CHRISBOOKSALON: A FORUM FOR LITERARY DISCOURSE

I recently finished Jean Genet's first book, Our Lady of the Flowers; which I first brought up in a blog entitled: Jean Genet and Me; or some such.  I promised an analysis; and as I try never to renege on said, I shall attempt to tackle Msr. Genet's debut in my new feature: CHRISBOOKSALON (one word); wherein we discuass the written word in whatever form it presents to us.  I thought "Chris' Book Club" was a bit too prosaic; and as Ms. Winfrey already has the most famous literary salon of all with a similar moniker, I thought I'd try to be a bit more original.  Hell, we can slap my chop on it at some point; much as Ms. Winfrey has commandeered the capital "O."  I wonder if she's ever considered trying to copyright it; the letter "O" that is.  Like Ralph Lauren tried to copyright the word "Polo."  Rich people, am I right people!??! 
Before I get into Msr. Genet; I thought I'd bring up another interesting writer who has traipsed the periphery of my interests and that the ComputerWeb has compared me to visually (without my prompting).  One Yukio Mishima (1/14/25-11/25/70).  I posted a picture of me in leather on a blog and Bing picked it up and alogorhythmed it and put it up with all these pics of Asian martial arts men.  Mishima was in there too.  Let's take a look!  Here's me:

And here's the picture of Mr. Mishima it compared me too:

Compliment taken.  The man was HOT. Or atsui in Japanese.  Not to mention SEKUSHI!  But what do we know about him?  You may know a lot about him.  Me, not so much.  I remember there was a movie about him back in the 80's; and though I was quite interested in it, I didn't see it.  Perhaps because I had NO IDEA who he was. And it was definitely the kind of thing I would've gone to see.  Maybe I was busy.  Here's the poster:

I mean, I don't think most Americans had any idea who he was; and that poster certainly wasn't going to draw anyone into the theater.  I mean, the man was handsome.  And seems as though he was pretty good natured.  Lots of pictures of him smiling.

So, to this day, despite my interest; I have next to zero idea about anything about this man.  I do know that the director of the movie is married to Mary Beth Hurt.  She's one of my all time favorite actresses; so of course, she pretty much stopped working.  'Memba her?  She played Helen, Robin Williams' wife in The World According to Garp.

But before we continue, I wanted to announce a name change.  The book club is now going to be called CHRISBOOKSALOON.  Why?  Well, because I really like the quadruple "o" action and I don't like to take myself too seriously; I'm kinda honky-tonk; and, I'm a goof.  And yet, at the same time, it has a kind of Scandinavian feel to it, don't you think?  Like super-serious, Ibsen/Strindberg energy.  Or a nice Ikea credenza!
So, I've been doing some initial research on Mr. Mishima.  Not so good...way too political, if you ask me.  And Japanese politics, yet; which I know even less about.  I'll get into all that.  But here's the good news:  he loved cats!  And who can't love a man who loves cats?

Now, why didn't they put that on the poster?
But now, back to Msr. Genet:  Here he is, perhaps the most dapper convict next to John Gotti.

I read Our Lady of the Flowers and my main question about it was; how did this clearly super-intelligent, highly educated, sophisticated intellect end up in jail?  Not just end up there; but seem to thrive there and enjoy it?  And not just enjoy it but be really kind of into it; so into it that he was excite erotiquemont.  I did not do a lot of research.  I tried to glean from the book the answers; that is, once I determined it was more or less a prison journal.  An extremely creative and fanciful journal; but a journal.  I ordered a copy from Ebay, with this cover:

A softcover.  It was actually published in France, originally, in 1947.  The first English language edition from 1949 featured a sketch of Genet by Jean Cocteau.  Now how does someone go from jail to having high-end editions of their debut novel with drawings by celebrated French artistes on the cover?  That is my next question.  But first, let's get into what the book is about.

I read it about two months ago and already a lot of it has flown out of my head.  But it's not like there's a lot of "plot" to latch on to.  It's definitely Jean Genet relating the story in the first person; but he also seems to be taking on the persona of several of the characters within the narrative; that is, if we can really call it a proper "narrative."  The story mostly revolves around a person called "Divine."  Divine--and I would say here, not to be confused with the famous drag queen of John Waters' movies--but I can't, since I suspect this is exactly where Divine got her name and persona--is a male prostitute who presents as a woman and is same sex attracted.  So, in the old parlance, a transvestite hooker.  He/she is not "transexual"; that is, a person born male who has taken hormones and still has a penis.  Also, formerly known as a "pre-op tranny."  But it doesn't seem as though Divine is "pre-op" or has taken female hormones; so, is a male person who wears the clothes and make-up of the traditional female and services male customers or "johns."  In his/her private life, they are romantically and sexually attracted to men.  I'm thinking pretending to be a woman was one way in which gay men of the past were able to actually be with men.  Just being a man with a man, apparently, was a lot more difficult.  And it was also a lot easier if you happened to be in an all male environment, like prison.
So, Divine lives in a garret, maybe on the outskirts of Paris?  The garret overlooks a cemetery.  Divine may also be an alter-ego of Jean Genet's; although it's never really explicitly stated.  Another element of this is that Genet is sort of projecting characters as "ideas" on to attractive young men whose photographs he's torn from magazines and newspaper articles and hung on the walls of his jail cell.  One of these "characters/idea" is a young man named Culafroy who may or may not be Genet as a young man and/or Divine as a young man; before he became a "woman." Are you still following this?  It's basically Genet entertaining himself with this sort of dreamlike fantasy; but something of a plot does emerge; particularly later when a charater named "Our Lady of the Flowers" shows up.  "Our Lady" seems to be a young man who may have been an actual person who murdered an old man and that Genet is obsessed with.  
Usually, I do not particularly enjoy this kind of literature.  Stream of consciousness?  Magical realism?  Long form poetry as prose?  But in this case, there was enough "plot" to keep me moving forward.

To be continued...