[Jandek] regarding Darger

[BlackMonk]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Colin Frangos" <nadirn at pacbell.net>
To: <jandek at mylist.net>
Sent: Tuesday, July 26, 2005 9:44 PM
Subject: Re: [Jandek] regarding Darger


> Ah, the joys of the "outsider" community.

Isn't that an oxymoron? I always envisioned any community of outsiders to be 
a bunch of people all wondering "why am I getting grouped in with these 
losers?" Only posers try to be outsiders, the real ones think that what 
they're doing is perfectly normal?  I'd be crushed to find out that Jandek 
saw himself as having more in common with the Shaggs than with Leonard 
Cohen.



> 2. The absence of Nathan Lerner. To be fair, he's dead, so that's not 
> really the filmmaker's fault. But they didn't really give him a fair shake 
> in all of this, and he was for my money the central character in the 
> post-Darger world. Nathan made great efforts to present Darger's work as 
> art and have it preserved as a complete body of work. He was working on 
> getting it all collected in one place so that it could be studied in its 
> entirety. He worked hard to make sure that scholars were given access to 
> the work, preserved his room rather than rent it out again. It was his 
> then-wife, Kiyoko, who was adamant about cutting up the books and selling 
> off the good stuff to outsider collectors, which happened quite a bit in 
> the beginning. In short, Kiyoko really Yoko'd up that situation.

How so? She inspired some of Darger's best work? She did occasionally 
brilliant work herself?