Samuel Delany

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.

Not an expert either, but you might try Triton, Nova and The Complete Nebula Award-Winning Fiction of Samuel R. Delaney (compiled in miid-80s,good used copies easy to find online)
Combined edition of two novels and two short stories which won the Nebula Award. Babel - 17 (winner, 1966 Nebula, 1995 James Tiptree, Jr. Award, Classics; nominated, 1967 Hugo Award; 1975 Locus Poll Award, All-Time Best Novel (Place: 36)); A Fabulous, Formless Darkness (original title The Einstein Intersection) (winner, 1967 Nebula Award; nominated, 1968 Hugo Award); Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones (winner, 1969 Nebula Award, 1970 Hugo Award); Aye, and Gomorrah (winner, 1967 Nebula Award; nominated, 1968 Hugo Award).

triton!

einstein intersection!

drift glass seconded.

iirc there is a complete short sci fi that's sweet

that's...a lotta stuff! thanks y'all. with school starting in a few weeks i'll scarcely read a thing for the next nine months :[

Try the short stories when you can catch a breath, usually works for me

The Neveryon stuff is fucking great. Also, it starts out broken up into novella-like chunks which may aid in digestibility...

haven't read a word of this guy... saw him read from his Times Square nonfic book before a showing of an early '70s gay porn film tonight.

He's kinda bored by gay marriage. "Tolerance, not assimilation" is the key to advancing civilization, he said.

every time this gets revived now i'm worried that he's ill or dead.

what was the film?

also is there another delany thread we alternate with because i swear i remember talking about all the piss-drinking in 'through the valley ...'

ask sam delany a question?

ah yeah

film was The Back Row

I have no idea whether to recommend Delany to you, Morbs -- either the sf or the porn.

I just reread his Times Square book in may.

I recently started reading the tales of neveryon, i'm generally not a fan of short stories but since they're all set in neveryon, i'm interested in how the stories are going to relate to each other and if it's all going to fit together somehow.

saw him speak at the university of chicago for the second time tonight (he's just ending a visiting professorship). it was mostly sort of autobiographical this time; he told a great story about hooking up with a senegalese prince in paris in the mid-60s. i got him to sign my copy of trouble on triton

72nd birthday today

The only one of his novels I have unequivocally enjoyed was Babel-17, of which the ebook is on sale for $1.99 today- as has been noted before, both Shakey and I find his style maddening - but the critical writings I have read from him are grebt.

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.

i have a book of interviews with him and it is endlessly fascinating even when he repeats himself over the years.

Terrific how Delany was worked into this piece on Chaturbate

Emily Witt has now built a fine, fine portfolio of pieces on this intersection of sex and the interwebs.

I haven't read the whole thing so I can't judge but some stuff Delany has said about child abuse and nambla probably wouldn't have been received nearly as well if he wasn't considered such a hero and so good writing about race. He's in the comments too.

http://shetterly.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/a-conversation-with-samuel-r-delany.html

I struggle so much with this - as a person who, when underage, had meaningful relationships with people who were above the age of consent, which, 35 years later, I still don't think of as wrong or hurtful - it's a difficult discussion to have without seeming like a monster. certainly when Delaney says that, at the age of nine, he was entering into consensual sexual relationships with adults...I'm a dad now, two boys: I can't accept that, viscerally I reject that. but at the same time, I got a letter from a Joan Crawford fan a month ago or so: a dude who's doing twenty years in prison. he was in his late twenties having a relationship with a sixteen-year-old boy, and the parents got wind of it, and they threw the book at him. I looked up his case: his victim insisted no victimization had ever taken place, but the southern judge didn't care at all, and put him away. where's the justice in that? I feel like this is Delaney's point broadly put, but the concept of an age of consent feels valuable.

one of the most struggly subjects there is. I have not even the faintest stab at encompassing it.

I haven't read the whole thing so I can't judge but some stuff Delany has said about child abuse and nambla probably wouldn't have been received nearly as well if he wasn't considered such a hero and so good writing about race. He's in the comments too.

http://shetterly.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/a-conversation-with-samuel-r-delany.html

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Wednesday, September 7, 2016 9:41 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's a very difficult topic but framing it this way is disingenuous garbage.

delany isn't a race writer. did you mean "because he's black?"

he's not a good writer either tbf

I can't have much of an opinion on something I haven't finished but I doubt most other writers talking about similar things would be treated so well. The interview happened because it was being said too many big figures in the genre were getting a free pass while others were getting a ton of shit for relatively minor things, but nobody really knew a lot about Delany's stance on this stuff. Do you think I'm implying he should be dragged through the dirt for his opinions?

delany isn't a race writer. did you mean "because he's black?"

No, because he wrote some very good articles on racism in the past that have been heavily circulated and praised in the past several years when the topic has been at the forefront of sff discussions.

fair

sorry i had my hackles up

That's okay.

Happy 75th birthday.