ask sam delany a question?

can you confirm that the late michel foucault and the late rock hudson were lovers ?

(if this is the book he's signing nix this i guess)

which is his favourite ep of xena? how does he feel now that the marginal territories of tv are lightly but pervasively delanyised (xena = neveryon; the tribe = dhalgren etc etc)

we really are in a dazzling egalitarian future!

my question is semi-serious: does he feel that he's less of an outsider today in ref off-mainstream pop culture then eg in 1975?

what does the think though is still valid, and in many ways vital-or how about this-if it is the opposite of his taste, then what does he make of his taste being under repsented ?

the queering of beauty being vain and young should be of no suprise, but does it isolate queers like delany ?

also i want him and gore vidal to wrestle in cream corn.

I can't see that there will be a new Neveryon. Since the first story was also the last, any more would fuck the structure badly. Telling him that you think Xena is exactly like Neveryon might be very funny.

But yes, read The Mad Man (if you can get your hands on a copy) if you're really curious -- it's his third (and best, though I haven't read/found the first one yet) porn novel, as well as an academic murder mystery, as well as... well, it's a lot of things.

Actually you could ask him whether he's working on another porn book.

But is there another Delany book out that I haven't heard of? Oh I hope so I hope so.

Anyway, I've met him; he is, predictably, a very nice guy.

random house is reprinting delany's books under the vintage imprint with new covers (which are beautiful but flimsy, like most every other trade reissue from the last five years, see the new penguin classics series). so far we have dhalgren, babel-17 and this one, called 'aye, and gomorrah', a sort of "best of" short stories.

if i figure out how to phrase your question anthony, i'll ask him.

Why buy the new editions when you can get the old ones dirt cheap? How many new editions of Dhalgren do we need (didn't Wesleyan just put one out a few years ago?)? Is Dhalgren to be reissued as frequently as the $20?

Anyway yes. Most of his books involve severely bitten nails. I was very conscious of being a nailbiter when I met him.

woland. i know that name from somewhere

personally, as much as i like the new covers, they'll never hold a candle to the old bantam paperbacks, what with their silver-age nasa publicity oil paintings of starships and nebula. is their a golden treasury of silver age sci-fi painting out there?

see also the cover for bantam's dhalgren, feat. a vast, post-apocalyptic cityscape, enormous red sun, and three microscopic extras from "the harder they come" hanging out in the corner.

The Dhalgren cover is great. I saw a cheap copy at Powell's and almost bought it to give away to someone, as I usually do when I see cheap copies of it, and then realized that I still had a copy or two that I hadn't given away yet. Well, it's not for everyone.

If I could give away copies of Times Square Red, Times Square Blue like that, though, I'd be very happy indeed!

http://www.infinitematrix.net/art/fundraising/Nova22.jpg

just been bookshopping and i didn't see any old editions of his books but hopefully this reish will mean some of these old ones turining up in 2nd hand bookshops.

1) I was wondering about your stories often being cited - particularly Neveryon - as an inspiration for Xena: Warrior Princess. Are you aware of Xena and do you see it (and other Sword & Sorcery movements) as part of a general mainstreaming of fetishism?

2) Did you know Sun Ra credits William Dhalgren in Space is the Place? What do you think of Afrofuturism?

Then, when I say Xena, I got this huge laugh from the 200 person crowd, who I think were laughing at me. And Delany goes "Oh, GOD".

And then - mark s you would have DIED - he goes:

"Sword and Sorcery, that's so vague, what does that mean? I don't think QUESTIONS OF INFLUENCE are very interesting - who influenced what or what's influenced by who - that doesn't get a lot of mileage out of me."

So, sensing end of question, I repeat myself - do you see it anyway as the mainstreaming of fetishism?

"Oh yeah, sure. Fetishes always enter the mainstream and we create new ones in their place." (duh).

Thank god I didn't ask about Sun Ra (later he sez: "literary fiction analyzes the subject and genres analyze the social object, but i don't think genre conventions grant any special privelege or power").

