ask sam delany a question?

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