Jean Genet -- classic or dud?

I had to grab hold of invisible tackle. I could have cooed. Words, or the tone of my voice, would not have merely expressed my ardor, I would not have merely sung, my throat would have uttered the call of indeed the most amorous of wild game. Perhaps my neck would have bristled with white feathers. A catastrophe is always possible. Metamorphosis lies in wait for us. Panic protected me.

Forget Miller is right. Of all the dirty dirty writers that rocked my world when I was a teen, he was by far the best, the one I was least likely to skim through for the raunchy parts, the one who most altered my view of the world. Well, John Rechy comes close, but he turned into such a lousy writer. I keep meaning to re-read them all the Genet books. And that Edmund White book.

The one line that's stayed with me is when some queen farts and she exclaims, "Oh, my cock's house collapsed." Haw haw, I wish more had stuck with me, I have such a bad memory.

Acker doing Genet through (literally and figuratively, if you've read Blood and Guts in High School) is unstoppable.

"to pluck a rose" - to have a piss.
"to post a watchman" - have a shit.

The latter derived from his habit of alway staking a dump on the carpet of apartments and houses he burgled. He'd say to his mates, "I'm just going to post a watchman". How he turned such stuff into poetry, I don't know; but he did.

Miracle of the Rose started this afternoon.

I liked him so much in high school that I buy cool editions when I see em (grove press hardbacks mainly) but I haven't read him in a while - I feel like the literature of transgression is something you either stick with or leave behind and it's not really where I'm at. still I mean to get to Funeral Rites one of these days

erm I don't think Genet exactly codes as 'Literature of transgression'. Or he does but his works have been trapped in this label - when as an artist and activist and writer he is so much better than almost anybody else he is labelled with.

Speaking (six months later) of Genet's activism, Jackie Wang has written a long but engaging account of Genet's relation to the Black Panther Party and the writings of the imprisoned radical George Jackson, as well as their reception by Deleuze and Foucault:

http://loneberry.tumblr.com/post/150136710622/the-global-circulation-of-a-black-radical

This looks great thanks.

Juan Goytisolo passed away a couple of days ago - never read (although heard of) him. What I didn't know is that he loved Genet and wrote this really nice piece on the man and his fiction

I liked him so much in high school that I buy cool editions when I see em (grove press hardbacks mainly) but I haven't read him in a while - I feel like the literature of transgression is something you either stick with or leave behind and it's not really where I'm at. still I mean to get to Funeral Rites one of these days

― tremendous crime wave and killing wave (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi), Wednesday, February 10, 2016 10:08 PM (six years ago) bookmarkflaglink

today I cracked the very cool edition of Funeral Rites alluded to above and within twenty pages ran across a phrase I remember vividly from high school, a passage I'm certain I read back then; of course, I took a lot of drugs back then, heavy ones that can do a number on your memory, so I'm not sure if I just abandoned or lost the book at some point or maybe only read briefly in it...and now, an hour & some pages later, I'm still not sure if Genet's where my head's at in the twenty-first century. I don't know! Kind of conflicted about whether to continue -- this is in some sense a personal issue, young drug-addled me & my willingness or unwillingness to harbor both his reading eyes & my own in the same skull for two hundred pages. And I think it's fair to say that some of Genet's preoccupations aren't aging so well -- I mean, specifically, the youth of his lover, his referring to the lover he's mourning & many others as literally as a child -- when Laurtreamont does this, he intends to shock, but...I don't know! Where does Genet sit in the midst of our time, you know?

I really want to read this:

https://www.nyrb.com/products/criminal-child?variant=14170567049268

I have that, the title essay gave me the same pearl-clutching fits I was getting yesterday from rites. today, further in, I'm of course inside Genet's severe aestheticism and willing to tithe him the world if he needs it, but, like, my waking sober mind kinda things to aestheticize things like children's prisons is bullshit - but who has greater standing to talk about this: I, who never saw the inside of a cell til he was 18, or Genet, who believed strongly in the fraternity of the prison & knew precisely of what he spoke? Genet, obviously, but his "I oppose prison reforms because of the beauty of the moral universe of the prisoner" schtick here...I feel like it doesn't survive the age of the electronic panopticon, of the merging of the justice system & capitalist interests, etc

*kinda thinks, not "things"

I feel like Prisoner of Love is the one where he is probably writing away from his schtick, if you like. But I gave it a read ten years ago.