Delany at 75

from The Polymath

Samuel R. Delany just celebrated his 75th birthday, an auspicious occasion.

I've been writing about Delany for over a decade now — I've written and published more about his work than about that of any other writer: introductions to new editions of The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, Starboard Wine, and The American Shore; on his early pornographic novel Equinox; on his recent novel Dark Reflections; an interview in 2009. I spent some time last summer researching in his archives at Boston University and expect to return this summer, as about a third of my doctoral dissertation (in progress...) is devoted to his work. I've given presentations about him at academic conferences, and all of my academic friends are probably quite tired of my invoking his name at every possible opportunity.

The simple fact is that I think Delany is one of the most important American writers, one who ought to be spoken of alongside any great American writer (however defined or identified) of the second half of the twentieth century. Though Delany readers disagree not only about their favorites among his works, but about what should be considered his major writings, the passion of the arguments indicates the range and richness of his oeuvre. As a novelist, he's more interesting than Updike, Mailer, Vidal, and other big white males who still so dominate the idea of post-World-War-II American lit; as a nonfiction writer, he's at least the equal of Sontag. And yet somehow he continues to get seen in very limited ways, ways that impoverish the reading of his works.

The limited view of Delany often seems to result from personal preferences for particular texts or types of texts, and with a writer as complex as Delany, that's a fatal flaw. In fact, one of the great lessons of Delany's project is to encourage us to think beyond personal taste, to recognize personal taste as only a first step, an entry point. We all have our individual interests and preferences. (Myself, I like some of the early work well enough, but had Delany published nothing after Nova, I wouldn't be interested in him; of the fiction, The Mad Man and Dark Reflections are my favorites, though I think Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand could plausibly be offered as the greatest science fiction novel ever written, and the Return to Nevèrÿon series is perhaps his most impressive sustained work. For all that focus on the fiction, though, I generally feel most excited and inspired when reading his nonfiction.) However, to assess Delany within any sort of literary history, to take stock of his aesthetic and intellectual achievements, to understand anything that he's up to, requires less solipsism. Such an anti-egoistic idea extends well beyond the realm of literature, and is itself present as a concept in virtually all of his books, whether Empire Star or Times Square Red, Times Square Blue or Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders.

The conviction that Delany's work must be seen in multifarious ways by multifarious audiences with multifarious tastes was what led me a few years ago to organize a quick alternative roundtable discussion of Delany to counter one that Locus created in honor of his inauguration as a Grand Master of Science Fiction. I knew even then that my effort was inadequate — despite my attempts to make things otherwise, we were all male, for one obvious inadequacy — but the goal was simply to show some of the possible ways of broadening how we discuss and value Delany's work, hoping to inspire others.

Of recent academic efforts, the special "Delany Lately" issue of African American Review (Fall 2015) and the symposium on Delany in the Winter 2012 issue of American Literary History are significant; the recent publication of volume one of Delany's Selected Journals in a gorgeous edition from Wesleyan University Press (brilliantly edited by Kenneth James) is monumental; and Wesleyan's commitment to Delany's work in general has been one of the most notable (even noble) commitments by an academic press in our era to a particular writer.

Naturally, I think it's not enough. For a writer of Delany's stature, there ought to be more, and it ought to be more various.

Reflections on Samuel Delany's Dark Reflections

At the Los Angeles Review of Books, I have a new essay about Samuel R. Delany's 2007 novel Dark Reflections, which is about to be released in a new and slightly revised edition by Dover Books. Here's a taste:

In many ways, Dark Reflections is a narrative companion to Delany’s 2006 collection of essays, letters, and interviews, About Writing. In the introduction to that book, Delany says that its varied texts share common ideas, primary among them ideas about the art of writing fiction, the structure of the writer’s socio-aesthetic world both in the present and past, and “the way literary reputations grow — and how, today, they don’t grow.” The book is mainly, though not exclusively, aimed at aspiring writers. It provides some advice on craft, but it circles back most insistently to questions of value, and especially to questions of the difference between good writing and talented writing — and what it means, practically and materially, for a writer to shape a life around an aspiration toward the highest levels of achievement. While About Writing poses and explores these questions, Dark Reflections dramatizes them.

Read more at LARB

The Journals of Samuel R. Delany

Kenneth James is editing the journals of Samuel Delany for publication. Volume 1 is coming out from Wesleyan University Press in December. For the future volumes, Ken needs help with funding.