The message I got: fuck y'all if you weren't invited to the graduate luncheon. i'm here to promote the product. Which is fair, of course, I'm just not comfortable looking the fool.

anyway thank you vahid, and v.sorry the spotlight felt maybe a bit hot and horrible up there for a moment - however at least you can be proud knowing you didn't ask creepy asslick questions so hurrah!!

Are people with only one shoe a running theme in his books? I've only read Dhalgren and Nova and it shows up in both.

I bought this book used at Mary Jo's Book Exchange in Canby, Oregon, back when the population was about 3000 people. I took it home and started reading it and felt guilty, weird, scared: it was gay! and straight! and sexual! and cool! and difficult! I was probably in like 6th or 7th grade. Some education, no? Anyway, it freaked me out too much and I sold it back. Years later, in hschool, my issues sorted out, I read an article in The Portland International Review about how important, etc., it was. I bought it the next day at Powell's, with that same excellent cover, for like $2. I didn't know Delany was black OR gay OR anything.

And damn were The Einstein Intersection and Babel-17 mindfucks of the highest order.

actually HAS there been a single srd movie adaptation. i suspect not.

maybe gaspar noe can try his hand at hogg and finally eat up the rest of his art-house goodwill.

Nova could make a good film. Honestly I'm not sure what else would! I mean, there's a lot that might make interesting films, but not much that could get financing to get made.

xpost LOL

in terms of wider pop success, aside from the lack of movie adaptations, and yr right, though i think some of the shorts could be spun out or maybe babel-17, i think the KIND of novels he wrote, as much as the fact that he didn't die young and not yet reclaimed by the ivory tower and has always purposely straddled the line between the straight lit avant-garde and sf himself since dhalgren, is a big part of why he hasn't been given the "guy you thought just wrote shitty drugstore paperbacks was actually a genius!" treatment by the believer crowd.

tom six's 'hogg'

i don't know -- don't you think there's something (ick) zeitgeisty (don't ask which zeitgeist i mean) about pkd -- which explains why the stuff he did adapts so well to being farmed out for adaptation? whereas delany's recurring concerns are sexual freedom and critical theory, neither of which i think anyone wants to see an SF movie address

einstein intersection

plus also this is a really obnoxious thing to say, but -- he's just too good! currently HBO is dumbing down george r.r. martin -- they looked at a george r.r. martin novel and thought to what degree and in which way can we best dumb this down? (the answer was 'more hookers') (this is not actually surprising) -- the hell would they do with stars in my pocket like grains of sand

yeah, I also think PKD's concern with reality and simulacra resonates with cinema very naturally. Delany's interest in language much less so.

well there are also like two good pkd movies so i wasn't exactly offering it as a prescription

i think i will happily defend any philip dick movie that does not feature damon or affleck

or nicolas cage, actually, him too

A good film of Heavenly Breakfast could be made for very little money, but I guess it would be dumbed down to "lol hippies."

A great film of "Aye, and Gomorrah..." could be made, but not in the US.

come on, syfy will make anything.

he has an interview in TPR! doesnt that count as "the 'guy you thought just wrote shitty drugstore paperbacks was actually a genius!' treatment by the believer crowd"?

delany's been taken seriously by certain factions of the literati since the mid-70s at least. there was no after-the-fact rediscovery.

Yeah, that's why I specified higher popular profile. He doesn't need any help in the critical community that I can tell.

I assume max and SHGD aren't referring to the same people as the believer crowd.

Steve Paulson asks Delany a bunch of questions.

"To the Best of Our Knowledge" radio interview.

transcript?

does he explain what the xlv want?

otherwise i'm not listening.

happy 70th birthday (one day late)

so through the valley... apparently finally came out last spring. has anyone read it? (i haven't, because i'm poor.) the only positive reviews on amazon seem to be from delany fanboys and the only negative reviews seem to be of the ewwww-gay-sex variety, so i'm curious.

i started it, got a couple hundred pages in. it's pretty remarkable but at the same time very slow moving, i guess. like a utopian counterpart to the mad man's descent into hell. i stopped in the middle of ... spiders because i'd only read mad man a week or two before and i found myself thinking "really? more piss-drinking?" which wasn't the attitude i wanted to approach it with. (there's a lot of piss gets drunk, in the book.)

