Jean Genet (born December 19, 1910): "dreaming is nursed in darkness"

No matter how "civilized" a nation appears, it is the individual who must live daily within its socialized constraints no matter how difficult. The current debate over the National Security Administration's eavesdropping is only the most current example of how fiercely individual boundaries can be debated. 

During a state of war, the rules of civilized society and its accepted boundaries are suspended for many reasons. Jean Genet's dark and chaotic daily world found an answering echo in the chaos of World War II, a conflict which was a trick mirror to life's surface appearance of order and propriety. For those who know Genet's work, "dark" is used here in the way Nabokov's Lolita can be described as "humorous" -- which it is, with its waves of world-weary acceptance.

The author who was abandoned as a child, and who turned his life of juvenile crime into a novel (The Thief's Journal), eventually snubbed the French literary establishment which had ignored his work by refusing to accept its later awards. He who writes well enjoys the last laugh.

From a literary point-of-view, this is great reputation building. Yet reading Genet's last novel, Funeral Rites, is a sobering experience in the moral and ethical questions of war -- serious questions for a writer who was a sexual outsider. The author who once famously said "I'm homosexual... How and why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green," here treats war as the universal human condition.

What individuals do in war, as well as love, transcends the boundaries of politics, idealism, or ethics. Funeral Rites is a serious book about the differences between men, the governments who send them to die, and the personal conflicts that seek some kind of resolution in the confusion of battle (and sexual attraction).

The novel's plot becomes a funhouse mirror of relationships formed in immediate circumstance. Genet himself is the thinly-disguised narrator, who then becomes a character in the novel, and then part of a fantasy relationship during war-time France. (Genet's dead lover's brother is Hitler's lover too, in Genet's war-time fantasy).
Is it meant to be humorous? Yes, in the ironic sense; when the normal order of life is stripped away, a sense of humor (and acceptance) is a welcome defense against the rising tide of death and uncertainty. There's a long literary history of ironic war humor: Heller and Vonnegut are the familiar ironists from an American perspective: their tales are told by the winners, leavened by obvious humor. Genet's European tale is darker, but with the same themes of sex, fate, and fantasy.


The book begins as a eulogy to Genet's lover and resistance fighter, also named Jean, killed on August 20, 1944 during the street-fighting for the recapture of Paris. The lover's brother is likely a German collaborator; at Jean's funeral he meets his lover's mother, a bourgeois middle-class woman who is hiding a Nazi officer. From the mother's "pink, plump face" to the neighbor's assessment of the 20-year old dead soldier's simple pine-wood coffin, Genet's sharp description of middle-class values could be an echo of Flaubert in Madame Bovary:

"We had not come to see a face but the dead Jean D., and our expectation was so fervent that he had a right to manifest himself, without surprising us, in any way whatsoever.
'They don't go in for style these days,' she said. Heavy and gleaming, like the most gorgeous of dahlias, Jean's mother, who was still very beautiful, had raised her mourning veil. Her eyes were dry, but the tears had left a subtle and luminous snail track on her pink, plump face from the eyes to the chin. She looked at the pine wood of the coffin.
'Oh, you can't expect quality nowadays,' replied another woman in deep mourning who was next to her."

In the confusion of war-ravaged Paris, Genet fantasizes a relationship with the Nazi officer and another German soldier. One reviewer notes Genet's potshots at the French middle class: even in the middle of chaos and German tanks advancing on Paris, a woman retires to her bedchamber so she can, as Genet properly puts it, "release her wind," rather than embarrass herself in front of her "client," a German soldier.

In a move Genet privately expected, the book's original French publisher balked at the last moment -- the experience of war just past was too new, they felt, the writing too scandalous. A limited edition appeared in 1948, and was finally openly published in Paris, and a translation worldwide, in 1953.


"A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness," Genet wrote. In 1975 the French Ministry of Culture awarded him a prize, which Genet refused, for a screenplay he had written. In 1983 he received the Grand Prix National des Lettres, and two years later The Balcony, which had been notoriously rejected by several producers when it was initially offered for stage production, was included among the repertory of works performed by the Comédie Francaise, a bastion of French cultural respectability.

