Count Julian - Opening

harsh homeland, the falsest, most miserable
imaginable, I shall never return to you: with eyes still
closed, it is there before you, enveloped in the blurry
ubiquity of sleep and thus invisible, but nonetheless
cleverly and subtly suggested, foreshortened and far
in the distance: with even the tiniest bits recognizable,
outlined as you yourself admit, with such scrupulous
accuracy as to border on the maniacal: one day, another,
and yet another: ever the same: a predictable sharpness
of contour, a mere cardboard model, in reduced scale,
of a familiar landscape: burning beneath a fiery sun perhaps?

I dreamed of Tangier, whose proximity fascinated me,
and the prestige of this city that is more or less a favorite
haunt of traitors.

-- JEAN GENET, The Thief's Journal

In their struggle againt the Byzantines and the Berbes,
the Arab chieftains had greatly extended their African
dominions, and as early as the year 682 Uqba had reached
the shores of the Atlanntic, but he was unable to occupy
Tangier, for he was forced to turn back toward the Atlas
Mountains by a mysterious person who Moslem
historians almost always refer to as Ulyan, though his
real name was probably Julian, or perhaps Urban or
Ulban or Bulian. Soon thereafter he became a legendary
figure, known as "Count Julian". We are not certain
whether he was a Berber, a Visigoth, or a Byzantine; as
a "count" he may have been the ruler of the fortress of
Septem, once part of the Visigoth kingdom; or he may
have been an exarch or a governor ruling in the name of
the Byzantine Empire: oor, as appears more likely, he may
have been a Berber who was the lord and master of the
Catholic tribe of Gomera ...

- L. G. DE V., Historia de Espana

Reivindicacion del Conde Don Julian
Editorial Joaquin Mortiz, S.A., 1970

Don Julian
Editions Gallima 1971

English language translation Copyright 1974
by The Viking Press, Inc.
All rights reserved
A Richard Seaver Book/The Viking Press
Published in 1974 by The Viking Press, Inc.
625 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022
Published simultaneously in Canada by
The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited
SBN 670-24407-4
Printed in U.S.A

Notre-Dame Des-Fleurs (Our Lady Of The Flowers)

Jean Genet's brilliant novel, Note-Dame Des-Fleurs has left me feeling kind of sad. I finally finished it after struggling with last 30 pages for last 3 days.

""Dearest,
I'm writing a few lines to give you the news, which isn't good. I've been arrested for stealing. So try to get a lawyer to handle my case. Arrange to pay him. And also arrange to send me a money order, because you know how lousy things are here. Also try to get permission to come and see me and bring me some linens. Put in the blue and white silk pajamas. And some undershirts. Dearest, I'm awfully sorry about what's happened to me. Let's face it, I'm plain unlucky. So I'm counting on you to help me out. I only wish I could have you in my arms so I could hold you and squeeze you tight. Remember the things we used to do together. Try to recognize the dotted lines. And kiss it. A thousand big kisses, sweetheart from
Your Darling."

The dotted lines that Darling refers to is the outlines of his prick. I once saw a pimp who had a hard-on while writing to his girl place his heavy cock on the paper and trace its contours. I would like that line to portray Darling."

Notre-Dame Des-Fleurs, last page.

Our Lady Of The Flowers - pg. 283

"The greatness of a man is not only a function of his faculties, of his intelligence, of whatever gifts he may have; it is also made up of the circumstances that have elected him to serve them as support. A man is great if he has a great destiny; but this is of the order of visible, measurable greatness. It is magnificence seen from without. Though it may be wretched when seen from within, it is then poetic, if you are willing to agree that poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible."

Newark

There is a bright, beautiful day stretching out on the streets outside( and the anticipation of a lazy evening that would surely follow). I guess, we are unofficially in the summer here in Newark. Notre-Dame Des-Fleurs has one of the craziest structures as a book. It is ostensibly a narration by a guy who is writing the book from his prison cell and using the paper cuttings of crime reports from various old newspapers to base his story, yet he uses the memory of old friends and subjects their memories to serve "his story" while at the same time annotating the proceedings in the novel in a true french new-wave style. Jean Genet is crazy.

Our Lady Of The Flowers - pg. 226

"Poetry is a vision of the world obtained by an effort, sometimes exhausting, of the taut, buttressed will. Poetry is willful. It is not an abandonment, a free and gratuitous entry by the senses; it is not to be confused with sensuality, but rather, opposing it, was born, for example, on Saturdays, when, to clean the rooms, housewives put the red velvet chairs, gilded mirrors, and mahogany tables outside, in the nearby meadow."

Our Lady Of The Flowers - pg. 120

"To love a murderer. To love to commit a crime in cahoots with the young half-breed pictured on the cover of the torn book. I want to sing murder, for I love murderers. To sing it plainly. Without pretending, for example, that I want to be redeemed through it, though I do yearn for redemption. I would like to kill. As I have said above, rather than an old man, I would like to kill a handsome blond boy, so that, already united by the verbal link that joins the murderer and the murdered (each existing thanks to the other), I may be visited during days and nights of hopeless melancholy, by a handsome ghost of which I would be the haunted castle. But may I be spared of giving birth to a sixty-year-corpse, or that of a woman, young or old. I am tired of satisfying my desire for murder stealthily by admiring the imperial pomp of sunsets. My eyes have bathed in them enough. Let's get to my hands. But to kill, to kill you, Jean. Wouldn't it be a question of knowing how I would behave as I watched you die by my hand?"

Our Lady Of The Flowers - pg. 99

"Slowly but surely I want to strip her of every vestige of happiness so as to make a saint of her. The fire that is searing her has already burned away heavy bonds; new ones are shackling her: Love. A morality is being born, which is certainly not the usual morality (it is consonant with Divine) though it is a morality all the same, with its Good and Evil. Divine is not beyond good and evil, there where the saint must live. And I, gentle than a wicked angel, lead her by the hand".

Our Lady Of The Flowers - pg. 84

"The only way to avoid the horror of horror is to give in to it. He therefore wished, with a kind of voluptuous desire, that one of the names were his. Besides, I know that you finally tire of that tense, heroic attitude of the outlaw and that you decide to play along with the police in order to reassume your sloughed-off humanity. Divine knew nothing about this aspect of Darling. Had she known it, she would have loved him all the more, for to her love was equivalent to despair."

Our Lady Of The Flowers - pg. 65

"Without bringing her back to reality, for she never left reality, the arrangement of the setting obliged her to shake off the dream. She went to get the revolver, which had long since been loaded by a most considerate Providence, and when she held it in her hands, weighty as a phallus in action, she realized she was big with murder, pregnant with a corpse."

Our Lady Of The Flowers - pg. 57

"Divine died yesterday in a pool of her vomited blood which was so red that, as she expired, she had the supreme illusion that this blood was the visible equivalent of the black hole which a gutted violin, seen in a judge's office in the midst of a hodge-podge of pieces of evidence, revealed with dramatic insistence, as does a Jesus the gilded chancre where gleams His flaming Sacred Heart. So much for the divine aspect of her death. The other aspect, ours, because of those streams of blood that had been shed on her nightshirt and sheets ( for the sun, poignant on the bloody sheets, had set, not nastily, in her bed), makes her death tantamount to a murder."