I got about 80 pages in and lost interest.

thanks for making us wait so long for your boring utopian piss-drinking porno, chip.

i enjoyed this blog posting

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2009/02/like-pop-rocks-for-the-brain-samuel-r-delanys-stars-in-my-pocket-like-grains-of-sand

about my favorite book of all time

nah it's a really good boring piss-drinking utopian porno though??

like, repetition and tedium and minimal variation are aesthetic strategies i'm fond of, and to consciously get there through porn is a smart aesthetic choice -- and what he's getting at is dramatizing his very small utopia (one in which queer men of colour can drink all the piss they want with minimal harassment and a local government that's actively involved in halting the spread of sexually transmitted disease) in a way that makes it lived-in rather than didactic

i think the mad man might be the larger novel in a lot of ways (albeit not, er, physically) but spiders is at least an impressive demonstration of what a 'late style' might look like for him

oh i'll definitely read it. (at some point this week i'll drag my fat ass to the library.) and it's not as if i am not already a sucker for sam delany novels with corprophagia. actually the review on the tor site linked to from that stars piece that v posted is probably the best i've read yet. (though i think she's a little too...prissy. even as she tries to say that she understands why the copious perversions have literary value.)

sometimes i wonder if there really is anything i could read that would gross me out enough to stop reading.

the last delany i read was dark reflections, which i remember being melancholy and pretty great.

I skimmed through most of Hogg in a bookstore and ultimately couldn't bring myself to buy it. My daughter was about 7 at the time and it squicked me out just a little too much.

i read hogg when i was...25? i guess? maybe earlier. it didn't gross me out, per se, but it definitely became a slog. i don't know if i ever finished it.

i mean i can understand why he felt he needed to write it, and as a busting-loose-of-all-societal-and-literary-constraints move it has historical value, but i think everything he was trying to do there he did better in later books (including, it sounds like, spiders), mostly because they have actual plots and characters you care about, rather than just a steady, numbing accumulation of taboo-busting grossnesses.

actually i did finish it, because i remember the last page very vividly now, and it's a hell of a punchline if nothing else.

i picked up 'through the valley...' again this morning and it's interesting how easy it was to fall back into the rhythm of it, eric and shit and dynamite collecting trash and drinking each other's piss, and jay and mex piloting the ferry and eating shit out on the island, and so on and so forth

i mean, it's a rare novel you can pick up again at six month intervals and not feel like the effort's become completely pointless

just checking in with your poop-eating friends.

i still need to read this.

For whatever reason I pulled a copy of Dhalgren off the shelf last night and reread the first 80 or so pages. The Kid's about to become a poet and get his ass kicked.

to be fair, i probably feel more excited at the idea of rereading dhalgren than i do getting through the second half of ...spiders.

good thread, someone said 15 years too late

crossposting from the ILB thread.

Good (first half of an) interview: http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2015/07/interview-samuel-r-delany-three-novels-launched-career-part-1/

He was also interviewed by Gary Wolfe for the Coode Street Podcast — http://jonathanstrahan.podbean.com/e/episode-241-samuel-r-delany/ — but it seemed a bit lightweight and inessential. Getting a bit of press/doing a bit of promotional work for the new Vintage edition of three early novels.

Didn't know about those reprints, thanks!

For all my Delany fandom, in the early 80s I breezed through his early work once, quickly and with poor attention to detail. Time to reread.

Another good new interview, from The Nation - http://www.thenation.com/article/samuel-r-delany-speaks/

The Motion Of Light In Water is one of the best autobiographies/memoirs ever written (him being young & etc in NY 1957-1965) - pretty much the first thing I read of his, Tim, & I luvved luvved ELL YOU VEE luvved it to death.
― Ess Kay (esskay), Sunday, May 25, 2003 11:56 PM (12 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's true

Still a hero, another new interview:

https://io9.gizmodo.com/samuel-r-delany-on-his-legacy-creativity-and-promisc-1833407173