stoneunhinged

For three days I’ve done little else but read and think about Henry Darger.  I won’t go into biographical details, since they are readily available using Google.  I will, however, out of courtesy, give a link to a fellow WordPress blogger (who also gives plenty of links): Darger

Here’s the basic story:  in 1973, shortly before Henry Darger’s death, Darger’s landlord found 30,000 pages of single-spaced typing on legal-sized paper, along with hundreds of artworks meant—or so most accounts say—to illustrate the written work.  Darger was a recluse and a menial worker.  His world was going to work, going to mass, scavenging materials for his projects, and his art.  Again, you can read the basic details elsewhere.

I am utterly fascinated by this story for so many reasons it’s hard to know where to start.

One remarkable aspect of the story is the relative dearth of public information.  I spent several hours reading almost everything Google turned up, and most of it is simply repetitive.  Interestingly, much of it would seem to be wrong as well (though it is hard to be sure).  Most of it falls into a kind of urban legend category in which “facts” are repeated so often that most accept them as true.

In spite of this dearth of public information, there is at least one major 600+ page biography and a 2004 documentary on him.  Haven’t having read the book (as far as I can tell, one has to cough up a few hundred dollars to buy a used copy; otherwise it is unavailable), and having not seen the documentary (which is available—in case anyone wants to send me a gift), I would still have to assume that there is an enormous amount of speculation regarding the details of his life.

But this is neither mysterious nor surprising, though the word “mystery” is often used about the story.

What is unusual is that no one seems to have read his work except for a few.  The biographer claims to have “been on every page”, the documentary director made the attempt but gave up, and perhaps a few scholars we don’t know by name have spent countless hours perusing the work.  Otherwise, the work remains unread.

This, in spite of the repeated claims that Darger is chiefly known for his writing, and in spite of claims regarding the literary merit of his work.

Let me address the latter claims first.  The works consist of a 15,000+ page novel called The Story of the Vivian Girls (not the complete title); an 8,000+ page sequel called Further Adventures of the Vivian Girls in Chicago:  Crazy House  (of which I read in one single account—after many hours of reading—that the title is not his); a 5,000+ page autobiography (of which only the first few hundred are actually autobiographical); and the rest consisting of a journal of the daily weather.  Of other odds and ends just as letters and such, I have found no accounts—though he appeared to be the kind of recluse who would hardly write letters.

Yet none of this is published.

Yes, a few excerpts have been published.  A few excerpts from over 25,000 pages of literary fiction.

This means that the vast majority of commentary regarding the literary merits of his work is based on air—that and the comments of the few people who have seen the originals, but who have admitted not to have completely read the work.  Not to mention that neither the biographer (a scholar, it is true, but an art critic by training) nor the documentary director are trained in literary analysis.  Yes, I realize that one doesn’t have to have formal education in literary analysis to know if they are reading crap or not; yet a scholar in the field would at least give another kind of report to the world regarding what is actually contained in the manuscripts, rather than just using it to support a psychological analysis of it’s author.

Does the work show any kind of pre-meditated design, for example?  Are there chapters and chapter headings?  Did Darger construct an index?  What voice does he usually write in?  Does he use allusions? Metaphors? Is there any character development?  Does he demonstrate a distinct narrative style?  Does it remind one of a particular author which may or may not have influenced him?

And so on.  You get the idea.

Then there is the oft repeated—and most obviously false, given the above point—comment that Darger is “known” primarily for his writing, the Story of the Vivian Girls in particular.  This simply cannot be.  We only know the writing by reputation.   It hasn’t been published.  Of course, since it hasn’t been published, it is a rather silly point to say that he is known for the Story of the Vivian Girls and not for Crazy House.  An unpublished sequel is no less unpublished than an unpublished novel.

No, Henry Darger is known for his art.  This makes perfect sense, since the executors of his estate—in fact, the landlords who discovered his work—were in the art scene and knew what to do with the artwork.  They sold it.  For large sums of money.

And yet:  30,000 pages of writing go unpublished and unanalyzed by the public at large.

