Samuel Delany

surely the lead's relationship with an autistic character in 'stars ...' is just as troubling on that level as the fifteen year old in dhalgren? or is there something i'm forgetting. i mean, none of these books is quite hogg, i mean.

yeah, i feel like the quote-unquote kiddie sex in dhalgren is totally an exploration of transgression and mental/social/literary breakdown that isn't really about what it's about.

of course, that could also be the polite lie i tell myself so that i can enjoy the rest of the book.

I changed the title from "Sam Delany" to "Samuel Delany."

a regular Chip off the old block?

haw

WmC - I forgive you.

im reading a book of short stories by this guy and hes hella easy to find v cheap

Lots of Delany around but I've never seen a copy of Stars

Not having read Dhalgren, Babel-17 is the best of his I have read: so joyously full of great ideas, so much bouncy FUN

I just finished Dhalgren, so great, thanks guys. Call me a fag, but I always get a little bit sad when I finish a big novel and this was no exception. I'm thinking of reading Stars now.

call me a fag

Just finished Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. Totally different pace from Dhalgren, this had me clawing for the main narrative for most of the book. As a result, I really didn't give enough attention to some of the detailed description which I feel is a really big part of this book - to realise the sensations and image of these planets, especially Velm. The relationship between Marq and Rat made me quite sick, knowing you can't help but be attracted to another being is somewhat sickening, Marq didn't complain of course, but like those couples who seem so made for eachother, as a couple they struck me as boring and corny.

the hands-as-parentheses bit is pretty central, iirc

i'm curious what the other half of it would have looked like: a tour of a planet from the other set of aliens (the Family?), plus a coda? i don't know. i don't remember a lot of the details but it's my favourite of his books. this is in part due to a bit which isn't particularly central to the thrust of the book in itself, that part in the opening section where rat (?) finds a mental implant that lets him read/experience the entire western canon in seconds; that hit me in a peculiar way, as a teen.

I was particularly taken by that opening section too, and was expecting the book to take off from there, to my surprise, it was not to be. Thanks for your thoughts.

I've bought Dhalgren, and keep picking it up, but it's so huuuuuge. Need to gather my resources.

I read Driftglass in my early teens. Didn't get everything but got a lot. Delany for me will always represent vistas opening (yet in truth I never read much past Nova). "Night and The Loves..." was exactly what I wished a short story would do. It probably still is but I don't dare reread it.

His use, over and over, of teen-prodigy characters didn't seem realistic when I was that age, and far into adulthood, having seen a certain amount, I find it a gimmick and more about Delany (or SF) than about the world.

These days, the imaginary world of Delany that fascinates me is his lost New York, as unreachable as his distant planets.

Editing issue: should be "did exactly what" and "probably still does."

I shall begin reading The Mad Man soon, I'm expecting some of Delany's 'lost New York'.

You won't be disappointed there, as I recall.

And check Heavenly Breakfast, an autobiographical novel(pub. 1979). Its title is also the name of a real-life 60s NYC psych-folk band. SD was a satellite member, sort of.

Also loads of 1960-1965 Manhattan in his memoir, The Motion of Light in Water.

I was just looking at the wiki for his next novel -- it's done, he's just having trouble finding a publisher. It was originally supposed to be published by Alyson Publications, but apparently they've gone under and he's back to shopping it around to publishers.

Man, I'm just finishing up The Mad Man(took me 5 months wtf?! I've been busy). Insane book, really, but Delany really knows how to challenge and reward I think, just as you're becoming insensitive to some bloke shitting all over another blokes face whilst a group of other guys are jacking off all over the guy who is getting shitted on, he throws you a bone. Fantastic.

try hogg next, then. no thrown bones in that one.

Finally reading Auden's Dyer's Hand, which is everything Motion of Light in Water made it out to be and more -- the secondhand quote that Delany gives from it is golden -- and really perfect for Motion..., which is one of my fav Delany books, and fav. works of literary autobiography full stop. There's so many scenes that I remember really clearly from it -- the pockets thing, for example!

a tour of a planet from the other set of aliens (the Family?)

as i understand it, the sygn and family don't exactly work like this ... you might be reading it a bit too much like star trek. the sygn and the family are names for philosophies, not rigid political groups like the federation and klingons.

i forget whether it's the north or the south where humans and evelm don't get along, but in that half of the world you might say the family philosophy is predominant - you are a human first, or an evelm first, and you find strength in that mentality.

in the sygn communities you are a free thinking subject first, and you sort of choose your family or define it as you see it, and your identity (racial, gender, cultural, whatever) comes second.

never read him, should I go?

