Conversations with Samuel R. Delany

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

Although it's taken me a while to get to it, this was the first book I finished in 2010. I guess you could say that it's officially by a white man, since the editor (Carl Freedman) is white, and most of the interviewers are white, but the vast bulk of the book is Samuel R. Delany in his own words.

Delany will only do what he calls "silent interviews," with written questions and written responses. The interviews in this book range over 23 years and cover many, if not most, of the topics we associate with Delany: writing, race, postmodernism, queerness and public sex, and a host of ancillary, related, and gratuitous topics that come up in the course of the interview.

The book is not an easy read: Delany is a hard-core intellectual and he can convolute his sentences (and his concepts) with the best of us. I lose him when he digs into the depths of Foucault or starts waxing eloquent about some 19th century poet that I've never heard of ... but I love that about him, the way he travels seamlessly from what feels like intellectual finger-fucking to the glorious realities of blowjobs in public parks, and uses his understanding of each to illuminate the other.

Some things that particularly struck me:

--his argument about the importance of historical understanding in activism ("When we forget the historical provenance of some discourse that we and the people around us inhabit--the scientific ideas or the philosophical theory a discourse developed in response to--that discourse becomes even more powerful and even more difficult to eradicate or revise.") along with his willingness to include an argument from a friend of his against this position.

--the story of how he came to live with his partner of many years, who was homeless on the streets of NYC when they met, and how differently he tells that story from the (as he would say) contemporary discourse about such things. He absolutely does not feel that he rescued Dennis. In fact, he points out ways in which Dennis was taking more risks than Delany was. (Now I want to read Bread and Wine the graphic novel about their partnership which Delany wrote with artist Mia Wolff.)

--his writing about Dark Reflections, his most recent novel, which tracks the life of a "successful" African-American poet in our times, and his writing about Hogg, his most controversial and difficult pornography novel. (One entire interview is devoted to Hogg, which I haven't read, because it makes me nervous.)

If you've read a lot of Delany nonfiction, not too much of this will be new to you. If you haven't read any, this probably isn't the place to start. But if you happen to be right where I am, conversant with Delany but not fully read in his work, this is a joy and a gem.