If you already know how valuable this project is, don't read on. Just go donate.

But if you need some convincing, please read on...

Canonicity and an American Literature Survey Course

This term, I taught an American literature survey for the first time since I was a high school teacher, and since the demands of a college curriculum and schedule are quite different from those of a high school curriculum and schedule, it was a very new course for me. Indeed, I've never even taken such a course, as I was successful at avoiding all general surveys when I was an undergrad.

As someone who dislikes the nationalism endemic to the academic discipline of literature, I had a difficult time figuring out exactly what sort of approach to take to this course — American Literature 1865-present — when it was assigned to me. I wanted the course to be useful for students as they work their way toward other courses, but I didn't want to promote and strengthen the assumptions that separate literatures by national borders and promote it through nationalistic ideologies.

I decided that the best approach I could take would be to highlight the forces of canonicity and nationalism, to put the question of "American literature" at the forefront of the course. This would help with another problem endemic to surveys: that there is far more material available than can be covered in 15 weeks. The question of what we should read would become the substance of the course.

The American Shore by Samuel R. Delany from Wesleyan University Press

Now available for pre-order. Here's the Wesleyan University Press page for it.

Here's an excerpt from the introduction, should your appetite need whetting:

It may, on a quick glance, appear to be a book about a short story. On further examination, it may appear to be a book about how science fiction works, or a contribution to the literary and cultural theory of its day. It is those things, but not only those things. Like so much of Delany’s writing, its strategies and concerns nudge our view wider. Much as the best science fiction’s trivalent discourse easily lures us into considering the meaning produced by the intersections of world and text, and thus provides a powerful space for reflection on both, so Delany’s dive over and between the lines of “Angouleme” stands as a model for and instigator of various levels of thought about all the signs and languages that produce and obscure our lives. No great text ever ends if there are still readers to read it and re-read it, to diffuse it and re-fuse it, reveling in the possibilities of polysemy and dissemination. Even the briefest moment of meaning can be, itself, a meaning machine.  Signifiers and signifieds want to dance till the end of time.

Samuel R. Delany: Another Roundtable

Recently, Locus published an online discussion of the work of Samuel R. Delany with a bunch of different writers and critics, primarily aimed at discussing Delany’s status as the newly-crowned Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America. Plenty of interesting things are said there, and the participants include a number of people I’m very fond of (both as writers and people), but the particular focus ended up, I thought, creating a certain narrowness to the discussion, especially regarding the post-Dhalgren works, and I thought it might be nice to gather a different group of people together to discuss Delany … differently.

So here we are. I put out the call to a wide variety of folks, and this is the group that responded. We used a Google Doc, and the discussion grew rhizomatically more than linearly, so you'll see that we sometimes refer to things said later in the roundtable. (This makes for a richer discussion, I think, but it may be a little jarring if you expect a linear conversation.)

I hope people who didn't have time or ability to join us in the "official" roundtable will feel free to offer their thoughts in the comments — as will, well, anybody else. Therefore, without further ado and all that jazz... 


PARTICIPANTS  

Matthew Cheney has published fiction and nonfiction in a wide variety of venues, including One Story, Locus, Weird Tales, Rain Taxi, and elsewhere. He wrote the introductions to Wesleyan University Press’s editions of Samuel R. Delany’s The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, Starboard Wine, and The American Shore (forthcoming). Currently, he is a student in the Ph.D. in Literature program at the University of New Hampshire. 

Craig Laurance Gidney is the author of Sea, Swallow Me & Other Stories and the YA novel Bereft. 

Geoffrey H. Goodwin is a journalist, author, and rogue academic with a Bachelor’s in Literary Theory (Syracuse University) and an MFA in Creative Writing (Naropa University). Geoffrey writes fiction; has taught composition and creative writing in a wide range of settings; has interviewed speculative writers and artists for Bookslut, Tor.com, Sirenia Digest, The Mumpsimus, and during Ann Vandermeer’s helming of Weird Tales; and has worked in seven different stores that have sold comic books.
  
Keguro Macharia is a recovering academic, a lazy blogger, and an itinerant tweeter. Sometimes, he writes things on gukira.wordpress.com or tweets as @Keguro_

Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including Love is the Law and The Last Weekend. His short fiction has appeared everywhere from Asimov’s Science Fiction to The Mammoth Book of Threesomes and Moresomes.

Njihia Mbitiru is a screenwriter. He lives in Nairobi.

