Goodreads thread

Yeah, but I was looking to add some girls with cute pics and similar taste for literature, the guys here are all men in their 20s. Looking for young girls.

Humbert pls go. We all know girls don't actually read.

I'll post mine after I obscure myself

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I used to be friends with a lot of people on here, but I deleted my account for whatever reason; only recently decided to start being active again. Add me, dorks

Can't believe you've read Darger

Well I haven't; nobody has, though Bonesteel and MacGregor have probably gotten close. I've just read a shit ton about him, and books on him tend to have a lot of excerpts.

My mistake. I see that youve read at least five books on Darger, were they only biographies? Could you ggive a rundown on the ones you prefer?
Also, Ive watched a documentary about him and everywhere I read it just says that he had only one friend and was a recluse who spent most of his time at home alone or at masses, is there any insightful info about him? Is there any interview with his only friend in one of the books?

Thanks for the reply

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The only girls on Veeky Forums have a feminine penis

Girl(male) here goodreads.com/user/show/45412379-tom

His one friend, Whillie Schloeder, died a while before Henry did, and unfortunately he couldn't write English, so there isn't much non-fictional correspondence between them (Henry wrote multiple versions of Whillie (and himself) into his works though, so through excerpts, you can get an idea of their relationship). The best persons who could've been interviewed about Henry were the folks who also lived at 851 Webster St; Ben and Kiyoko Lerner especially - and that documentary probably gives one of the better selections of those interviews (even if the doco itself has loads of issues).

As far as the books are concerned: the Biesenbach book has some essays and the longest unedited excerpt of his writing that's around, a good 20-ish page chunk from 'The History of My Life', a sort of auto-biography (if you can read French, this part was translated and published by Aux Forges de Vulcain), but I think the best starting point would be Jim Elledge's book, 'Throwaway Boy'. It's quite sentimental at times, and there's a LOT of conjecture where old medical histories and Henry's habitual lying obfuscates the truth, but it's one of the most accessible works.
The MacGregor book is far and away the most comprehensive, but copies rarely dip below far below $400 anymore, so it's not exactly a good starting point.
Bonesteel's 'Art and Selected Writings' and Lerner's 'Disasters of War' are pretty good collections, and Moon's 'Darger's Resources' has some interesting think-pieces, but again, not really good starting points. 'Sound and Fury' is useless.
There're also some essays in Raw Vision, the INTUIT zine, Groundwaters, 3rd Person (a game design book, of all things), and a German/English bilingual book on outsider art whose name I forget, but their mostly derivative of those scholars' major Darger books.
/ramble

- If you want to learn about Darger the guy, read Elledge's book, but take it all with a grain of salt.
- If you want to familiarize yourself with his art, check out Biesenbach's.
- If you want to familiarize yourself with his writing, you've got options: 'Darger's Resources' for a hypothetical, academic approach; 'Disasters of War' or 'Art and Selected Writings' for unadorned excerpts, and Elledge or MacGregor's books for fictional excerpts integrated with biography or psychoanalysis.
- If you want to understand the technical aspects of his writing and painting processes, MacGregor's is the best.
MacGregor's is probably the best in general, actually.

Welp, I feel like I kind of lost the plot and got derailed there, but basically, if you want insight into Darger's personal life, 'Henry Darger, Throwaway Boy', by Jim Elledge, is what you want.

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I'm not the guy who asked, but thank you for the detailed reply.

Added you in the last goodreads thread. You're a legend mate.

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Add me everyone, I'm a newbie and I'd like to remove the pussy shit from my feed and get some Veeky Forums recommendations.

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Sophia Lillis is a qt.

Thanks. I don't understand the compliment but thanks.

Yeah.

Im really thankful for your detailed response.
I have read that he and his friend were homossexuals who tried to adopts a girl, but failed, is that true?
Also, from the excerpts you have read, do you think he is a gifted writer? His illustrations are certainly terrific, but they don't make sense if they don't go attached with the scene they mean to illustrate. Which books come with his illustrations and explanations of them?

Thanks again for the time

If your goodreads is connected to your Facebook... Can people find your Facebook through your goodreads?

I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.

Ok,maybe not kill you

np my dude! Any excuse for me to spread the love I'll take.

There's no concrete evidence that Whillie and Henry had a homosexual relationship, but I'm almost positive they were. Elledge makes an almost irrefutable series of arguments for this, drawing comparisons between Henry's upbringing and the memoirs and better documented stories of boys in similar situations. (See Ralph Werther's 'Autobiography of an Androgyne' and Clifford Shaw's 'The Jack-Roller')
The adoption thing is a huge topic in itself, but yes, they tried to adopt a little girl and were rejected. How much of that Whillie is a part of isn't really clear, but this is something that definitely ate at Henry for the majority of his life; it stems from the relationship with the younger sister he never had (who was given up for adoption when their mother died in childbirth), and of course, the case of Elsie Paroubek.

