Samuel Delany

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.

I'm always scared to open this thread.

This thread is v repetitive

In Glasgow for several events during the next Arika eisode:

http://arika.org.uk/events/episode-9-other-worlds-already-exist/programme

Just finished Dhalgren, my first trip into Delany. I really liked large chunks of it, but other portions were definitely a slog. Even aside from the tedious descriptions of underage orgies, it did feel like some of the same plot points just kept cycling through without moving the story forward. But many of the characters were terrifically drawn and I enjoyed his world-building, what's a good next step?

I enjoyed Dhalgren alright but somehow that's where I got off the bus, many years ago--several people have told me I should have at least gone on to Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, and maybe I will, but right now thinking of re-reading his fun, imaginative debutThe Jewels of Aptor, published when he was 19, I think, also should dig up my copy of a chunky drugstore paperback, The Complete Nebula Award-Winning Fiction of Samuel R. Delany. which Amazon describes thusly: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) The cheapest (by far) copy they have of this is $24.03, but worth it, if condition is okay. They have a lot more by him.

that sounds like a good 'tracklist' for sure.

You might check out the Neveryon stuff, bronze age fantasy as vehicle for a dive into semiotics. I loved the two of them I read.

Triton is great also.

I enjoyed the Neveryon books on rereading a couple of years ago. Reread The Einstein Intersection last year and understood it better than the first time I read it. Nova, Triton, and Stars in My Pocket are all good.

imo triton and stars in my pocket are the masterworks

Thanks! I think I'm leaning to Stars In My Pocket next, though it may come down to what the library has available.

First living author to get a Dover Thrift Edition. Dark Reflections is kind of an odd choice in his oeuvre to get that treatment, but ok.

https://dorisvsutherland.com/2019/09/23/samuel-r-delany-and-nambla/

Steve Smith
@nightafternight
·
38m
Today I learned that Samuel R. Delany is an operaphile, a Wagnerite, and a former supernumerary at the
@MetOpera
. Thanks,
@Artforum
!
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EdTX6R_WkAAPDe4?format=jpg&name=large

@alexrossmusic
Has written fascinating essays on Wagner and Artaud, Wagner and Willa Cather...

@AbstractTruth
And he's on Twitter now
@SamuelRDelany1
11:34 AM · Jul 19, 2020

@SamuelRDelany1
An experiment in gay pornography and realistic storytelling
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51EJbeJz9aL.jpg

i'm starting through the valley of the nest of spiders, random thoughts:

1) descriptions and fetishization of human filth, stench, shit, etc, can't bother you
2) there's a fan fiction quality to it tbh but the descriptions of one moment into the next into the next are kind of soothing
3) delany definitely comes from a different era as far as gay libidinal energy is concerned. there's a fetishization of the positively masculine that's always present.
4) his style is burdensome and opaque but weirdly readable. what happens next is what keeps me going. you can glaze over certain bits of sentences and descriptions and it's ok.
5) i'm making it sound bad for some reason but i'm enjoying it. feels a little bit like guilty pleasure reading but that's good for me right now, the last thing i want is dutiful reading.

also enjoyably light-hearted for all the sex with super-hung homeless dudes

some dweeby jokes that aren't really funny but i appreciate

it reminds me of reading porn i would find on newsgroups in my teens. but sneaking in the political/ontological point that existence itself is worth existing for. already a spinoza mention. it's fun for me but i would definitely hesitate to recommend it to someone unless i knew it was "up" their "alley" haha.

oh, i also don't think he's good at being "realistic" if that's what he's trying to do for this novel, this stuff still feels very much in the fantasy lane even though it's not in the fantasy genre if that makes sense.

i think it winds up unambiguously 'science fiction' by the end, doesn't it? or at least a long way into the future; maybe just 'utopian fiction'

that said i never finished it

i find delany's model of 'pornographic' writing pretty interesting even though none of it gets me off; he may have been the first writer to make sex literarily interesting for me in that way? idk how many others have succeeded, maybe it's just him

as i wrote above and also jordan, it's always a relief to open this thread and have it not be an RIP post

yeah.

i said all those things above very prematurely, don't know why i was so opinionated after like 15 pages. anyway now i'm 25 pages in after the convo with bill bottom and i'm loving it. it's also really funny! kind of feels like a massive gift so far tbh.

his sex writing isn't embarrassingly hot but it's salacious and gets at the right details and it's panoramic and just... lively and fascinating. it takes cliches and turns them into more realistic commentary on what a sensuous queer existence could or might look like. actually the scene that bill bottom describes in the park, that one did arouse me a little bit haha.

Was going to add this to a recent ILM thread on rock fiction which I can't find now: Delany's Heavenly Breakfast, which I took as a novel, but wiki sez: Heavenly Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love is a 1979 memoir by author, professor, and critic Samuel R. Delany.[1] It details the time he spent living in a commune in New York City during the winter of 1967-1968,[2] although altering some details.[3]

Heavenly Breakfast was also the name of the rock band that lived in the commune, which consisted of Steve Wiseman, Susan Schweers, Bert Lee (later of the Central Park Sheiks)[4], and Delany.[5]
A fairly comsic rock-jazz-folk-etc. way of life; some good bits about timing the echo from a waterfall or something for flute solos-as-duets---also duh lots of polydolly sexandrugs for heavenly breakfast.
Think I once saw listing of an LP by a group of this name, but dunno if same or maybe took their name from book.
A goodread, as I anciently recall.

a fairly *cosmic*, I meant to say.

I listened to an interview with him recently. He recalled asking Judith Merrill if Donald Wollheim hadn't told him about fan communities and conventions for racist reasons, Merrill replied that she would normally assume it was racism but in this case it was just that Wollheim had absolutely no social skills.

pic.twitter.com/RPw35eGrus

— Samuel R Delany (@SamuelRDelany1) July 28, 2020

otm

hahaha

I love Dhalgren and Hogg and TSR,TSB and Heavenly Breakfast, but pretty much anything he's written recently is not very good. And he was, by all accounts, an awful teacher.

He is a very dear man, however!!

"And he was, by all accounts, an awful teacher."

That really surprises me, can I hear more about this?

"I'm really supposed to read all of this...this awful stuff?!?"

"Well yes, Chip, that is your job here."

haha it doesn't surprise me in the least

Delany tweets longer about a recent discovery re gay science fiction history, hope this link works, but if not, guess you can check his twitter account directly? should I do it this way
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EgDaQ99UYAAq965?format=jpg&name=large

Anyway, it has to do with Sturgeon getting blacklisted for a while for submitting short st ory "The World Well Lost," though fatwa was lifted and as D points out, the story is in TS's Collectes Stories and they were both on the first panel for Gay Science Fiction and there's something about Jack Womack's Flying Saucers Are Real and the Shaver Mystery (he spells it "Shavery" at one point), something to do w Gay Fying Saucers maybe? Aklso about Ray Palmer, four feet tall and I don't understand this post overall.
account: https://twitter.com/samuelrdelany1?lang=en Takes lots of pictures of his TV, maybe with his smartphone, a geezer thing. Note he's there as samuelrdelany, there's a also a samueldelany w/o initial in London.

"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.