which to us is still incredibly remote, has become a present-day problem for the inhabitants of Mars. The immediate pressure of necessity has brightened their intellects, enlarged their powers, and hardened their hearts. And looking across space with instruments, and with intelligences such as we have scarcely dreamed of they see, at its nearest distance only 35,000,000 of miles sunward of them, a morning star of hope—our own warmer planet, green with vegetation and gray with water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility, with glimpses through drifting cloud-wisps of broad stretches of populous country and narrow navy-crowded seas.“

 wells

H. G. Wells (21 september 1866 – 13 augustus 1946)

 

De Duitse dichter Johann Peter Eckermann werd geboren op 21 september 1792 in Winsen (Luhe). Hij was bovenal de medewerker en vriend van Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Zie ook mijn blog van 21 september 2007. Zie ook mijn blog van 21 september 2007 en ook mijn blog van 21 september 2008. en ook mijn blog van 21 september 2009.

Weimar

Glücklich Weimar! – Von den Städten allen
Bist du, kleine, wunderbar bedacht;
Man wird stets zu deinen Toren wallen,
Angezogen von der heil’gen Macht;
Und man wird nach großen Männern fragen,
Die in schönen Zeiten hier gestrebt,
Und mit edlem Neid wird man beklagen,
Dass man mit den Edlen nicht gelebt.

 

Musengunst

Musst kein Gedicht durch tiefes Sinnen
Dem Geiste mühsam abgewinnen:

Dem Dichter muss zumute sein,
Als flög’ eine Taube zum Fenster herein
Gebraten, wo er nichts braucht dazu,
Als sie zu schmausen in guter Ruh.

Wer so das edle Dichten treibt,
Der stets ein lust’ger Geselle bleibt;
Wer’s aber auf solche Weise nicht kann,
Tut besser, er fängt was anders an.

eckermann.jpg

Johann Peter Eckermann (21 september 1792 – 3 december 1854)
Getekend door Ernst Förster, 1825

75 Jaar Leonard Cohen, H.G. Wells, Johann Peter Eckermann, Stephen King, Frédéric Beigbeder, Xavier Roelens, Fannie Flag

De Canadese dichter, folk singer-songwriter en schrijver Leonard Cohen werd geboren op  21 september 1934 te Montréal.

 

Waiting for Marianne

 

I have lost a telephone

with your smell in it

 

I am living beside the radio

all the stations at once

but I pick out a Polish lullaby

I pick it out of the static

it fades I wait I keep the beat

it comes back almost asleep

 

Did you take the telephone

knowing I’d sniff it immoderately

maybe heat up the plastic

to get all the crumbs of your breath

 

and if you won’t come back

how will you phone to say

you won’t come back

so that I could at least argue.

 

 

Poem

 

I heard of a man

who says words so beautifully

that if he only speaks their name

women give themselves to him.

 

If I am dumb beside your body

while silence blossoms like tumors on our lips.

it is because I hear a
man climb stairs and clear his throat outside the door.

 

 

 

The Pro

 

from the Nashville Notebooks of 1969:

 

I leave my silence to a co-operative of poets
who have already bruised their mouths against it.

 

I leave my homesick charm to the scavengers of
spare change who work the old artistic corners.

 

I leave the shadow of my manly groin to those who
write for pay.

 

I leave to several jealous men a second-rate legend
of my life.

 

To those few high school girls
who preferred my work to Dylan’s

 

I leave my stone ear
and my disposable Franciscan ambitions.

 

 

Cohen

Leonard Cohen (Montréal, 21 september 1934)

 

De Britse schrijver Herbert George Wells werd geboren op 21 september 1866 in Bromley, Kent.

 

Uit: The Time Machine

 

“I have already told you of the sickness and confusion that comes with time travelling. And this time I was not seated properly in the saddle, but sideways and in an unstable fashion. For an indefinite time I clung to the machine as it swayed and vibrated, quite unheeding how I went, and when I brought myself to look at the dials again I was amazed to find where I had arrived. One dial records days, and another thousands of days, another millions of days, and another thousands of millions. Now, instead of reversing the levers, I had pulled them over so as to go forward with them, and when I came to look at these indicators I found that the thousands hand was sweeping round as fast as the seconds hand of a watch — into futurity.