As for whether Henry was a good writer, I would say that he definitely has incredible potential. His three major texts come to nearly 30,000 pages though, so there's inevitably a lot of nonsense filler; the excerpts that've been selected for publication are clearly the gems, so I understand they're not necessarily indicative of his general skill.
But there's a mixture of fairytale whimsy and abject horror that I haven't experienced through any other writer, and it's all so raw and earnest. When I read the light-hearted scenes, I get the same kind of enjoyment that I get out of Baum: the language is generally simple, but imagination is let to run rampant. What makes Darger more interesting to me though is that, for him, his story was predominantly an outlet; he had no editorial censor; he takes a story supposedly written for children and subjects his characters to gratuitous torture; has them sexually experiment in homosexual and incestuous scenarios, and deploys through them an unanswerably complex meta-narrative about the writing and conception of this story. Almost everything he writes can be construed as a metaphor for him trying to rationalize or accept some element of his life: sexual repression and abuse, the years in the mental institutions, the loss of his family, etc. - or else to glorify his particular fascinations: weather, war, and angelic little girls.
I won't lie; I'm definitely drawn to Darger in particular because we share a lot of preoccupations. If you're not interested in transexuality, playful fluff, hyperviolence, and chaotically organized, encyclopedic detail, you're not going to be so invested, because he's no Proust; he was prolific, but no literary wizard.

The best book for integrating analysis, Darger's art, and his writing, is MacGregor's "Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal".
For pairing illustrations and writing like an illustrated novel intends, Bonesteel's "Art and Selected Writings" is quite good too.

addenda because character limit:
Bonesteel's also working on editing down the first three volumes of In the Realms of the Unreal, and I know one of his major concerns was how or if to integrate the illustrations; haven't heard an update on that project in a while though unfortunately... I think it may have run out of steam. :/

TL;DR
Darger's actual art and writing are not for everyone, but for those that he's for, he's incredibly powerful; for everyone else, his life and his work is at least an interesting story.

Thanks again for your reply.
I was thinking about buying Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal. Do you think this book offers a good overview of his fiction as well as his art?
From the information I've gathered, I think the illustrations match accuratly what is going on in the book. It's funny how we are used to see unrealistic violence in the cinema so when you see exposed organs like in Darger's it makes some of us disgusted.
I wasn't aware of the incest and homossexuality in his work. Could you expand on that?

Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal is the end and the beginning of Darger scholarship. All that's come since cites it as indispensable, and it dives deeper into analyzing his writing than anything else.
Unfortunately, the cheapest copy on Amazon right now is $380. Libraries tend to have some copies, but just be aware that it's not super accessible and almost as wordy and repetitive at times as Darger himself!

It's definitely interesting how his gore is viewed so differently from cinematic gore, and I think it really boils down to two major things: firstly, the victims are exclusively children, mostly naked, and secondly, their interiors are anatomically correct!; Darger's idiosyncratic collage-drawings are plagiarisms, and it's very disconcerting to see recognizable characters from ad campaigns and comic strips with uneuphemized entrails leaking out of them - like with the writing, it's the juxtaposition of kids and cruor that feels so fucked up and wrong.

In regards to sexuality, a LOT has to be inferred, because America in the early 1900s was incredibly repressed. Masturbation was considered a sign of mental illness, and sex was just not something he was taught about.
Everyone in the art of the Realms has a penis, but genitalia isn't ever mentioned in the writing, and Darger, having studied enough human physiology to get his organ placements correct, almost certainly knew that girls had vaginas.
But Chicago in his childhood was crawling with child-predators and young boys who submitted themselves for money or protection or enjoyment; Elledge speculates that Henry was likely amongst them, thereby coloring his early understanding of sex to be between what on the streets were then called 'Wolves' and 'Lambs'.

Darger's ignorance towards love blurs familial and romantic at times. As far as explicit incest is concerned, there's one peculiarly raunchy scene where Penrod (brother of the eponymous Vivian Girls) has sex with one of them, but what I really was referring to is only formed on top of the extrapolations I've made so far: adoption is a huge theme in Darger's work, with honorary brothers and sisters being added to the Vivian family left and right (and Darger's (the author) own desire to be adopted by his heroines, which magnified upon his accepting the unlikelihood of him ever being able to adopt in the real world), and acts of sexual or physical violence happening indiscriminately across the narrative. There's a part where Penrod asks what 'rape' is, and it's defined as "undress[ing] a girl and cut[ting] her open to see the insides," equating or at least entwining sex and violence.
With the biological gender of every 'girl' ambiguous, every instance of torture is potentially (homo)sexual; with a family so huge and so many self-insert characters, a lot of these interactions become incestuous or autarkic.
It's all so turgid, so sorry if this sounds frenzied; Veeky Forums posts aren't exactly my preferred medium for essays!

very thankful for your explanations,
It's a shame that the book is so expensive, I will try to buy it, if they ever release a second edition.

no problem user; thanks for chatting with me~

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Who owns the copyright of his works and art?

