We like to keep close the trembling fictional works of Jean Genet, namely OUR LADY OF THE FLOWERS (1951), one of our most treasured paperbacks from the archive.
Genet was playwright, activist, poet, thief, and novelist, who didn’t start writing until the age of thirty two. But during his earlier years, he was arrested multiple times for riding trains without fare, stealing notebooks, and embezzling money to attend the carnival. He was always one of my heroes as a teenager, but it was something I kept to myself for many years. My grandmother would often state, “…take your hat off to the thief.” And I found myself believing in this concept as well.
Genet was most famous for his association with the Theatre of Cruelty and the plays The Balcony, and The Maids. But we prefer Our Lady of the Flowers—an erotic, queer whirlwind. Genet writes in a state of dreams...
"The drunken grave diggers, where ghosts are composed of neither smoke nor opaque or translucent fluid. Squatting, probably on a rug, they sought the number and found it after entangling themselves as they cut the wire from the watchmen's quarters.
Our Lady of Flowers plucks off his adventure. And the door of the cabinet opened. They pocketed 300,000 francs and a treasure, and fake jewels, we're the ones who are mopey, and lousy and tough.
I believe in the world of prisons, its reprehended practices, but the diversion must feed on dreams. Must not be dandyish and bedeck myself with new adornments, smoking ten to a butt, seven sailors carrying a message to god, holding between his teeth the flame of which as it reddened his face, so pure a marvel that he was.
Swallows nests beneath his arms. Snuff colored velvet caterpillars mingle with the curls of his hair. Beneath his feet a hive of bees..."
We've recently discovered the work of Hungarian filmmaker Márta Mészáros, and featured a behind the scenes look at her feelings on the film industry for our latest episode. We chose her lonely masterpiece from 1975, ‘Adoption’, which caught our attention out of all her work —I took it in, twice in one day, like how I used to watch Tarkovsky in the 90’s.
As we've come to observe recently, there seems to have been far too many decades of bad filmmaking, which allow for films such as ‘Adoption’ to truly shine, nothing short of a miracle. Women produced many of these essential filmic treasures. Kata, the main character in ‘Adoption’, is a middle aged factory worker, who comes to the conclusion that her lifelong relationship with a married man no longer deserves her attention. Unless they were to bear a child together. When he refuses, she tells him she'll raise the child without him. Although with such a proposal at hand, this man becomes much too nervous to continue their entanglement. Is it because he imagines she's going to purposely get pregnant? Or does he secretly desire to have a child with Kata as well?
As this part of Kata’s life begins to fall apart, she befriends a young woman, who at first appears tender yet also a bit wild-eyed, as if embodied by Natasha Kinski. Kata’s new friend was searching for a home herself, outside of the shelters for abandoned children she'd been frequenting. And so two strangers provide for one another what the other desperately seeks. But the relationship between these two women becomes just as complicated as the one Kata was seeking to dismantle.
We've also fallen for Lyall Watson’s essential nonfiction release, Heaven’s Breath: A Natural History of the Wind -with a focus on Chapter 8 ‘The Perception of the Wind’, which we love particularly because of Watson’s playful method of examining the linguistic roots of a whirlwind/vapour/breath et alia.
“Languages themselves become windblown…there are few things as steady or as changeable, as fierce or gentle, as unstable…as balmy, or as protean as wind -Sanskrit’s Nirvana incidentally means ‘to be extinguished altogether’.
And in all languages there is the same blurring of boundaries, roots and meaning between the words for wind, spirit, breath and soul —as though each felt they clustered about the same essential mystery, and were loth to get too close for fear of startling or trampling on it.”