http://www.welcometolace.org/events/view/screening-the-polymath-or-the-life-and-opinions-of-samuel-r-delany-gentleman/

he is one of my favorite authors and i found him really tedious. i posted a thread about going to see him, it was an awful experience. he mostly talked about discovering he was bisexual, how he got into cruising times square porn theatres, and the gradual erosion of our shared times square porn theatre cultural heritage.

if you are a bicurious or a queer theory grad student you might find it highly stimulating? but as a sci fi fan, or just for kicks, no.

ok

. this is in part due to a bit which isn't particularly central to the thrust of the book in itself, that part in the opening section where rat (?) finds a mental implant that lets him read/experience the entire western canon in seconds

this *is* central to the thrust of the book itself

he's one of martin skidmore's favorite authors. the guy doing martin's funeral service today read from something martin wrote about dhalgren, which i found really moving. it was martin's favorite book.

really want to hear sam delaney monologuing about cruising

i found it hard to follow because a lot of it was in reference to cruising scenes in post-70s delany i hadn't read.

i really want to read some more delaney, when i was in america you could pick up cheap paperbacks by him really easily but over here he's p hard to come by

really want to hear sam delaney monologuing about cruising

― plax (ico), Thursday, August 18, 2011

there's a whole book about this btw

yeah, baja's summary of the event sounds a lot like 'times square red, times square blue'

that was the book!

I haven't read Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, but his book The Mad Man features a lot of cruising, the porn theatres are involved too, the book also documents the impact of AIDS on the gay community. The way Delany describes them, those porn theatres were really home to a kind of exchange and communication that is seldom seen nowadays, I'm not a queer theorist though.

that's the thesis of times square blue (which is the second half of 'times square red...', the first ('times square red', natch) being a memoir of them): that the sexual motivation to go into those locales actually underscored and expedited a whole raft of non-sexual contact up and down the social scale, & that in 'cleaning up' times square (& in similar efforts elsewhere) we're making movement lateral to one's class boundaries much less likely. i don't know in what form it creeps into the novel; never found a copy of 'the mad man'. (almost wrote 'mad men'.)

I think that argument is certainly a big part of the mad man novel. I should really give times square red, time square blue a read.

http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/2010/11/chip-delany/
http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/2011/01/chip-delany-part-2-the-miracle-of-dhalgren/

found a copy of 'the mad man'

nice! let us know how it is, i've never read it.

i've started on my draft of "the splendor and misery of bodies, of cities", brian herbert and kevin j anderson style

i'm at the part where rat and marq sneak into the xlv fleet and commandeer a stolen experimental fighter, it turns out that the rings of vondramach okk allow rat to interface w/ xlv biocomputers!

making movement lateral to one's class boundaries much less likely reminds me of Charlie Haden and others on living in 60s Lower East Side tenements, all those artists in dif genres and media in same bldgs--plus a lot of other characters--this way on into late 70s too

Not only easier to speak of, but it also has its real importance -- important enough so that when such encounters as the above three -- as opposed to any of the others I've described -- cease, one seeks out other cruising grounds. Several times since high school I've abandoned one area of the city for another, when forces I will never comprehend drive down the number of such accessible, satisfying exchanges, whose satisfaction is always, Sam, measured on a (or on several) scale(s) more complex than the sexual. Yet, in all cases, a dismal, gray and unresponsive ground is the incomprehensible template against which they occur, not throwing themselves into relief so much as providing a necessary obscurity to their outlines, making them bearable, even possible (making them hard of impossible for we who indulge in them to speak of in any terms save the sexual, even as they are, in their actuality, wholly social), in a world that largely denies they exist.

which is to say that the mad man has its elements of elegy for the cruising scene too, though the action (structure?) of the novel is weirdly orthogonal to that.

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Man, I'm just finishing up The Mad Man(took me 5 months wtf?! I've been busy). Insane book, really, but Delany really knows how to challenge and reward I think, just as you're becoming insensitive to some bloke shitting all over another blokes face whilst a group of other guys are jacking off all over the guy who is getting shitted on, he throws you a bone. Fantastic.

― historyyy (prettylikealaindelon), Sunday, 14 August 2011 13:24 (11 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this seems like a really weird way to be reading this. ('that movie deep throat really manages challenge and reward the viewer, it's amazing how much you want to get to the end of the next blowjob..')

(weird how the rhythms of pornography are still deducible, compelling even if it's pornography you find (abhorrent? not to your taste? well, maybe reading some-hundred pages of it is enough to make it more the latter and not the former) -- either that or i secretly long to have homeless new yorkers of the 80s excrete in my mouth -- delany's reliance on parentheticals is both contagious and compelling.