Lavelle Porter is an adjunct professor of English at New York City College of Technology (CUNY) and a Ph.D. candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center.  His dissertation The Over-Education of the Negro: Academic Novels, Higher Education and the Black Intellectual will be completed this spring. Finally. He’s on Twitter @alavelleporter.

Ethan Robinson blogs, mostly about science fiction, at maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com, a position he will no doubt shortly be parlaying into literary fame.

Eric Schaller is a biologist, writer, and artist, living in New Hampshire and co-editor of The Revelator.


THE ROUNDTABLE

Matthew Cheney

Locus is “The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field”, and so they’re primarily interested in science fiction. We don’t have to be that narrow here. But let’s start with one of the questions they start with, and see where we go: 

How has Delany influenced your own work or views on writing and literature?

Samuel Delany: The E-books

Today, Open Road Media releases e-book editions of a number of Samuel R. Delany's best books. I've had the chance to look at the Kindle edition of Dhalgren, and it's really excellent. Indeed, it looks to be the most accurate text, incorporating the corrections to errata in the Vintage editions, which were, until now, the most accurate.

The other Open Road editions (which I haven't yet seen) are: Babel-17, Nova, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, The Motion of Light in Water, and the four Nevèrÿon books.

A Decade of Archives 8: 2005

This is the eighth in a series of posts leading up to this blog's tenth anniversary on August 18. In each post, I look back on one year, sometimes specifically and sometimes generally. All the posts can be found here.

2005 was a big year around these here parts, as the blog was nominated for a World Fantasy Award. I went to the World Fantasy Convention and wrote up a report of that experience here. It was an exciting time.

From my perspective now, though, 2005 doesn't seem like all that great a year for actual blog posts,. There are lot of them — 2005 is second only to 2004 in the number of individual posts — but most of them are quick links, bits of news, etc. The stuff that I now will just throw on Twitter, or ignore altogether.

This is reassuring, actually, because I often look back on the number of posts in 2005 and 2004 with fondness and even a certain awe — how did I ever write so much? (My life was no less busy and crazy back then; indeed, it was busier and crazier.) I often fear the blog is lying fallow, victim of my other work. But if anything, the number of substantial, substantive posts here has increased over the years.

Getting back into the oldest of the archives brings about mixed feelings. A bit of nostalgia, certainly, occasionally a moment where I'm impressed with something I wrote, but mostly a lot of cringing. There's a youthful enthusiasm, a youthful naivete to a lot of it that just makes me want to hide under a table. I was 29 and 30 in 2005, and yet often wrote like a precocious 12-year-old. (Eight years from now, if I'm lucky I'll be able to say my writings in 2013 remind me of a precocious 20-year-old.)

I'm not going to go back and laugh at my younger self. The archives are there for you to explore and chuckle through all you want. Instead, I'd just like to note a few posts that don't seem to me entirely worth sending down into the memory hole quite yet...

A Decade of Archives 7: 2006

This is the seventh in a series of posts leading up to this blog's tenth anniversary on August 18. In each post, I look back on one year, sometimes specifically and sometimes generally. All the posts can be found here.

Miami Vice

K: There are times when I'd really love to live in your world.
M: It's full of existential crises, but not a lot of headaches.
K: I've already got the existential crises, so it might be a nice change.
M: There's a reason the first album that ever made a strong impression on me was Stop Making Sense.
K: So that's your aesthetic credo?
M: No, I don't have a credo. It's just something I thought of and so I said it. It's probably not even true.

—"A Conversation After Miami Vice"

2006 seems to me an ideal year of The Mumpsimus, not because all of the posts are high quality (they aren't!) but because the diversity of posts covers just about everything I think of as Mumpsimusian. In other years, the balance has been in one particular direction or another, but if anyone were to ask me to sum up the most dominant ideas and concerns of this blog, I'd tell them to roam around in the 2006 archives.

I'm not one for taxonomy, but it's occasionally useful, so let's taxonomize.

Recent Reading

Blogging always slows to a crawl during the second half of a semester, but I was surprised to see that it's been almost a month since I last posted here. Egads. I've hardly had a moment to breathe, though.

For now, I just want to capture a few moments of reading from the recent weeks.

Starboard Wine at Strange Horizons

Strange Horizons has just posted a review by T.S. Miller of the new edition of Samuel Delany's Starboard Wine, for which I wrote an introduction. It's a generally thoughtful and well-informed review; inevitably, I have quibbles with it, but they aren't important — what's important is that, as Miller notes, the book is now available to a wider audience than ever before.

