The Realms of the Unreal

Last year, P. and I watched a documentary by the above title about a man named Henry Darger. A quiet, socially backward man, he grew up in orphanages in the first half of the 20th century--the kinds of places where the Miss Hannigans really did hand out knuckle sandwiches and the orphans sure didn't do tap numbers (can you tell I just played for that show?). He had the kind of education one would expect of one diagnosed early on as "feeble minded"; he grew up to be a janitor, for years living alone in the same tiny apartment.

But when he died, neighbors found a novel almost 16,000 pages long, fully illustrated. It details the story of the little Vivian girls, crusaders in the fight against child slavery. The text is not brilliant, though some might argue that the art is; though Darger wasn't trained, he arranged found pictures (often advertisements) and copied or traced them to fit his needs.

I think this is so interesting--that someone ignored by most around him would go so far to create a whole other secret, complex, beautiful world--and do all his living in that world. It's the story of the poor Lady of Shalott all over again. And like the Lady, nobody noticed him until after he died...would he have been as popular had he tried to send his novels to publishers and sell his art on the street?

In Dangerboy news: all (babysitters included) will be happy to hear that one rash is clearing up, though the other one looks still worse. (I'll leave you to decided which is which.) The result is actually a much happier baby, though some of these tantrums appear to be age-related. If anyone has suggestions on how to deal with tantrums, please let me know!

Today DB loved pizza, and giving out kisses (on the lips!), and playing in dirt, and Teletubbies computer games, and snails, and splashing Mommy's glasses, and "vacuuming", and helping Mommy do the dishes, mainly by taking big globs of extra dishbubbles and smearing them on the wall.