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i read this over like 72 hours, which is the quickest i've read anything of equivalent .. length, density .. in a while.

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want to say something about the intersection of different narrative styles (campus novel, detective novel) with the novel's pornotopia, also the different characters as different biographical displacements of delany, also the enjoyably (deliberately?) stilted moments of dialogue common to all delany's 'serious' work. on the other hand, don't want to burn myself out when i will probably start in the valley of the nest of spiders tomorrow

I found a used paperback of The Mad Man in a store in Gainesville in 2001. In the SF section, natch. brought it home and discovered a $20 bill in the middle. Like you, thomp, I couldn't put the book down and read it in the course of a few days. There was an element of tourism I'm sure, as a straight male on the vanilla end of the spectrum, but that was far from the only driver. It really is an amazing book.

Mad ol' me, have an unread copy of this since since '07. Will get onto it ASAP.

on the other hand, i flicked ahead to see quite how long the first truck stop bathroom sex scene in ...spiders goes on for, and put the book down, and haven't picked it up again yet.

(it goes on for a lot of pages.)

god i wish he'd finished splendor and misery, i liked stars in my pocket sooo much. i've been keeping my eyes peeled for more but there's only one used book store in town and the only time i went there i overheard the owner slumped over his computer and grumbling "goddamn fucking faggots" and i haven't been back.

only other book i've read was dhalgren. where should i go from there if i'm going to shell out some internet dollars?

Triton, Driftglass (short story collection with his best short work), Tales of Neveryon, Nova. If you like ToN, there are three more volumes in that series.

I think I'm going to go ahead and buy Nest of Spiders now in the 1st edition. I read the missing chapter online and it's just a couple of pages. Plus, with Delany's bad luck with publishers lately, I worry they'll go out of business before they ever come out with another printing.

"The World Well Lost" had gay theme apparently.

Gay Flying Saucers dammit and what is up with my typing overall? Sorry! Not drinking, maybe going blind and/or too fast.

To be perfectly frank, I love Chip, but his recent work as well as his written presence on the internet is sometimes very difficult to decipher. He's one of those people whom I think has so much floating around in his head that as he's gotten older, he sometimes spins out on weird paths that don't make a lot of sense.

Delany posted yesterday (FB) about choosing clothes for a New Yorker photo shoot. Fingers crossed for a full profile.

Hope so! They published an astute take on the work of Octavia Butler in March, guess the rest is behind paywall (I happened to see the print edition), but here's the opening: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/15/how-octavia-e-butler-reimagines-sex-and-survival

I can't read the full text just now, but maybe this is The New Yorker piece in question WmC. Interesting photograph, I like it.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/06/07/the-personal-works-of-samuel-r-delany

Unfortunately it's just a paragraph in the "This Week" section.

The “Carte Blanche” film series at moma, programmed by the prodigious science-fiction writer Samuel R. Delany, concludes this week with two personal works. He discusses his childhood in Harlem and his life as a gay man in nineteen-sixties New York in Fred Barney Taylor’s illuminating documentary “The Polymath, or The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman,” from 2007. Delany displays his directorial art in the 1971 featurette “The Orchid,” which blends street theatre and joyful eroticism with ingenious special effects.

I like the point about wanting more radical readers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nh0PF95rdvk

A terrific new profile in the NYer: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/10/samuel-r-delany-profile

Interesting he mentions Gay Davenport.

Heh. Guy Davenport.

Every serious writer I know admires Davenport.

this had me rolling

We exited onto a narrow street with a huge mural commemorating the struggle for L.G.B.T.Q. rights. Steam billowed from a vent in the sidewalk, dissipating, as we neared, to reveal a blanket-covered heap. People were sleeping outside all over the neighborhood, which, before its gentrification, had been a red-light district. Delany, as usual, pulled out his phone to take a picture; across the way, a group of smartly dressed young women shot him a reproachful look.

“Could you not?” one said.

Rickett crossed his arms and smiled: “He’s never seen a homeless person before.”

loved reading that piece

I used to live down the street from Delany. I saw him walking around a few times before I realized who he was.

Really enjoyed the piece. I must read something by Davenport.

I have only read a few of his books, I am most fond of Geography of the Imagination. His poems are largely great. I don’t care for his fiction but ymmv

Reflecting a bit more and it feels like there is some overselling of Delany's prose than is necessary...pretty good profile but it's sorta shameful that they only bothered when he is old and at the end.

I read Delany's autobiography. Those sections about Marilyn Hacker reading Victorian novels all day while Delany was at work were pretty funny.