Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village
Samuel R. Delany
http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/D/delany_motion.html
The unexpurgated edition of the award-winning autobiography—back in
print!
"A very moving, intensely fascinating literary biography from an
extraordinary writer. Thoroughly admirable candor and luminous
stylistic precision; the artist as a young man and a memorable picture
of an age." —William Gibson
"Absolutely central to any consideration of black manhood. . . .
Delany's vision of the necessity for total social and political
transformation is revolutionary." —Hazel Carby
"The prose of The Motion of Light in Water often has the shimmering
beauty of the title itself. This book is invaluable gay history." —
Inches Magazine
Born in New York City's black ghetto Harlem at the start of World War
II, Samuel R. Delany married white poet Marilyn Hacker right out of
high school. The interracial couple moved into the city's new bohemian
quarter, the Lower East Side, in summer 1961. Through the decade's
opening years, new art, new sexual practices, new music, and new
political awareness burgeoned among the crowded streets and cheap
railroad apartments. Beautifully, vividly, insightfully, Delany calls
up this era of exploration and adventure as he details his development
as a black gay writer in an open marriage, with tertiary walk-ons by
Bob Dylan, Stokely Carmichael, W. H. Auden, and James Baldwin, and a
panoply of brilliantly drawn secondary characters.
Samuel R. Delany is the author of numerous science fiction books
including, Dhalgren and The Mad Man, as well as the best-selling
nonfiction study Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. He lives in New
York City and teaches at Temple University. The Lambda Book Report
chose Delany as one of the fifty most significant men and women of the
past hundred years to change our concept of gayness, and he is a
recipient of the William Whitehead Memorial Award for a lifetime's
contribution to lesbian and gay literature.
Winner of the 1989 Hugo Award for Non-fiction
440 pages | 1 halftone | 5-7/8 x 9 | 2004
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Sentences: An Introduction
The Peripheries of Love
Notes
Whole Hogg
Three books—old, new, and revised—offer entry into the universe of
Samuel R. Delany
Brandon Stosuy Tuesday, Nov 2 2004
Village Voice
The patron saint of walnut-sized knuckles, Samuel R. Delany
rhapsodizes repeatedly on mangled mitts in his memoirs and fiction. On
lucky days these misshapen hands are attached to ill-shod societal
outsiders.
In The Motion of Light in Water, Delany recounts his own discalced
ramble through New York City. After the miscarriage of his then wife,
poet Marilyn Hacker, he adopts the mien of Snake, a barefoot boy who
came to him wordlessly in a dream and who will show up in his first
novel, The Jewels of Aptor: "I knew this strange, gentle youngster,
castrated of language and rephallicized by his name, was some version
of myself, who both doubled me and split something off from me."
Hoping to repeat the encounter, the writer arrives at a flower booth
in the Staten Island terminal, where he tells the florist via written
note that his name's "Snake." Mistaken for "one of them stupid kids,"
Delany is raped in a storage space "behind the refrigeration unit" and
sent on his way with a wilted orange bouquet. Elsewhere in Motion,
Delany chews his own fingers raw, "an experiment that fell somewhere
between the erotic and the aesthetic." The same could be said for the
author's extensive oeuvre.
The Motion of Light in Water is a fine introduction to the grittier
side of Delany's sensibility: The exhaustive Shandian chronicle steers
the reader through the author's formative years as a Harlem prodigy
through his grappling with sexuality, race, family, friends,
threesomes, the folk scene, dyslexia, and science fiction in the 1960s
East Village. Hogg offers a more extreme entrance. Written between
1969 and 1973 but not published until 1995, the unrelenting text
exaggerates the effects of pre-Stonewall secrecy. Just reissued by FC2
with the author's revisions and corrections, Hogg can still make even
some adventurous readers retch.
Narrated by an ethnically ambiguous "cock sucker," Hogg relays 72
hours wherein the 11-year-old hooks up with a burly, nail-gnawing, one-
shoed trucker, Hogg, and accompanies him as a willing sex slave with a
motley crew of rape artists to victimize women (and some men).
Eventually, one of the younger crew members, a compulsive masturbator
named Denny, goes on a killing spree, and the orgy shifts to cum-
stained detective story. Besides suggesting more interesting ideas for
body fluids than Guyotat's Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers—a cinched
foreskin creates curdled cum and a mouth of shit offers a warm bull's-
eye—the book can be read as Hogg's coming-of-middle-age love story.
While a grad student at SUNY-Buffalo, I took two Delany-taught
courses. "Art & Revolution" involved a semester-long close reading of
Flaubert's Sentimental Education alongside Marx. "Euphistics: The
Analysis of Extravagant Prose" spun Djuna Barnes, Melville, Pater, and
Nabokov with Gerald Burns, Sir Thomas Browne, George Saintsbury, and
Charles M. Doughty.
Such eclectic bookishness is unavoidable in Delany's new historical
novella, Phallos, a lapidary, digital-age Pale Fire, tonally redolent
of Paul Valéry's Eupalinos. Emblematic of Delany's recent concerns,
the wee text offers a crib sheet for the writer's interests in the
history of the novel and textual criticism. Taking the form of an
online essay ("My Three Favorite Gay Male Porn Novels") by Randy
Pedarson, the footnotes and an anonymous, grandiose introduction carry
separate running dialogues with his underemployed Ph.D. friends, Binky
and Phyllis: Walter Pater was a big Phallos fan, and his Plato &
Platonism gets the extended treatment; Hegel, Nietzsche, Arthur
Symons, and Guy Davenport come up.
Prior to Pedarson's slipshod scholarship, a preface explains that a
young African American named Adrian Rome moved to New York in 1994 and
hoped to find a copy of Phallos (a book that had intrigued him since
he was 12), but through a string of bad luck could only find
Pedarson's dubious online synopsis. A meditation on desire and
repetition, the novel-in-a-novella begins during the reign of the
Roman emperor Hadrian and follows Neoptolomus, a rags-to-riches
Odysseus type from the island of Syracuse, on a roundabout 20-year
quest for the unattainable jewel-encrusted phallos from the statue of
a nameless god, which "has always-already-been stolen by someone
else."
Pulling Pierre Menard rank, Pedarson condenses Phallos, removing
explicit sex scenes (e.g., the castration of two white men at the so-
called "ebony orgy"). Still, he envisions a different synopsis,
perhaps like Hogg, "in which the passage of the years and the progress
from social level to social level we so cavalierly call 'plot' were
elided and the sexual alone was foregrounded."
Though the book's rumored to have been written by "a black Southern
writer, currently living in New York City," the squeamish scholar's
unable to fathom that "a black man (or woman)" might have written
Phallos, describing it as closer in feel to Sentimental Education than
to Invisible Man, Roots, or Beloved.
But earlier, the anonymous Phallos author invoked the anticlimax of
Flaubert's big book, wherein Frederic and Deslauriers, who've fought
wars and partaken in great romances, recall fleeing from a brothel in
their youth as "the happiest time" ever. In Phallos, Neoptolomus's
"Nubian lover" muses on the sensual anticipations of "provincial boys,
before their first visit to a local brothel." It's pure Delany: meta-
commentary on Pedarson's misfire noticeable to careful readers of the
sentence-a-day French stylist. And then there's more fucking.
--
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