>Henry Darger was a janitor in Chicago, and he pretty much kept to himself. He never mentioned that he was writing a book. But just after Darger's death, his landlord discovered his magnum opus, "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." The book is several volumes and 15,000 pages (single space!) of strange, fantastical adventure stories, accompanied by over 300 illustrations of children and semi-human creatures. Some of the illustrations take the form of collage, and the largest clocks in at 10 feet wide.Are you writing a secret masterwork, /lit/?
>>25004540has the actual work ever been published? darger had such a big moment in the mid-00's that it seems silly his promoters never released an edition
>>25004562Probably because society sees autistics as a burden.
>>25004562It's very very long iirc>>25004567I wonder if something similar like Sonichu will be treated as some hidden gem 50 years down the line
>>25004614sell it as a multi-volume set, ez-pz. they could set the price high and an army of the affluent would pony up to display it prominently in their condos
>>25004652just imagine how expensive it would be. probably the most expensive book every printed.
“I figure that it’s better to be a sucker who makes something than a wise guy who is too cautious to make anything at all.”Henry Darger
>>25004614>something similar like SonichuPlease be joking. If you can't see the difference between the artistry and passion Darger poured into his strange, secret world and the lazy, clueless attempts at mass-appealing slop CWC slapped together and put out on display wherever he could you are blind.
>>25005020this makes no sense when you consider he literally never showed anyone his works while he was alive, the only reason anyone even knows about him is because his landlord didn't throw out his drawings and book after he died.he WAS to scared / apprehensive to share his art.
>>25004540>Are you writing a secret masterwork, /lit/?For six years, yes, but I'm about to start self-publishing it.
>>25005574He says "make" not "share." It's the making that's important. Sharing is extracurricular.
bump
>>25005615art cannot exist without other art.sharing your creation is a fundamental aspect of art, if no one knows it exists it's nothing but something in your head.
>>25006926No thats not how that works. You seem to fundamentally not understand what it is to Make.
>>25004540My family doesn't want to admit to themselves what a loser i am so I think they have a fantasy that I'm working on something like this. But I'm not. I'm fundamentally incapable of cresting anything. I just read and work my dead end job in my ugly little incel life.
When do you think he started on this?
>>25006926This is simply false. Sure, if a tree falls in the woods and nobody's around to hear it then something something, ergo if art has nobody to admire it then it may well lose its luster, but that's all irrelevant because in this case someone is always around to hear and/or admire: the maker. And if they choose not to share what they've created, selfishly enjoying it in isolation, well then by God that's their right in my opinion.
Stories like those of Darger and Kafka make me wonder how many potentially important and influential works of art humanity at large never got their hands on because their artists never shared anything and were successful in erasing their work off the face of the earth pre- or post-mortem.
>>25006936If it cheers you up I'm sure they're well aware you're a loser. Watch Tokyo Story
>>25006998I don't watch stuff sorry
>>25007004You should at least watch your weight there tubby
>>25007006I'm underweight
>>25007010Shut up skelly bitch
>>25007010What, an underweight sumo wrestler?
>>25007004I looked it up and apparently it's based on another movie that's based on a stage play that's based on a 1930s novel called Years Are So Long by Josephine Lawrence so maybe read that instead (I haven't). TL;DR an old couple revisits their adult children shortly before the wife's death and it's all about how life is full of losses, losers, and disappointments
>>25007054Sounds agonizing to read for someone in my situation. I don't really want to torture myself.
>>25007056lol pansy
>>25007056You can't even enjoy being useless? And you call yourself a human.
>>25004540This is a real artist
/ic/fag here that occasionally lurksDarger didn't know how to draw but that didn't stop himhe cut pieces from magazines and other media and would trace over and use it as reference and then mesh it all into making truly beautiful artwork I believe their landlord had already seen some of his work, or maybe it was his friend (of which Darger possibly only really had one as he was a very quiet and reclusive man) and they told him that he should put his work out there for the world to see, that people would love itby this point Darger was already old and frail and he simply said that it was too late for thatIf you don't know, I recommend reading about outsider art and outsider artists if people like Darger interesting youI also recommend this 3 episode show, all on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pEyeZhXOUw
from Darger's apartment
>>25007210
>>25007217I believe the landlord didn't demand Darger pay full rent because of how poor he was and they probably felt bad cause he was an old man
>>25004540>Are you writing a secret masterwork, /lit/?I was. Since age 7 I would imagine this massive war between two microscopic races of people on an alternate mega earth, I used to play with twigs and bits of paper in school and pretend they were ships and fighters battling each other. Anyway it eventually grew into this huge narrative from elementary to middle school, then after that I was homeschooled so I started imagining it in my head instead, imagining a tree outside my house was a titanic city many miles tall, able to stand up to enemy siege for years. The main characters died when I left middle school, their son overthrew the corrupt king of the tree city and rallied it for war. I imagined snowfall each year from then on as thousands of enemy landing craft descending to invade. During the winter they'd fight off the enemy siege, then in spring they'd strike back. Eventually when I was 19 I figured it had been more time with this guy as the main character, than with the original main characters. So I had him die and had his kids became main characters but it wasn't the same and I didn't like them. So his daughter went in a quest to revive him, guided by visions form their special psychic gifts, to use ancient nanotech to reconstruct his body. After that the whole story felt fake and more and more I trailed off imagining it. I was 23 then. At 25 I became a full-time agie and that killed my imaginative drive. I did write fragments of the story though. Around 300,000 words. Didn't even cover half of what happened. Did hundreds of shitty drawings too. There's an outline of the whole plot, me recounting all the events I imagined in my head. I feel kinda sad I don't imagine it anymore. In some ways I moved on, in other ways some part of my soul just died. That autistic constant imaginative drive just rotted into nothing.
