dhalgren

"be glad you're not just a character scrawled in the margins of somebody else's lost notebook: you'd be deadly dull."

SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!

apollo & daphne?

why does he have only one shoe

actually if I recall correctly the main character in nova only has one shoe

And the main character in stars in my pocket also has messed up hands. delany has weird fetishes!

Shall we do this in the new year? What's a good breakdown and I'll post a thread round mid-jan?

It's in 7 parts, so maybe one week each? Except the last section is quite a bit longer and more complex, so maybe 2 weeks for it plus summing-up? 8 weeks total. Is that too long?

ffs you people read fast

I tried book clubbing this with my wife and brother last year. Got a lot further than those two scrubs but still stalled out about halfway through. Wouldn't mind finishing it.

I managed to finish this mostly because I brought it with me to jury duty and ended up just sitting in the waiting room all day.

It's in 7 parts, so maybe one week each? Except the last section is quite a bit longer and more complex, so maybe 2 weeks for it plus summing-up? 8 weeks total. Is that too long?

― WilliamC, Monday, November 25, 2013 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes! I'd say a month, or 5 weeks at a push.

Ordered a copy from my library today - once I get it I'll have a browse and think on this..

I'll never keep up. I could do 1 part a month for sure but 1 part a week? Maybe when I was 22.

i vote for sixteen weeks

PKD was right about this one

What about Harlan Ellison@?

Hey Shakey, there is no articulate resonance. The common problem, I suppose, is to have more to say than vocabulary and syntax can bear. That is why I am hunting in these desiccated streets. The smoke hides the sky's variety, stains consciousness, covers the holocaust with something safe and insubstantial. Knowwhatimean?

Got my copy from good ol' inter-library loan - lets see if PKD was right.

My thinking now goes something like: we'll never finish as a collective, so lets do about 3-4 parts (at 350-400 pages) and then a final oh-whoever-reads-through-the-rest and want to add more is invited to do so?

How about starting this on Mid-Jan? Post a thread then - the worst that can happen is no one answers/takes this on. It will be 'hilarious'.

I'm in for whatever happens. One hope I have for this is to use it as a training session in close reading, something I've always been an abject failure at. (Which is funny, considering Delany has always been one of my favorite authors.)

my ancient copy self destructed so i got the new ugly tpb version. gonna bring it with me over xmas holidays, looking forward to revisiting this novel that i loved as a young feckless autodidact. always goes well.

maybe i'll join, i do have an unread copy of this on my bookshelf. my strong hunch is that i won't be into it but who knows

Great! Monday 13th January is the date for your diaries.

If I can get this for free I'm in.

Inter-library loans. Can't say it enough :)

Took over a month the last time I tried that. Also Lambeth libraries have 3*Delany, 0*Dhalgren. Hopefully the internets will provide an epub though.

The last section has some very specific formatting requirements meant to convey the sense of multiple passages written into a notebook, possibly or possibly not by different authors. I don't know enough about epubs to know whether they can handle that sort of thing.

From the sound of things I won't get that far.

My local borough has no Dhalgren so they got one from Wandsworth lib.

finished re-reading my six month old reread of triton, now just to finish through the valley, only been reading that for a year and a half, then i'll get on this dhalgren thing, how's everyone else doing

I'm not at the mo as my copy was recalled back (wonder if it was an ilxor).

If someone wants to start the thread sometime otherwise I'll get round to it.

I read Dhalgren for the first time with a group last year, so I probably won't be taking part in the thread, but I'll just mention the wide-ranging Paris Review interview with Delany from a few years ago:

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6088/the-art-of-fiction-no-210-samuel-r-delany

Fredric Busch's observations on publishing Dhalgren are also worth reading, particularly since Delany offers corrections to Busch's account in the comments section:

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

A weird typo above: by Fredric Busch I meant Frederik Pohl.

that is a weird typo, you should get a larger phone

or a better analyst

i'm ready to go when you all are

what do you think of "triton" thomp? i think it might be my second-favorite delany.

it's my favourite after 'mad man' probably; idk, it reminded me to Think About Things when i read it first time round; this time round it felt more uncomfortably close i guess bcz more life-experience to try and connect with the narrative stuff and reconcile with the theoretical stuff. -- that's not very interesting, is it? i'll think about it. i do think (like all his best stuff!) it actually is stronger at what it's doing for delany's failings; like he does a great job of not just building his project around his strengths but designing it such that his not-quite-there and overdetermined-feeling characterisation/dialogue/description seem an essential part of his affect

i was thinking of proposing a feb 14 start date for dhalgren, but mainly just because it was convenient for me to do so

book club, this time for real?

yeah i'm in

just bought the ebook, hope the formatting is up to scratch.

What about the audiobook?

Is this the thread or do we need a new one bc I’m liable to start tnite

i was unsure, there may already be one

A friend of our family, a 17-year-old girl, asked us all what our favorite novels were. I said this one and she asked to borrow it. I tried to warn her away from it but she insisted, so she's got one of my 2 copies. She got about 250 pages in pretty much lost interest.

i mean huge credit to her getting 250 pages in

I have a copy and have read like ten pages. i'm in.

I’m in. (famous last words, pvmic etc.)

just bought the ebook, hope the formatting is up to scratch.

― what if bod was one of us (ledge), Tuesday, March 26, 2019 8:53 AM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol yeah i wish, though it's not horrible as those things go. quite a few very silly spacing/pagebreak errors throughout though, and one paragraph in the final chapter is repeated twice and i had to check it against my print copy, as things were kind of unraveling by that point anyway

anyway, best book i've ever read

its good

[ernest newboy voice] i couldn't possibly tell you if it's good or not

Brad, I really liked your substack essay on this

https://hologramofthesenses.substack.com/p/escalator-over-the-hill

Met Chip over the weekend because we were booked to read together. Honor of my life, he tickled my shoulder and took lots of pictures of the audience's hands and postures? Then he read a damning review of 'Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders,' then a chapter from that book. It was excellent.

Amazing!

Cool! I think ex-ILX0r Casuistry may have met him once as well, iirc.

Oh that's so nice! I've noticed he frequently describes his characters' hands so that one doesn't surprise me. I emailed with him about a blurb once when I worked in publishing but that was as close as I got

aww this is so wonderful

my old college lit professor is writing his biography and i couldn't be more thrilled :)

Very cool. I thought about ilxor love for him while we were sitting waiting for his Uber home. He lives only ten minutes away from me.

awww that rules

I will never not love this book. I read it for the first time in my early teens. That was probably a great time and an awful time to read it. It made a powerful impression on me, probably as much as any novel ever has, in terms of shaping my ideas of what fiction, and life itself, could be. Returning to it in my middle age was a revelation, an almost unique experience of telescoping time.

thinking about a reread.