Nonfiction and Science Fiction

There's a fun Mind Meld feature at SF Signal on "Non-Fiction Books About Science Fiction That Should Be In Every Fan’s Library", with responses from an eclectic group of writers, scholars, reviewers, etc. Well worth a glance. My own prejudices and inclinations align enough with many of the respondents that their lists include a lot of books I've spent a lot of time with, as well as others I'm unfamiliar with, which is always fun. One of the good things the Mind Meld editors do a lot is create agonizingly broad questions that can elicit hugely varied responses depending on how people interpret them; that's part of the fun of the feature. In this case, Gary Wolfe nails it: "I think this question depends on what you mean by 'fan.' Not all fans set out to be students of SF; some just want to enjoy the stuff and have no more interest in finding out about it than in finding out where their sausage comes from. Still fewer aspire to be scholars of the field in the academic sense..."

Things I likely would have added had I participated would have been Damien Broderick's Reading By Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction, which gives a good overview of a lot of the critical issues that have come up over the last couple decades in SF scholarship, and Samuel Delany's Starboard Wine.

Starboard Wine has been out of print pretty much since five minutes after its publication in 1984. Copies are nearly as rare as moon rocks. But no longer! Wesleyan University Press releases a new edition of the book this month, with an introduction I wrote. It should be available any day now, and the ebook edition is already available from Amazon and Google. (Currently, both editions are listed as by "Samuel R. R. Delany". Apparently, George R. R. Martin has decided he has enough R's, so he's loaning his out now...)

A number of people mention The Jewel-Hinged Jaw in the Mind Meld, and that's all well and good (it's been a hugely influential book for me, too), but only Cheryl Morgan brings up any Delany book that's less than 30 years old — she mentions About Writing, an excellent choice, indeed. But it's symptomatic of, frankly, so much that is shallow about SF criticism that everybody keeps going back to JHJ, and especially "About 5,750 Words", which he wrote when he was 26. Delany's ideas have become, since he was 26, more complex, more subtle, more nuanced, more informed. I love JHJ and everybody on Earth should should buy a copy right now — but they should also at least get About Writing and Shorter Views (which gives a wider exposure to his ideas about texts and the world).

And now, finally, we can add Starboard Wine to the list, because it's his most developed and accessible book focused on science fiction. The difficulty of finding a copy of the first edition made ignoring the book understandable; now, there is no excuse. Carl Freedman gave it an appropriate blurb:

After all the years since it was first published, Starboard Wine remains one of the three or four most important critical statements ever made about science fiction. No one with a serious interest in the field should be ignorant of it.

One thing that the Mind Meld made me think of was a variation on the actual topic. Even though it's against my own best interests to say so, I don't think the world is in any great peril from SF fans not reading enough about SF. The question that bubbled up into the swamp of my mind was:  

Which non-fiction books NOT about science fiction should be in every fan’s library?

Delany & The Bat

Ed Champion interviews Samuel Delany for his Bat Segundo Show. An informed, wide-ranging conversation that's very much worth the time to listen to:

Delany: And I think pornotopia is the place, as I’ve written about, where the major qualities — the major aspect of pornotopia, it’s a place where any relation, if you put enough pressure on it, can suddenly become sexual. You walk into the reception area of the office and you look at the secretary and the secretary looks at you and the next minute you’re screwing on the desk. That’s pornotopia. Which, every once in a while, actually happens. But it doesn’t happen at the density.

Correspondent: Frequency.

Delany: At the frequency that it happens in pornotopia. In pornotopia, it happens nonstop. And yet some people are able to write about that sort of thing relatively realistically. And some people aren’t. Something like Fifty Shades of Grey is not a very realistic account.

Correspondent: I’m sure you’ve read that by now.

Delany: I’ve read about five pages.

Correspondent: And it was enough for you to throw against the wall?

Delany: No. I didn’t throw it. I just thought it was hysterically funny. But because the writer doesn’t use it to make any real observations on the world that is the case, you know, it’s ho-hum.

Correspondent: How do we hook those moms who were so driven to Fifty Shades of Grey on, say, something like this?

Delany: I don’t think you’re going to.

