Gerrit would have turned 80 on Saturday March 30 and that should be celebrated in a big way, that’s what his biographer Arie Pos – friend of the show – publisher Ezo Wolf and my person thought.
(Also StamCafé)
by Arthur van Amerongen
De Bezig Bij paid no attention at all to the birthday of their star author and the languishing publisher would rather put the idiotic Jew-hater Dyab Abou Jahjah in the spotlight than all of us Gerrit.
For the young readers who have no idea who Komrij is, here is a cheerful video in which the good man stumbles through the hell of Salou sweating in a black suit, a name that probably rings a lot of bells among the commenters.
And here is a razor-sharp Komrij about the betrayal of his generation, in Pauw and Witteman’s talk show.
Anyway, publisher Ezo Wolf came up with a nice package of reissues and new editions of Gerrit’s work and organized various happenings in Belgium and the Netherlands last week. Last Saturday I would perform with Arie Pos, musician, singer, radio and television presenter Marcel Vanthilt (here almost 40 years ago at MTV), and writer and poet Tom Lanoye in a tribute to Gerrit in the cultural center De Studio in Antwerp.
To my great amusement I heard that Lanoye, who had just won the prestigious Prize for Dutch Literature, did not want to be advertised with me, the Batavian fascist. I was just allowed to sit in the audience by the grace of the Flemish icon with his inexhaustible wardrobe of bizarre, heavily swearing clown jackets. The bitch fight – from which I distance myself as a gentleman – goes back to the time when my book Brussels Eurabia came out. In the Brussels television news I referred in my well-known ironic and mild tone to a comment by my professional cousin Lanoye, who had recently been beaten up with his partner in the Belgian capital. The pushers – you wouldn’t expect it – were Moroccans. Lanoye condoned this mischief by a pack of Mohammedan rascals with the historical words that the Catholic Church is infinitely worse than Islam because the Vatican had allowed and even encouraged pedophilia for centuries. He never forgave me for my attack on Tommie the Mohammedan hugger.
In a recent interview in De Morgen, Lanoye’s club magazine, Lanoye tirelessly deals in politically correct nonsense – preaching to his own parish – and the circle jerk of virtuous Flanders has come full circle again.
A few examples:
“We really need to think about who we want to accept as our moral compass. Elon Musk: really? A cokehead who also chases through a cannabis plantation every day? His stainless SUV tanks are rusting, the shares of ‘his’ Twitter are crashing, his rockets are exploding and he lends his satellites more to Putin than to Zelensky.
“Another advantage of a second life in the southernmost point (Cape Town, AvA) of another continent is that you end up in different discussions. I abhor the ANC’s courtship of Putin, even though there are geopolitical explanations for this, but on the other hand I find it heart-warming how people here sympathize with the people in Gaza. You get a completely different input. I am proud of South Africa for suing Israel as a potentially genocidal apartheid state at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
Brrrr. Fortunately, I did not have to enchant myself with Jodocus Kwak on the stage of De Studio in Antwerp, although he did recite one of Gerrit’s most beautiful poems in a wonderful way, entitled Love.
LOVE
They lie on top of each other, scabies on eczema.
You hear the flakes cracking. Rose jumps up.
Their skulls shine like a diadem.
She tenderly caresses his swollen crop.
His little finger disappears into an abscess of blood.
She squirms. Mucus pops out of her mouth. A bladder
Exploded. His crop becomes bluer. He takes courage.
He rolls her onto her back. He’s the boss.
Then his jaded loins start to rage.
It’s a mighty crunch. The slop
There is no end to drool in pus.
She pukes. God’s miracle in a nutshell.
Furthermore, Roos Custers van Tzum wrote a neat report about the happening in De Studio and you can read it here.
Charles Hofman & Gerrit Komrij
In the evening I was guest of honor at ‘t Scheldt, a Belgian website that brings satire and defines it as “shaming individuals or government towards improvement”. The anonymous authors and cartoonists use irony, sarcasm, black humor, parody and absurdism to expose sore points in society. You could say that ‘t Scheldt is a mixture of GeenStijl, Propria Cures, Charlie Hebdo and Harakiri. They wrote a scathing piece about me, entitled: Away with nest-fouler Arthur van Amerongen.
In a beautiful building in Antwerp, where I was treated with all the respect by the beau monde of right-thinking Flanders, I presented my new book Annus Horribilis (the GeenStijl edition is sold out) and I spoke with Arie Pos about Gerrit Komrij.
