De Schotse schrijver Christopher Brookmyre werd geboren op 6 september 1968 in Glasgow. Zie ook alle tags voor Christopher Brookmyre op dit blog.
Uit: All Fun And Games Until Somebody Loses An Eye
‘It would encourage me, you know, to think … or rather it would comfort me, no, wrong word, well, maybe the right word, but it would, you know, inspire me but at the same time sort of soothe me in an all-is-well-in-heaven-and-earth kind of way to think, ah, what am I trying to say here?’
Som was sitting on an upturned black flight case, rocking it back ten or fifteen degrees as he rolled his heels on the frosted gravel in front of Bett’s mansion. Lex wished he wouldn’t do that, really wished he wouldn’t do that. Okay, it was Som’s case, Som’s stuff, and maybe he was cool with the contents getting clattered in the less-than-improbable event that his feet slipped and put him on his skinny Thai ass, but that wasn’t the point. It was bad practice. There were several black flight cases sitting out there with the three of them in the cold tonight, as on any such night, and Lex didn’t much like the thought of Som using the vessel of her fragile, delicately packed and fastidiously inventoried kit as a makeshift shooting stick. Weighing further upon her discomfiture was the fact that Armand’s flight cases were occasionally known to accommodate materials sufficient to denude the im-mediate vicinity of any standing structure, mammalian life, or even vegetation.
‘Som, you’re 404-ing,’ she warned him.
‘Sorry. I’m just saying, wouldn’t you love to believe that somewhere in this
world there really is at least one – just one – hollowed-out volcano containing a super high-tech ops base under the command of a fully-fledged evil genius? I mean, I could live with all the havoc the evil genius might wreak simply to know there was a facility like that in existence. It would just make the world a more fantastical place, don’t you reckon? In a Santa-really-does-exist-after-all kind of way, you know?’
‘Would it need to have a retractable roof for space-rockets and nuclear missiles to launch through?’ Armand asked, bringing a measured irritation to bear in the precision of his accented pronunciation.
‘I’d settle for a submarine dock,’ Som responded, with an equally measured, de-liberate guilelessness.
‘So,’ the Frenchman said, ’the thought of an actual, existent, staffed and fully functioning underground base doesn’t, how would you say, blow your hair back? It must be inside a hollowed-out volcano and run by a cackling megalomaniac or it’s merely part of the crushing ordinariness of life’s relentlessly drab ennui?’
Christopher Brookmyre (Glasgow, 6 september 1968)
De Duitstalige, Iraanse dichter en schrijver Cyrus Atabay werd geboren op 6 september 1929 in Teheran. Zie ook alle tags voor Cyrus Atabay op dit blog.
Stadskaart van Samarkand
Aanbeland in de smogsteden,
die zich met de uitwerpselen
van de machine voeden,
was ik verdwaald,
die toch minstens één keer mijn weg
vond in de onderwereld.
Ah, ik kende andere steden,
waarvan de maten Händels muziek
vertaalden naar architectuur.
Op de stadskaart van Samarkand,
vond ik de tuin
en de karavanserai,
ook de straat
waarin jij woont—
Ik ben een reiziger,
op weg naar Samarkand.
Vertaald door Frans Roumen
Cyrus Atabay (6 september 1929 – 26 januari 1996)
Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 6e september ook mijn blog van 6 september 2019 en ook mijn blog van 6 september 2017 en ook mijn blog van 6 september 2015 deel 2.