If I were to be cynical (and those of you who know me know that I am), I would say that there seems to be no way to profit from the writings.  The editing and reproduction of a work which—according to one source I read—amounts to a single novel five times longer than Proust’s, would seem to be a commercial non-starter.  The project would probably take at least ten years if worked on by a team.  And then it might bomb in the marketplace.  I wouldn’t take on the challenge, if making a profit were my goal.

So, in all likelihood, the only people who will ever read any significant portion of Darger’s work are those scholars who go to the museum where the books and microfilm are kept and read them there.

Now, I’m not against people making money.  A massive project to publish the work electronically and on the internet would probably be feasible, and would probably only increase the value of the art work.  Only then could we begin to evaluate the literary merit of his work.  And as long as people are going to go around celebrating the “artistry” of this man, I think such an evaluation is in order.

So, that’s one of the things I find fascinating about Henry Darger.  His written work is legendary.  But almost no one seems to have read it.

jj

Here is the dream:

Variation #1: I am, for some strange reason, high…high…high in the air. I can see the ground like a skydiver sees it. I do not know why I am up here. But I do know this:

I will land safely on my feet.

This my friends, is one of the stranger things about getting older: while dreaming, I remember dreams…or, at least, my pattern of dreaming. I know, while dreaming, that if I am up in the air looking at the ground like a skydiver, that I will land safely—though I cannot fly and I do not have a parachute.

This dream is a bit strange, but is in no ways a nightmare. Because: I know that I will land safely, because within the dream I know it is a dream and I know that I always land safely in dreams.

Variation #2: I am sitting in a passenger airliner (usually in the back…though I can always see what the pilot sees in the cockpit window (dreams!)) and there is some kind of problem with the plane. The pilot is flying low and over highways and between buildings and under bridges—TERRIFYING STUFF!—but…hey…been there before, done that, and while the rest of the people on the plane are scared shitless, I’m doing okay. Because: this is a dream I’ve had before, and within the dream I know this, and I always survive.

So, this dream could probably be categorized as the “I’m in a dangerous position but in dreams I’ve been there before and I always survived and I know I’m in a dream so I know I will survive.”

Comments?

jj

They buried Simone yesterday. (Well, they buried her ashes. In Germany, ashes must be “officially” buried or scattered, but cannot be taken home and put on the mantle or in the garage.)

The funeral itself—the second one I’ve been to in just over three weeks—was…well…not to my liking. It was a religious ceremony, and religious funerals leave me cold. It’s all “God’s ways are not our ways” and “God” this and “Jesus” that, and the person who has died—well, say a few sentences about the person and then move on to talk about the Book of Revelation and the resurrection and a new heaven and a new earth. The person being mourned is lost in a cloud of preaching and phrases of comfort that could be repeated an hour later for the next person on the waiting list. Religious funerals are like Las Vegas weddings, but for the dead. It’s “Insert Name Here” amidst the reading of Psalms and self-serving platitudes of faith and sorrow. The only truly touching part of the service for Simone was the playing of a song by a well-known German singer. The world is off-kilter when God is outdone by a pop-star.

But the problem begins not with religion. Rather, the problem is a common misconception about funerals. Today, in our post-Freud, therapy-infused, self-as-the-center-of-the-universe society, funerals are to console the bereaved. We must have “closure” and find comfort and give each other hugs and say goodbye to the departed. Funerals are for us, not for the dead.

Bullshit!

I mean, it’s not 100% bullshit, but 80% bullshit still leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth.

The ancient Greeks and Romans, the ancient Chinese, the ancient Africans—hell, all the ancient peoples of the world knew better. Double hell—probably everyone outside the western world STILL knows better. Funerals are partly about us and our need to put a death behind us and move on with our lives. Mostly, however, funerals are about remembering and honoring the dead.

I will repeat this, dear readers, so that next time you go to a funeral you might have a chance of knowing why you are there: funerals are about remembering and honoring the dead.

The only gift we can give the dead is to remember them.