Today, Wednesday, I went with my publisher and professor Pos to the Kramer bookstore in Winterswijk for the celebration of Komrij’s 80th birthday. The drive from Huize Muntz in Zaandam to Gerrit’s birthplace took as long as my flight from the Algarve to the Netherlands. I love the Achterhoek, which in many ways is reminiscent of my native village Ede, which is just as rural as Winterswijk. I recognize a lot of Komrij’s humor, which is shit and piss-oriented, and extremely rude about everything. Are Cacophony. Encyclopedia Of Shitis masterful.
Here’s a beautiful excerpt:
Do not think, ladies and gentlemen, that petomaniacs are vulgar. Petomania is a matter of infinite delicacy. Anyone can fart in a vulgar manner. A petomaniac looks down on that. Even from a woman who, by simultaneously letting out a fart, an armpit fart, a belch and what they in feminist circles, not without some humor this time, call a “sheath chatter”, performs a remarkable example of quadraphony, even from such a A woman is not impressed by the petomaniac. A petomaniac doesn’t give a damn. Let me give him a definition. A petomaniac is someone who manipulates gas accumulations in such a way that the result is a work of art, or at least causes amazement. For him, the fart is not an end, but a means. Winds are his material. The true petomaniac knows how to model his repetitive farts into a fugue by Bach, or he blows through his shit hole An der schönen blauen Donau.
The more soldierly, less artistically inspired part of the petomaniacs shoots a cork from a bottle at a distance of twenty meters, or, with its warbling back part pressed against the keyhole, sets a clock in another room to chime, merely by to target. These are the powerhouses among the petomaniacs, the oh-so-skilled, but somewhat unimaginative brutes. I prefer the artistic farts, ladies and gentlemen, the products of the lyrical gas. I once had the privilege of attending the performance of one of the last living artists, a baritone. The language he spoke could rightly be called shitty.
He began his performance with some light… exercises: he blew out three candles of varying sizes with his sighing base – the smallest with a beeper, a young girl’s wind, the middle one with a big, formidable roll, and the largest candle with a sound that most resembled a violent thunderstorm in the high mountains. Then he smoked a cigarette in his, what I will call artistic opening. All this was nothing compared to the main part of the program, the… highlight. The petomaniac had disappeared behind the curtain for a few minutes, I suspect to get air, to inhale rectally, so to speak, he came back, crouched down, and immediately started playing from his lower mouth – so clean! So soul-piercing! Never have I heard a more beautiful song. – You could almost hear the words. It was very exciting too, a march, an old country tune, I can’t say it anymore. In those windy minutes the beauty of art was revealed to me, the soul of music. I had become a different person forever. Now that I had tasted the laxative source, I was like a naked wanderer on this earth, and from now on my life would only be about, even a search for, the shit thrush. Petomania, ladies and gentlemen, had changed my life. I can now also blow a modest tune myself, after long exercises. On a quiet Sunday morning you can come to my house – oh! very modest indeed! – the robin taps on the window straight out of my uh… ass, and very painfully, very timidly I just manage to let me in, let me in. I won’t go any further, it remains just a hobby.
After the presentation in the packed accounting room, Arie showed me Komrij’s Winterswijk: his humble birthplace, the enormous mural with a portrait and a poem by Gerrit, and last but not least the Komrij lyceum. With rainbow stairs! Gerrit died shortly before he could officially open the lyceum that bears his name, and I asked Arie what Komrij would have thought of that. Gerrit was not the rainbow type.
Arie: Gerrit was not so open about homosexuality. It had to be some kind of secret society. He didn’t really think the sexual aspect was very important. He thought it was much more important that it was some kind of illegal resistance movement. People who could act against society and against all established norms and values in society. That subversiveness appealed to him. Being different and not wanting to participate in existing opinions and values. He thought gay marriage was a kind of capitulation because it actually meant stepping above the enemy. With that, the illegal and secretive thing he liked so much disappeared. Secret clubs and bars where someone lurks through a hatch to see who is allowed in. He liked that much more.
I conclude with a poem by Gerrit about his native village.
Winterswijk
Sometimes I dream, in the distant hot sun,
That I’m going to visit my village,
The school, the greenery, the street where it started –
No roads lead to it but umbilical cords.
Something glows and sings on the horizon.
I’m almost there, in the hollow of the map –
I will coincide again with my source –
The sidelines, but worth a detour for me –
The gray Jacobskerk looks like it is made of gold.
I’m kicking Weurden on the tail
Then, quickly, the phantom image, so familiar, subsides,
In a deep hole, I’ll never really get there –
Yet there is something persistent in my dreams,
For I keep repeating this pilgrimage.