After that, Genet was involved in various political causes, the most enduring being his association with the Palestinian Liberation Organization. He moved to Jordan in 1970 and lived with the Palestinians for the next fourteen years. According to critic Mary Ann Frese Witt, Genet had a “desire to abandon stasis for action, poetics for politics.”
 
It would be interesting to discover what Genet thinks of America's current debates, from records surveillance to income inequality. He would not be surprised to discover the old issues haven't substantially changed: even well into in the 21st century, the haves and the have-nots are having at it, again.

"Crimes of which a people are ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man." (Jean Genet)

Reynolds Price, 2002: "the South was a very separate country"

Bomb magazine offers a surprising mix of artists and writers talking together, often across disciplines. The magazine's website also includes pieces from the archives, such as a warm 2002 conversation between Reynolds Price and Caleb Smith, who was studying at Duke University at the time. Smith has gone on to teach at Yale, and his academic interests have included topics from antebellum literature to his 2009 Yale University Press book, The Prison and the American Imagination.

The Bomb interview, part of which is excerpted here, is a comfortable chat between teacher and student. Price died in January 2011; he was diagnosed with a spinal cancer in 1984 which left him a paraplegic. The illness did nothing to dampen the author's wit or his opinions. As Smith notes in 2002 about Price at his home in Durham, North Carolina: "He sits on his wheelchair more like a monarch on a throne. ... Reynolds and I poured a drink and talked. Recorded here is simply a visit, which between us is something shared, not paid."

RP I wasn’t able to go to Eudora Welty’s funeral in August, so I wanted to get down there and do something in the way of rounding off my long friendship with her. We had dinner with some of Eudora’s friends and family and went over to her house, which is sitting there empty now, waiting for museumification. It seemed both very desolate and also very haunted by her presence. She had lived in that house every day from the time she was 15 years old; she died at 92. It was her central place of residence for all those years, and there’s a lot of her still in the house. Finally we drove on through Alabama up to Atlanta, where we spent the night, then through South Carolina and on home.

The deep South is not the upper South. It’s deeply different — much older feeling (though it’s not) – and yet there are tremendous likenesses. The social life and the accents and the body language of my friends who are my age and come from Mississippi are almost identical to the ones I grew up with as a boy in eastern North Carolina. But it’s 800 miles away.
CS I’ve just come back from my first trip ever to Charleston, and it felt like even the things I was discovering about that place were somehow genealogical to me. 

RP And what does it all come out of except slavery and the Confederacy? I finally have to think that’s what the South is still about. I was born in 1933, in the Depression; and at that point, the South was a very separate country. People rarely left unless they were miserable with their station in life or fleeing their mother or father.
CS You think people’s whole imaginations about the world were more regionally bound? 

RP God, yes. My father, who was born in 1900 — a wonderfully witty and perfectly viable man — saw no reason whatever to go outside the state of North Carolina. He made a trip to New York once on business, and he couldn’t wait to get home — those harried people were driving him insane. Then in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s virtually everybody with a college education got out of the South — everybody who was interested in the arts went straight to New York City. I stayed, for complicated reasons that had nothing to do with virtue. We were the most hated place on the face of the Earth in those days, because of the tragic responses to the civil rights movement. Some of the hatred was righteous judgment on the South, and some of it was just utter hypocrisy — as though the whole nation isn’t profoundly racist.

And now, again, the South has slowly emerged and is looked upon as a very attractive part of the world — but also still very exotic and a little scary. When you get off the interstate at a diner in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and see the waiters and the staff, you realize that this ain’t Kansas, Toto.

CS I took a walk around a swamp in Charleston. You’re about a foot above the stillest green water you’ve ever seen in your life. Alligators are sunning themselves on these planks. The Spanish moss. It’s the tropical gothic that’s been so fantasized. 