Libidinal Estrangement

From a rich, insightful, and fascinating review by Roger Bellin of Samuel Delany's Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders:

It is certainly possible to find worthwhile the effort it takes to attempt the broadening of one's libidinal sympathies — the way a psychologically realistic novel can demand our sympathy with someone else's life and thoughts, this one demands our sympathy with his sexual desires. If science fiction, in Darko Suvin's definition, is the genre of "cognitive estrangement," then the pornographic first half of TVNS is a work of libidinal estrangement: the novel's alienating effect bears on its reader's desires, not his rational mind.

[...]

Rather than just cataloguing its protagonists' sex acts, TVNS gradually becomes a psychologically complicated novel about what they've learned from them — a reflection, through a host of little narrated daily incidents, on the ethical lessons that a life of joyous perversion has taught Eric and Shit. Sometimes it almost, implicitly, seems like a manifesto for a broad and catholic vision of queer politics; and the novel's real utopia might, finally, have less to do with the imagined community of the Dump than it does with the people themselves, and the practice of loving each other that they've discovered and worked out.

I'm still reading the book, slowly and with, frankly, awe, but everything Bellin says fits well with my reading so far.

More later, once I've reached the last page of the book...

Update: And now Steven Shaviro is as insightful as always, and offers an impressive first paragraph:

Samuel R. Delany’s new novel, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, is over 800 pages, which makes it the longest book he has ever written (even longer than Dhalgren). It is also one of the best novels by anyone that I have read in quite a long time. Indeed, I would go so far as to say (as I already put it on Twitter) that it is the best English-language novel that I know of, of the 21st century so far.

Worldbuilding

From three of the most interesting things I've read recently and, thus, started thinking about together...

M. John Harrison:

A world can be built in a sentence, but epic fantasy doesn’t want that. At the same time, it isn’t really baggy or capacious, like Pynchon or Gunter Grass. It has no V. It has no Dog Years. It has no David Foster Wallace. It isn’t a generous genre. The same few stolen cultures & bits of history, the same few biomes, the same few ideas about things. It’s a big bag but there isn’t much in it. With deftness, economy of line, good design, compression & use of modern materials, you could ram it full of stuff. You could really build a world. But for all the talk, that’s not what that kind of fantasy wants. It wants to get away from a world. This one.

Ian Sales on Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey:

There are some 150 million people living in the Asteroid Belt. The greatest concentration is six million in the tunnels inside the dwarf planet Ceres. There is no diversity. There is passing mention of nationalities other than the authors’ own – and a bar the characters frequent plays banghra music – but the viewpoint cast are American in outlook and presentation. Ceres itself is like some inner city no-go zone, with organised crime, drug-dealing, prostitution, under-age prostitution, endemic violence against women, subsistence-level employment… Why? It’s simply not plausible. Why would a space-based settlement resemble the worst excesses of some bad US TV crime show? The Asteroid Belt is not the Wild West, criminals and undesirables can’t simply wander in of their own accord and set up shop. Any living space must be built and maintained and carefully controlled, and everything in it must in some way contribute. A space station is much like an oil rig in the North Sea – and you don’t get brothels on oil rigs.

Further, what does all this say about gender relations in the authors’ vision of the twenty-second century? That women still are second-class citizens. One major character’s boss is a woman, and another’s executive officer is also female. But that female boss plays only a small role, and everything the XO does she does because she has the male character’s permission to do so (and it’s not even a military spaceship).

Paul Di Filippo on Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders by Samuel R. Delany:

Given that the book achieves liftoff into SF territory halfway through, you need to know that Delany does not stint on his speculative conceits. His hand is as sure as of old. The future history he creates is genuinely insightful and innovative. But it’s always background, half-seen. Because our heroes are living in a semi-rural backwater and are self-professed “Luddites,” their mode of life is more archaic than the lifestyles of others. But the shifting world keeps bumping up against them, rather in the manner of Haldeman’s The Forever War. Eric and Shit move ahead almost in a series of discontinuous jumps, waking up at random moments like Haldeman’s returning soldiers to find the world growing stranger and less comprehensible and less welcoming around them. It’s as if they are riding a time machine whose intervals of travel are ever-increasing. By the end of the book, the two ancient lovers are relics, fossils, and the mutant children who, in a sense their actions helped birth, are golden-eyed and alien.

Delany’s focus on such humble men—both Eric and Shit proclaim their lives to have been full and happy and joyous, but ultimately inconsequential, and no other character beside Robert Kyle is a Bigtime Player, and he’s mostly offstage—is the ultimate enactment of the goals discussed in Ursula Le Guin’s essay “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown”. No wars, no heists, no inventions, no high drama, no bigger-than-life supermen propel this story. To pervert the title of Aaron Copland’s famous work, it’s a “Fanfare for the Common Horndog.” And yet by this very limitation, by the intensity with which Delany inhabits the simple lives of his heroes, the book assumes that majesty which all eternal and humble things acquire, when seen a-right. 