“As I drove on, a peculiar change crept over the appearance of things. The palpitating greyness grew darker; then, though I was still travelling with prodigious velocity, the blinking succession of day and night, which was usually indicative of a slower pace, returned, and grew more and more marked. This puzzled me very much at first. The alternations of night and day grew slower and slower, and so did the passage of the sun across the sky, until they seemed to stretch through centuries. At last a steady twilight brooded over the earth, a twilight only broken now and then when a comet glared across the darkling sky. The band of light that had indicated the sun had long since disappeared; for the sun had ceased to set. It simply rose and fell in the west, and grew ever broader and more red. All trace of the moon had vanished. The circling of the stars, growing slower and slower, had given place to creeping points of light. At last, some time before I stopped, the sun, red and very large, halted motionless upon the horizon, a vast dome glowing with a dull heat, and now and then suffering a momentary extinction. At one time it had for a little while glowed more brilliantly again, but it speedily reverted to its sullen red heat. I perceived by this slowing down of its rising and setting that the work of the tidal drag was done.“

 

hg_wells

H. G. Wells (21 september 1866 – 13 augustus 1946)

 

De Duitse dichter Johann Peter Eckermann werd geboren op 21 september 1792 in Winsen (Luhe). Hij was bovenal de medewerker en vriend van Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

 

 

Höchste Süße

 

Hochgepriesen ist des Honigs Süße,

Köstlich labt der vollen Kirsche Saft;

Traubenkühlung, wenn ich dich genieße,

Füllt sich Geist und Herz mit neuer Kraft.

Wer von Lebensängsten will gesunden,

Spüle sie hinweg mit kühlem Wein!

Bessre Labe will noch erst erfunden,

Süßere noch erst ersonnen sein.

 

Aber süßre Labe wird erfunden,

Als dir Honig, Kirsch’ und Traube nennt,

Wenn die Vielgeliebte du umwunden

Und ihr holder Mund an deinem brennt.

O des überseligen Genusses,

Der sich da von Seel’ in Seele gießt!

O du Wundersüß des ersten Kusses,

Wenn der Liebe heil’ger Bund sich schließt!

 

 

Getadelte Poeten

 

Gras, am Wege getreten,

Wird sich gleich wieder richten.

Getadelte Poeten –

Sie werden immer dichten.

 

eckermann_relief

Johann Peter Eckermann (21 september 1792 – 3 december 1854)

 

Zie voor bovenstaande drie schrijvers ook mijn blog van 21 september 2007 en ook mijn blog van 21 september 2008.

De Amerikaanse schrijver Stephen Edwin King werd geboren in Portland, Maine, op 21 september 1947. Zie ook mijn blog van 21 september 2008.

 

Uit: Cell

 

„The event that came to be known as The Pulse began at 3:03 p.m., eastern standard time, on the afternoon of October 1. The term was a misnomer, of course, but within ten hours of the event, most of the scientists capable of pointing this out were either dead or insane. The name hardly mattered, in any case. What mattered was the effect.

At three o’clock on that day, a young man of no particular importance to history came walking — almost bouncing — east along Boylston Street in Boston. His name was Clayton Riddell. There was an expression of undoubted contentment on his face to go along with the spring in his step. From his left hand there swung the handles of an artist’s portfolio, the kind that closes and latches to make a traveling case. Twined around the fingers of his right hand was the drawstring of a brown plastic shopping bag with the words small treasures printed on it for anyone who cared to read them.

Inside the bag, swinging back and forth, was a small round object. A present, you might have guessed, and you would have been right. You might further have guessed that this Clayton Riddell was a young man seeking to commemorate some small (or perhaps even not so small) victory with a small treasure, and you would have been right again. The item inside the bag was a rather expensive glass paperweight with a gray haze of dandelion fluff caught in its center. He had bought it on his walk back from the Copley Square Hotel to the much humbler Atlantic Avenue Inn where he was staying, frightened by the ninety-dollar pricetag on the paperweight’s base, somehow even more frightened by the realization that he could now afford such a thing.

Handing his credit card over to the clerk had taken almost physical courage. He doubted if he could have done it if the paperweight had been for himself; he would have muttered something about having changed his mind and scuttled out of the shop. But it was for Sharon. Sharon liked such things, and she still liked him — I’m pulling for you, baby, she’d said the day before he left for Boston. Considering the s— they’d put each other through over the last year, that had touched him. Now he wanted to touch her, if that was still possible. The paperweight was a small thing (a small treasure), but he was sure she’d love that delicate gray haze deep down in the middle of the glass, like a pocket fog“.

 

stephen-king

Stephen King (Portland, 21 september 1947)

 

De Franse schrijver Frédéric Beigbeder werd geboren op 21 september 1965 in Neuilly-sur-Seine.Zie ook mijn blog van 21 september 2008.

