NP Dargermania!

[Dave Monroe]

Spent a night and a day in the Second Windy City of Big Shoulders, and
not in the least to attend a lecture at Intuit by one Michael Bonesteel
on "outsider," "naive," whatever, artist Henry Darger (hard "g,"
apparently), who, as author and illustrator of the 15,000+ page epic (as
yet unpublished in its entirety), The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What
Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War
Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, might be of interest to
someone or another here.  See ...

Bonesteel, Michael.  Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings.
    New York: Rizzoli, 2000.

... not to mention a long poem on Darger by ...

Ashbery, John.  Girls on the Run.  Manchester: Carcanet, 1999.

Bonesteel will also be at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago
Sunday, February 4th, in conjunction with some sort of "performance"
piece on Darger's life.  He was quite interesting and entertaining, but
how couldn't you be when you have a Catholic girls' school custodian who
spent three decades writing about a war bewteen little girls and Civil
War soldiers and dragon-like creatures (inc., much torture and
evisceration) on a massive planet to which our Earth is merely a moon.
And who doesn't seem to have known that there was a certain difference
between little boys and little girls ...

Anyway, obligatory hyperlinks ...

http://henrydarger.tripod.com/

http://www.uiowa.edu/~artmus/darger.html

http://outsider.art.org/

http://www.mcachicago.org/

And keep in mind, Realms of the Unreal was not his only literary opus,
though it was indeed his most magnum one.  There's also a 3000+ page
"autobiography" that, after spending the first couple of hundred pages
on HD's, switches to a detailed description of a cataclysmic tornado
called "Sweetie Pie" ...

Also, as much as I don't like to patronize the megachains, did take
advantage of a clearance sale at Tower Records.  40% off most everything
I got, including a recent recording of Olivier Messiaen's Quatuor pour
la fin du temps (the Deutsche Grammophon one), originally composed and
performed whilst OM did time in a German POW camp during WWII.  Thought
it interesting that the seventh movement is called "Fouillis
d'arcs-en-ciel, pour l'Ange qui annonce la fin du temps," i.e., "Tumult
of rainbows, for the Angel who announces the end of Time."  Apocalypse
(as in Book of Revelations) reference.  Something perhaps in there along
with the ballistics and the Rilke and so forth in Gravity's Rainbow?  Hm
...