When I die, I don’t want some priest or pastor standing behind a pulpit saying things about everyone getting to see me again at the resurrection, or that Jesus will remove all sorrows, or—should I die early—that God’s ways are not our ways. What I want is for someone to remember me. I want someone to say something like this:

Here’s Jeff. A bit unhinged. A Beta alcoholic but not a gamma one. A mediocre musician. His father’s son with his father’s temper. But a good man. A kind man. A loving man. He hated physical work but could read something as boring as Aristotle for 20 hours straight. And he loved dogs. He loved his wife and son, though he should have shown it a lot more. He had a few secrets. We found more than a small portion of pornography on his hard drive. We found an empty whiskey bottle hidden in his sock drawer—though, knowing him well, we know that he never cheated during his February alcohol fast. We found at least ten pounds of various candy bars and gummy bears and other sweets hidden around his bedroom. Irrationally, he didn’t take good care of his teeth. He’s here—not his ashes—because he wanted y’all to take one last look at him. He wants you to feel sorry for him having not had any tobacco in some time. He wants you to understand that’s why he has a roll around his waist. We know from at least once source [that would be this blog] that he was frustrated in his attempt to find out whether some women have truly blond pubic hair: since the rise of the internet coincided with the rise of pubic hair removal, his research went nowhere. Jeff’s favorite song was Red River Valley. He always believed that when his friend Simone died, they should have played Red River Valley instead of letting some pastor speak. He loved the old TV show “Kung Fu”, and watched it on DVD almost every night. He was unnaturally obssessed with playing cards. He should have been a Mormon or a Jew, but his agnosticism kept him from converting to either faith. Mostly, he was a philosopher without students, which tended to make him strange. He was okay, I guess. He hoped some of you would cry today. But he also hoped some of you would smile or even laugh. Mostly, he hoped you would always remember him for the rest of your lives.

Or something like that. I think you get the idea.

Again, the ancients knew this. It is no accident that ALL ancient religions—and most current religions—involved ancestor worship. Ancestor worship is actually just the rememberance of the dead raised to the level of superstition and then orthodox belief .

The desire to be remembered is strong, for it is essentially a desire for immortality. When we say funerals are to console the bereaved, what are we doing? We are denying immortality.

But we need immortality, so we bring God into it and speak of the resurrection. And then, having put all of the responsibilty onto God, we shirk our responsibility to honor and remember the dead. We do it, but not enough, and thus there is a void of rememberance. Thus we find strange distortions in modern society. We find humans who want FAME, who want to be honored and remembered before they are dead. But this desire is pathological. It gives immediate gratification, but to what end? Does anyone really want to live like Madonna? Even Madonna? Or consider the younger victims of this distortion, like Britney Spears. Is her fame anything other than a personal tragedy?

My friends, here is what you should do: make a shrine. Get photos of your family, of your brothers and sisters and parents and grandparents, and put them somewhere. My sister has such a shrine on her refrigerator. When you go to the fridge to get a cold beer, you see a picture of our grandmother (among others). THAT is rememberance.

And next time you go to a funeral, don’t be so damned selfish. Don’t think about yourself; think about the dead, and what they meant to you, and what they did, and who they really were. Celebrate their life.

And if you have the courage, boo the pastor.

jj

Where to begin?

The first time I met Simone, the first thing that struck me was her hair: short and car-stopping red. And she used cheap dye. Sometimes, during a practice or a game on a hot August day, she would sweat red streaks across her temples.

The color suited her. Simone was someone who radiated. She radiated life, fun, friendship, joy and especially energy. Even the last time I saw her—with a bad complexion, an extra ten pounds on her, and obviously weak (all side effects of chemotherapy)—she managed to be sexy. It was in her eyes and her smile. She betrayed little or none of the sadness and fear that she must have felt.

Simone was a hell of a ball player. She had started handball at the age of 7 (not the slap a ball against a wall American kind, but the throw a ball into a soccer-style net European kind), so she threw hard and accurately. Her handball experience left her with a slight tic in her throw: before throwing the ball she rolled it around with her wrist for a split second—presumably to throw off the goal-keeper’s timing. I told her that she didn’t need to throw off the first baseman’s timing, so that she could just throw the ball without doing the wrist jiggle. It took her two seasons, but she did manage to get rid of the tic.

She could hit, too. And steal. I’m tempted to call up some of her statistics. But that would be cheap. Simone wasn’t her statistics.

