ask sam delany a question?

dear mr delany

pls finish "the splendor and misery of bodies, of cities" before dying

Not likely, according to the interview I linked above.

Djehuty asks: "Will he ever finish and publish The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities?"

Probably not, I can't say for sure. Again, I haven't written it off entirely. I did write about 150 pages of it at some point. But a number of things had come up to undercut it. I've explained it many, many times, and don't mind explaining it again. I was in a major relationship at that time, that kind of fueled the first volume, Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand. And that relationship broke up, and that was the beginning of the Eighties, at the same time the AIDS situation came in. A lot of it, as the diptych was originally planned out, was a celebration of lot of the stuff I saw at the time in the gay world. Sort of in allegorical form, a lot of that was being celebrated. There was a lot of the gay situation that made me rethink some of that, not in any kind of simplistic way, but in a fairly complicated way. So between the personal breakup, which was an eight-year relationship that came to ane nd, and the changes in the world situation, there were other things that sort of grabbed my interest more. That made the second one a little hard to go on.

was thinking in the car earlier that if there's any writer whose personal archives i want picked up by the harry ransom center it's srd

yeah i'd heard something similar, though at the time i had interpreted it to mean that a lot of characters in the story were based on people who'd died of AIDS, and that he didn't want to revisit the setting because it was too painful for him to do that. maybe that's part of the story, too.

still, "stars in my pocket" is hands down my favorite work of his ... and i'm DYING to know what the xlv and the web were up to

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?

still looking for this

Next year is his 70th birthday and the 50th anniversary of his first novel. I hope he gets some coverage and a higher popular profile from it. He got done dirty by the B. Dalton blacklist and I'm sure it cost him a fair amount of financial security, which sucks considering Dhalgren sold a million plus.

I still haven't read Times Square Red, Times Square Blue -- thinking about buying the ebook of that one now that it's available.

good lord, he's seventy? i mean it makes sense but still. oy.

"higher popular profile" = he needs to get as...liberal with his movie rights as the pkd estate.

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.