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Kolkata, West Bengal, India
A FLAPDOODLE ... A COPROLALOMANIAC ... A DOPPELGANGER ... a blog when written when deranged for a man to give one gyp and what a gyp with a gusto ... this blog a mistaken ladder furnishes its one carrying self-lagoon ... rotten blog holding a periapt to vomit to laugh and cry and shout and yell ... a preface to the birth of an ablazed moon ... all white all gay all blood all sand ...

Sunday 27 January 2013

EDITORIAL – II FOR ‘REBELLARE’ : 19th JANUARY 2010 ISSUE


            Tempus fugit. A fortiori. Time flies. With stronger reasons. On 19th December 1910, a supercilious penman named Jean Genet was born in Paris, and with his heretical pen, stultified all the vulpine and lupine hegemony of the jackanapes of his contemporary literary world. A thousand thousand gun salutes to this plenary Quixotic for the veracious proclivity of his adroit pen, on behalf of us, on his birth centenary.
            An illegitimate child abandoned by his mother, Genet began to write while imprisoned for burglary. Apart from his first novel ‘Our Lady of the Flowers’ (1944) portraying an underworld of thugs, pimps and hustlers; and the ‘Miracle of the Rose’ (1945-46) telling of his adolescence at a notorious reform school; perhaps his most demented polemic is ‘The Thief’s Journal’ (1949) recounting his life as a tramp, pickpocket and prostitute. Genet does not write about homosexuality. He writes as a homosexual --- sans defense, sans justification, sans repentance or a plea for social understanding. His taste and activity as a thief were related to his homosexuality that had set him apart in solitude in his society. To him the prison embodied freedom --- freedom from heterosexual taboos, freedom from bourgeois preoccupations of glory and wealth, and it united him in abjection with the humiliated and the deprived sections of humanity. He became a leading figure in avant-garde theatre with just five plays --- ‘Deathwatch’, ‘The Maids’, ‘The Balcony’, ‘The Blacks’, and ‘The Screens’ --- stylized Expressionist dramas designed to shock and implicate an audience by revealing its hypocrisy and complicity in an exploitative social order. Admired by the Existentialists, he was the subject of Jean-Paul Sartre’s historic and adulatory biography ‘Saint Genet’ (1952).
            Today, as we should doff our hats verily in honour to this genius; we also must vow to proscribe every single puerile and jejune pen-shit of each such asinine writer, who itself is an astringent bane, a stigma, an onus --- in the literary territory. Thereby, in culmination, heralding an adage for the non-cerebral mediocre readers before choosing books to buy : “Caveat emptor.” Let the buyer beware!

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