Simone and I had a strange relationship. She was a flirtatious sort, even with me (I was her coach, for cryin’ out loud!); but after a while I just enjoyed it and even flirted back. She thought nothing of using my lap for a pillow last summer while we sat in the shade at the ball field and she talked on her cell phone for 20 minutes. I thought nothing of holding hands with her while walking in the dark to our bungalow in Holland last Easter. We always hugged and kissed when we hadn’t seen each other for a while. Unfortunately, during the last year it happened quite often that we didn’t see each other for weeks at a time. As her sickness progressed, I saw her less and less.

Nevertheless, she was unbelievably dependable. She usually had a round of chemo on Tuesday morning. Wednesday to Friday she was basically bed-ridden. But on Saturday or Sunday she usually played in games, and played well—with surprising energy, elan and remarkable skill. Even after I put her at shortstop, which she had never played before.

Other than Anika, she was the only one of my softball players with whom I have had any kind of relationship away from the ball field. We had several private conversations at the field and on the phone. We had coffee a few times. I even took her out to dinner once. When she began her chemotherapy, I started sending her text messages of support and encouragement each week—a practice I kept up for well over a year. But when the prognosis got to the point that there was no realistic hope for a cure, she subtly let me know that my messages weren’t helpful to her. I realised then that my concern had become a burden: I was just one more person regularly reminding her that she was critically ill.

So I stopped writing messages or calling, except for a brief note at Christmas and a brief birthday message a week ago Monday.

It was her 30th birthday.

Simone died the following Saturday, on the 10th of February.

What else can I say? I can say that I loved her and that I miss her—but that would be about me. I would rather say something about her, something here on my blog for people to read to get a glimpse of a very special woman whom the world has now lost. And somehow it is not enough to say that she wiggled her wrist when she threw a ball and that her hair dye ran when she perspired. I could say that she was beautiful—but then, I think most of us are when seen deeply.

All I can really say about her, the one truth about her that explains most explicitly how I saw her and knew her, is that she was radiant.

Simone was radiant.

May her soul rest in peace.

jj

…have kept me from blogging.  I have had access to the internet about 2 to 5 percent of the time during the last 10 days.  I used this time for business related emails.

The problems continue, but I just made a small change to my house wiring which *MIGHT* provide a short-term, half-assed solution to the problem.  In the meanwhile, those of you who used to come by regularly should not give up.  I’ll be back as soon as I can be relatively certain of staying online for more than five minutes at a time.

jj

Telling my story about a French toilet in Spain, and reading about a similar toilet in India, and remembering similar toilets in Taiwan—well, I saw a pattern. Seeing a pattern, one looks for a Greater Truth.

Here is the greater truth: Squat Toilets.

The Greater Truth is that the “squat toilet” can be found all over the world. Just google squat toilet and you’ll see I’m right. China, Japan, Turkey, India, Bangladesh…you get the picture. The squat toilet is a general fixture in the Orient.

So why do they have squat toilets in France and Spain? Okay: Spain was occupied by the Moors for 700 years. The Moors were North African Muslims, and Islam is “oriental”. Perhaps squat toilets thus moved north from the middle east to the Moors to the Spaniards and north to the French. But who knows?  Is there a standard historical work on toilets?

It is a great mystery. I mean, the French pride themselves on being civilized. They have their “ooh la la” language and Parisian fashion and the world’s absolute best bread in the baguette. They have their fancy wine and cuisine. They have their well-educated political elite and ultra-sophisticated attitudes towards just about everything in the universe.

But they have squat toilets.

Not everywhere, perhaps. Your hotel room in Paris likely has a sit-down toilet (it also likely has a bidet—but that’s another story altogether). But go to a a normal bathroom in a normal restaurant in a normal town and you might very well have to use a squat toilet.

This is the French Mystery. Why would a country which could create something so civilized and perfect as a croissant not wish to perfect and standardize basic hygiene?  Is French culture all about outward appearance—well-dressed, well-coiffed, and perfumed on the outside, but psychologically indifferent to any advances in shit-removal technology.

Here in Germany things are different. I have never seen a squat toilet. But EVERY toilet, public or private, has a toilet brush nearby—which you are expected to use. That’s right: in Germany, whether you are at a train station or an airport or a gas station or a campground, you can expect that the toilet you use will be relatively clean. Because after you flush you ARE expected to look at the toilet bowl and use the brush to brush away any remaining shit-streaks or particles so the next person doesn’t have to look at them.