 

Uit: Un roman français

 

“Je ne me souviens pas de mon enfance. Quand je le dis, personne ne me croit. Tout le monde se souvient de son passé; à quoi bon vivre si la vie est oubliée? En moi rien ne reste de moi-même; de zéro à quinze ans je suis face à un trou noir (au sens astrophysique: «Objet massif dont le champ gravitationnel est si intense qu’il empêche toute forme de matière ou de rayonnement de s’en échapper»). Longtemps j’ai cru que j’étais normal, que les autres étaient frappés de la même amnésie. Mais si je leur demandais: «Tu te souviens de ton enfance?», ils me racontaient quantité d’histoires. J’ai honte que ma biographie soit imprimée à l’encre sympathique. Pourquoi mon enfance n’est-elle pas indélébile? Je me sens exclu du monde, car le monde a une archéologie et moi pas. J’ai effacé mes traces comme un criminel en cavale. Quand j’évoque cette infirmité, mes parents lèvent les yeux au ciel, ma famille proteste, mes amis d’enfance se vexent, d’anciennes fiancées sont tentées de produire des documents photographiques.

Je ne mens pas par omission: je fouille dans ma vie comme dans une malle vide, sans y rien trouver; je suis désert. Parfois j’entends murmurer dans mon dos: «Celui-là, je n’arrive pas à le cerner.» J’acquiesce. Comment voulezvous situer quelqu’un qui ignore d’où il vient? Comme dit Gide dans Les Faux-Monnayeurs, je suis «bâti sur pilotis: ni fondation, ni soussol». La terre se dérobe sous mes pieds, je lévite sur coussin d’air, je suis une bouteille qui flotte sur la mer, un mobile de Calder. Pour plaire, j’ai renoncé à avoir une colonne vertébrale, j’ai voulu me fondre dans le décor tel Zelig, l’homme-caméléon. Oublier sa personnalité, perdre la mémoire pour être aimé: devenir, pour séduire, celui que les autres choisissent. Ce désordre de la personnalité, en langage psychiatrique, est nommé «déficit de conscience centrée».

 

FredericBeigbeder

Frédéric Beigbeder (Neuilly-sur-Seine, 21 september 1965)

 

 

De Vlaamse dichter Xavier Roelens werd op 21 september 1976 in Rekkem (Menen). Zie ook mijn blog van 25 mei 2009.

 

 

een autochtone trein naar A


de ogen van een andere man zijn bijna dicht
er zit een weerlicht op zijn wenkbrauw
en rookt een zelfgedraaide sigaret.
een andere man scheurt bladen uit de bijbel, leest
een kopie van een kopie met een eenbenige bril
zijn hoofd is bijna kaal hij kijkt geen moment
naar medemensen.
een andere man roept minuten af.

een andere vrouw is de andere vrouw
en is voor haar de kous af.
een andere man schijt en plast
is daartussen één geworden.

 

Xavier Roelens

Xavier Roelens (Rekkem, 21 september 1976)

De Amerikaanse schrijfster en actrice Fannie Flagg (eig. Patricia Neal) werd geboren op 21 september in Birmingham (Alabama). Zij schreef talrijke boeken, waarvan het bekendste Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is, dat in 1991 verfilmd werd met o.a. Jessica Tandy, Kathy Bates en Mary-Louise Parker.Als actrice trad zij op in enkele films en spelshows.

 

Uit: Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

 

Cafe Opens

 

The Whistle Stop Cafe opened up last week, right next door to me at the post office, and owners Idgie Threadgoode and Ruth Jamison said business has been good ever since. Idgie says that for people who know her not to worry about getting poisoned, she is not cooking. All the cooking is being done by two colored women, Sipsey and Onzell, and the barbecue is being cooked by Big George, who is Onzell’s husband.

If there is anybody that has not been there yet, Idgie says that the breakfast hours are from 5:30-7:30, and you can get eggs, grits, biscuits, bacon, sausage, ham and red-eye gravy, and coffee for 25 [cts.].

For lunch and supper you can have: fried chicken; pork chops and gravy; catfish; chicken and dumplings; or a barbecue plate; and your choice of three vegetables, biscuits or cornbread, and your drink and dessert–for 35 [cts.].

She said the vegetables are: creamed corn; fried green tomatoes; fried okra; collard or turnip greens; black-eyed peas; candied yams; butter beans or lima beans.

And pie for dessert.

My other half, Wilbur, and I ate there the other night, and it was so good he says he might not ever eat at home again. Ha. Ha. I wish this were true. I spend all my time cooking for the big lug, and still can’t keep him filled up.

By the way, Idgie says that one of her hens laid an egg with a ten-dollar bill in it.

… Dot Weems …

 

FannieFlagg

Fannie Flag (Birmingham, 21 september 1944)