RP People think we made it up. (laughter) The first time I ever went through one of those gardens was with some Duke colleagues of mine in the late 1950s, in a rowboat. You paid a young black man, probably 13 years old, to row you through the swamp. One of the people with us was British. He saw these very live alligators and this very dark water, and he said, “About how many people a year do you lose in here?” The young man said, ”’Bout 11.” (laughter) I loved his precision — 11 people vanish in that swamp in a year. 

CS Not ten, or a dozen.
RP No, 11. (laughter) That was very Southern too.....

(At top, Reynolds Price in 1961, by Wallace Kaufman from The New York Times)

Cheers, Keith! Richards turns 70.

"Gotta walk before they make me run ..."

Keith Richards, born Dec 18, 1942

Carbon footprints in the sand: the growing divide between newsprint and digital delivery

Much as the twenty-four hour news cycle and the web have their benefits (the web's attention-span disorder promises a clean slate, or a high boredom quotient, ever more rapidly -- good news for politicians at least), the permanence of the printed word itself continues to inspire hope in some unusual corners -- Jeff Bezos, of Amazon, purchased the venerable Washington Post in a move that promises unexpected surprises in the new year. 

The information on the web can't be piled up for later reading-and-tossing quite like newsprint -- you have to go look for what you want on the web -- but on the other hand, the jury's still out on the environmental impact of pixel vs. newsprint. More than likely the Amazon/Post combine will ultimately seem a good advertising and marketing move for a merchandiser's future, rather than a valiant effort to maintain print media's status quo.

The New York Times recently ran an article in its Paper Cuts blog about the ongoing question of the web's environmental impact versus newspapers' "dead-tree existence" -- Nicholson Baker finds that electronic server farms may have a broader ecological impact than the processing of ink and newsprint, and existing research figures suggest a somewhat-frustrating draw about the relative impact of each.

Until the web can be piled up like the Sunday paper in black, smudgy drifts next to the Barcalounger, it seems like newsprint will survive in some form far more messy than Kindle, and more reliably necessary than cable news. Here's an excerpt from the Jennifer Schuessler article, which can be read in full at The New York Times.

Dave Eggers, the fledgling press baron behind The San Francisco Panorama, the much-ballyhooed (and drop-dead gorgeous) newspaper by the McSweeney’s gang, has been making the rounds with his full-throated argument that the future of the news business can be written not just in pixels but with old-fashioned paper and ink.

“There are a lot of things that newsprint can do uniquely well that the Web cannot,” Eggers recently told The Chicago Tribune. “The two forms could coexist, instead of the zero-sum situation that we seem stuck in.”

As it happens, The Panorama includes an apologia for its own glorious dead-tree existence, in the form of an essay by the novelist Nicholson Baker considering “the strange possibility that the transferring of information digitally is more environmentally destructive than printing it.” (Alas, and perhaps to the point, Baker’s article, along with most of The Panorama, is not available online.)

Baker, who is on record as loving Wikipedia and Google but not the Kindle, visits the Otis paper mill in Jay, Me., which was once the world’s largest but was shut down forever last spring. The shuttering of Otis may seem like good news for trees. But the biggest threat to the Maine woods, Baker suggests, isn’t logging. It’s the kind of low-density development that comes when the logging stops.

As Don Carli, a research fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Communication, put it to Baker, “Hamburgers and condos kill more trees than printed objects ever will.”

As Baker reports, some 18 paper mills closed in the United States in 2009, with more than 34 paper machines permanently shuttered. Meanwhile, the growth rate of the huge server farms needed to fuel the Internet and related gadgets is “metastasizing,” as Carli puts it to Baker.

The carbon footprint of data center server farms — roughly equal to that of paper mills today — is set to double in the next five years. And those server farms are often powered by coal, which tends to be harvested in far less sustainable ways than wood pulp. ...

Right now, there are no good accountings of the environmental impact of pixels versus paper. Until we have a better understanding, Carli said, let’s stop green-bashing the print media.

“It may provide more benefit to the environment and society than you realize,” he said. “Print itself doesn’t have a larger footprint than digital.” Without better measurements, “you can’t really make a case either way.” ...