Germany, in general, has the cleanest public toilets of any place I have ever been.

Which I find to be one of the nicer things about Germany.

jj

When I was a child growing up in Taiwan, we had a couple of games we played during recess at school. There were four-square and tether-ball and of course there were swingsets and a jungle gym. But the KING of games was kickball.

Last night was our Wednesday softball practice in the gym. Problem was, the other coach was sick—and he has the indoor softballs. One of the girls had a normal softball, which they used to warm up with a bit. But then it came time to actually do drills or something, and we only had one hard softball.

Somehow, out of the middle of nowhere, I got the idea to play kickball. So I explained the concept and we borrowed a half-empty soccer ball and we played kickball for nearly an hour.

Now, they may not have had fun.

But I did.

What a great game! We didn’t have but six people, so we only had two teams of three, which meant a LOT of running. For me—old man that I am—it’s nice to play something fun enough to make me move enough to make me sweat and pant and get my pulse racing (which COACHING softball doesn’t usually do).

I do know that some men my age have resurrected kickball and play it in leagues and such to get their excercise.

But what happened to tether-ball and four-square?

Anyone know?

jj (who—nastalgic, as always—thinks we would play those children’s games as adults.)

Yesterday I was a bit bored. I had read my usual blogs and websites, had my fill of pornography, and didn’t want to leave my computer. So I got the idea of clicking the random blog button on my WordPress control panel.

I looked at maybe fifty or sixty blogs yesterday. Maybe more.

Two things struck me in particular:

1). The vast majority of bloggers (okay, a sample of fifty or sixty doesn’t mean much in the real statistical world) blog very irregularly—even less than I do. This was good information for my bad conscience. Most, as I did, start hot and then cool down with two or three months. This makes perfect sense, of course, since anyone who blogs knows how strange blogging is. You begin a blog thinking more or less of it as a diary, but later become interested in the number of readers, and lastly become disappointed that so few people are reading your blog, and quit (or think of quitting). A strange, strange thing. If you begin a blog thinking “no one’s going to read this”, then why do you later become disappointed that no one is reading it? Human nature is a strange thing.

2). I also noticed a LARGE number of religious blogs. Some seem to be nothing more than an organizational meeting place for Bible studies; others are personal accounts of their spiritual journeys. But there are a lot of them. And of my personal random sampling, the vast majority were Christian. Which got me to thinking: “WordPress”? Does the very name “WordPress” attract Christian bloggers?

Of course, I can only read English and German, and I ran into several blogs in languages I could not read. It could very well be that there are a lot of Hindu blogs, for example, but written in Hindi; so my observation that there are a disproportionate number of Christian blogs could be way off the mark.

jj

I’m always interested in two things regarding my son: 1., getting some kind of connection with him in any way whatsoever (fathers know what I’m talking about, I’m sure); 2., getting him to listen to more English.

So, I got this idea in my head to buy some DVDs of shows which I watched when I was his age.

It may not be clear to everyone who stumbles upon this blog, but my formative years—the grade school years from ages 6 to 12, or whatever they are—I spent in Taiwan. So I don’t know shit about what normal 8-year-old boys were watching on television in 1971. What I DO know, is what my favorite TV shows were. At 8 years old, my favorite show was Thunderbirds.

Growing up in Taiwan in the late 60s and early 70s was a bit different. Taiwan wasn’t, as it is today, a high-tech country. I personally have no idea how it is in Taiwan today when it comes to television, but I imagine that they have the highest-tech stuff possible: a few hundred digital channels in a dozen languages. But back in 1971, we got one or two English programs (with Chinese subtitles) a week. So, if “Twelve O’clock High” came on on Sunday night, virtually all the English speaking community in Taiwan watched it.

But I have digressed. I also saw, back in those days, Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlett, two of the brilliant—no, genius—works of Gerry Anderson during the 1960s.

And I thought I would share it with my son.

The first thing I found out is that sometimes it is an advantage living in Germany, at least when it comes to things that are “cult” in other countries. If something has “cult” status in, say, South Africa, then you pay top dollar in South Africa. Thunderbirds were never big in Germany, so I managed to buy the ENTIRE SERIES in Germany for about 80 dollars. Check prices in the US and the UK and you’ll see what a bargain this was.