Is there a reason why there arent even scans of his book available let alone published?

Not the specialist here: Before his death, Darger said everything could be thrown away; when the owner of his house was cleaning his things, she noticed his art and decided to keep it. I assume that she has the copyright unless she sold.
You can find photos of his books online.

>I assume that she has the copyright unless she sold.You can find photos of his books online.

Yeah but not of the whole thing itself just the actual books

he wrote more than 30000 pages, you can't expect them to take photos of each page.

The Internet Archive has 200 employees and in a 21 year period has scanned 600 million pages all of which is free.

It could easily be done

There's zero demand for this book. It's basically 15,000 pages of Loli Adventures in Fantasy CivilWarLand

I don't think so, there was a very succesful documentary about him. However, very few people would be interested in whole work.

I think you underestimate not only the interest in works like this but also the autistry of the Internet Archive.

I mean you can find people who will scan books about highways in Kentucky or brochures for 1930 Australian Bungalows - which was scanned today. Compare the interest in things like that to the longest loli adventure and greatest outsider book ever written and it seems obvious.

Take a look at some of the stuff that they scan on that site and youll see that people would be more than happy to scan it - even if only for academics

This reminds of the sorry story of how Google wanted to scan every book ever and make them available, and then the whole thing became entangled in some legal technicalities and they dropped it. It's a funny little story, most of it sad. I guess that makes it a very human story. The was a link to an article posted here a while ago.

minus 1 rating.. how?

It's all been saved to microfilm, so that part's done. The main task now is deciphering and transcribing (which Bonesteel's already started, I believe), because some of the manuscript pages are degraded as hell; Darger wasn't working with the best quality paper, and a lot of it was handwritten, so facsimile prints would be hard to actually read with any ease.
I think I mentioned this above, but Bonesteel had a plan to edit and publish three initial volumes of the Realms. There're concerns about how to incorporate the illustrations and how much (if at all) to edit, but at least the gears are grinding, however slowly.

Yeah, Kiyoko Lerner holds the copyright.
and not everything, but all the writing and all the art that hadn't yet been sold when she decided that maybe she shouldn't have fragmented his body of work, she has control of. Not her biggest fan, to be honest.

Well there's at least one demand I can ensure, Mr. Devil's Advotrips.
He is pretty much the posterboy for outsider art, and there's a decent following for him in France and Japan. His sensibilities have risen up as of late in other niche cultures as well: Tamaki Saito refers to him as an antecedent to the moe/waifu phenomenon in Beautiful Fighting Girl (calling it 'Loli Adventures' is pretty apt), and I don't think I have to state the relevance of the topic of transgenders today.

Forgot to mention, but access to the microfilms is restricted to academics, so unfortunately the laity are stuck out in the cold.

I've added a few people from lit, but there are 1 or 2 people who just add every book someone else reads to their "want to read" list, and all the spam is really annoying

if you add a book to "want to read" list and then delete the news feed on your own page, do other still see it?

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I'm pretty sure that they don't see it.
But there's no problem with adding a couple of books to the shelf occasionally, the problem arises when they add 10+ books every day, clog your feed and have two or three thousand "to-read" books.
There's also an option somewhere to "pause" your feed, so you can add a lot of books without having the updates show to other people.

Unfriend them. I try not to add such people at all.

I think that, while it's true that his landlord has the rights to all the physical objects that Darger left, it may be different when it comes to the copyright of the manuscript. Copyright in the U.S. is currently life of the author plus seventy years. Darger only died in 1973, so the 70 years hasn't run. The copyright is thus held by whoever Darger's estate falls to, unless he had absolutely no living relatives, unless he specifically specified that he passed it on to his landlord. But it sounds like he didn't specify that. Could be wrong though, it's a fact specific thing.
You can restrict your feed in some ways, like to just reviews.
Nope.

Nice numbers

Is there a good reason for this restriction?

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How active is the Veeky Forums group on goodreads? Anyone wanna start a new reading group?

they all end dying pretty fast for what i have seen
anyway here
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I think that i haved added everyone already but oh well

I just made a profile the other night while my gf watched one of her shows. Seems kinda neat to find new books that you might enjoy.

where the cute girls at

Outside.

Just set this up today!

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bump