Samuel Delany

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.

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.