Anyway, I bought the entire series only on the most vague memory imaginable regarding its quality. So I was curious about what the series was like.

IT ROCKS!

I can’t say enough good things about it. The puppets are great. The machines are great. The stories are great. The explosions are great. The models are great. The music is great. It’s all great.

Furthermore, my son and I have had nothing else that we were both so interested in. The Thunderbirds have an appeal to men of all ages, and are thus a terrific male bonding kind of thing. I could honestly imagine watching the Thunderbirds at one of my fortnightly poker parties. A room full of grown men crying, “Thunderbirds are GO!” is not unimaginable.

Of course there is also a nastalgic element to the whole thing. The Thunderbirds look 60s (which is not negative: for my son, the 1960s looks as foreign as the 2160s), which by itself almost brings tears to my eyes. And little things, like those sashes they wear—didn’t the girl scouts wear those things?—or the caps—remember when they wore those Thunderbirds-like paper caps at McDonalds? (Oh, Oh, Oh,…………I’m having a nastalgia meltdown, and have to stop writing………….)

Thunderbirds are GO!

jj

EDIT: a brief Wikipedia search would seem to show that the Thunderbirds’ caps were NOT the same as what they used to wear at McDonald’s. The Thunderbirds wear something called a “Glengarry“, and the McDonald’s cap was some kind of “Garrison” cap.

For obvious reasons, I find the modern U.S. Army’s use of the beret instead of the Garrison cap morally offensive. Okay, maybe it’s not so obvious, so I’ll spell it out. Firstly, they are now wearing berets, which are French. Need I say more? Secondly, I like the Garrison cap for nastalgic reasons, even though the Thunderbirds actually wore Glengarries.  I mean, if a Garrison cap was good enough for Omar Bradley…well…there you have it!
jj

I forgot to tell about scaring the shit out of the boys.

Here’s what I did:

I put up a small tent in the attic. I set up a few monster posters (which my son and I made last year out of flourescent paint) and a black light and creepy music for atmosphere. I bought some glow in the dark bugs and threw them on the floor of the tent. I gave each of them a glow arm band, cut off all the lights in the entire house, told them they had to see whether there were any ghosts in the attic, and we walked up all the stairs in the dark with only their arm bands for light. We got to the attic, and I told them they had to stay up there for 10 minutes by themselves or there wouldn’t be any party food tonight.

So they went and sat in the tent, saying things like “I’m not scared…are you scared?”, obviously giving each other some much needed reassurance.

I went downstairs and played with a deck of cards for five minutes.

Then I took a broomhandle and banged the ceiling of the room under the attic. I did it in such a way as to sound like a ghost were walking underneath them to the small closet in the attic.

Of course, in the small closet in the attic I had hung a glow in the dark skeleton in the doorway. Of course, the door was closed. Of course, I had tied some twine to the door and run it along a wall and down the stairs. They couldn’t see the twine with their little glowing arm bands.

I played with the cards a few more minutes, then put on my glow in the dark mask and went VERY QUIETLY up the attic stairs. The boys, against all my plans with music and all, heard me. Or they thought it was me, at least. Didn’t matter. I pulled the twine. Nothing. I pulled harder. Nothing.

What I left out is that the stairs to the attic are on the opposite side of the room from the attic closet. So they think they hear me coming up the stairs on one side, but the surprise is on the other.

The twine I had had to run behind a small table with a drawer. The next time I pulled the twine, it tipped the table over. On top of the table were a couple of boxes of model railway rails. I had not intended to tip the table over, but could not have hoped for a better accident. The table fell on one side of their tent, I came running silently with my luminescent ghost face towards the other, and the boys appeared to be very frightened.

Black lights are cool, aren’t they?

They never saw the skeleton in the door way. I had to point it out to them/

Afterwards they claimed not to have been, of course. Of course. Three seven year-old boys aren’t really frighted of anything, are they?

Well, of course they are on a one-on-one basis. But with each other? “Didn’t scare me…but I was pretending to be scared so that you would be scared.”

jj