"Why We Oppose Pockets for Women"

Here's a fabulous article by Lili Loofbourow from The Hairpin that presents excerpts from a book she discovered on Project Gutenberg, Are Women People? It's full of awesomeness, but the Delany-ologist in me particularly liked this bit about pockets:

Why We Oppose Pockets for Women
by Alice Duer Miller

1. Because pockets are not a natural right.

2. Because the great majority of women do not want pockets. If they did they would have them.

3. Because whenever women have had pockets they have not used them.

4. Because women are required to carry enough things as it is, without the additional burden of pockets.

5. Because it would make dissension between husband and wife as to whose pockets were to be filled.

6. Because it would destroy man's chivalry toward woman, if he did not have to carry all her things in his pockets.

7. Because men are men, and women are women. We must not fly in the face of nature.

8. Because pockets have been used by men to carry tobacco, pipes, whiskey flasks, chewing gum and compromising letters. We see no reason to suppose that women would use them more wisely.

About (Experimental) Writing

...having the entire intellectual armamentarium of rhetorical devices at your beck and call is far preferable to having to limit yourself to tradititional narrative tropes, when writing about truly important matters. To me, that's just simple logic. 

—Samuel R. Delany

(see also, here)

Paris Review 197

The latest issue of The Paris Review includes not only fiction by Jonathan Lethem, Roberto Bolaño, David Gates, and Amie Barrodale along with poetry by, among others, Frederick Seidel and Cathy Park Hong, but it also includes interviews with Samuel R. Delany and William Gibson.

An excerpt to whet your appetite:

DELANY

Gide says somewhere that art and crime both require leisure time to flourish. I spend a lot of time thinking, if not daydreaming. People think of me as a genre writer, and a genre writer is supposed to be prolific. Since that's how people perceive me, they have to say I'm prolific. But I don't find that either complimentary or accurate.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think of yourself as a genre writer?

DELANY

I think of myself as someone who thinks largely through writing. Thus I write more than most people, and I write in many different forms. I think of myself as the kind of person who writes, rather than as one kind of writer or another. That's about the cloest I come to categorizing myself as one or another kind of artist.

And another:

INTERVIEWER

Do you think of your last three books as being science fiction?

GIBSON

No, I think of them as attempts to disprove the distinction or attempts to dissolve the boundary. They are set in a world that meets virtually every criteria of being science fiction, but it happens to be our world, and it's barely tweaked by the author to make the technology just fractionally imaginary or fantastic. It has, to my mind, the effect of science fiction.

An Important Clarification

I stopped by the University library yesterday to take a look at the latest issue of American Literature because it includes not only some interesting essays about Samuel R. Delany, a fellow I've written about a bit myself, but also a fabulous essay by Aaron Bady, "Tarzan's White Flights: Terrorism and Fantasy Before and After the Airplane".

In this essay, there is what may be my favorite statement-required-by-a-rights-holder evah (as they say). It accompanies a drawing by Robert Baden-Powell, author of Scouting for Boys, that appeared in the Daily Mail in 1938 and is titled "Policeman Aeroplanes":

Reproduced by kind permission of the Scout Association Trustees. The Scout Association does not endorse Mr. Bady's article or the use of air power against civilians.

So relieved to have that cleared up!

The cover for this issue of American Literature, by the way, reprints the famous August 1928 cover of Amazing Stories. If Duke University Press, the journal's publisher, were to sell posters of this cover, I would buy one in a second, because seeing Amazing Stories on the cover of American Literature gives me irrational, childlike joy.

Of Lexias and Leiber

My latest Strange Horizons column has been posted, this time a celebration of Fritz Leiber's centennary.

I mentioned last week that I needed to come up with a title for my Strange Horizons columns. Through much of last week I was fighting off the worst illness I've had in years, so perhaps the title is simply the product of fever, but nonetheless, now in a less fevered state, I like it: Lexias. It keeps to the pattern of the other columnists (Scores, Diffractions, Intertitles, etc.) in being a single, plural word. And it seems mostly accurate to my project, if you think of the word as Roland Barthes used it in S/Z: "a series of brief, contiguous fragments ... units of reading" (Richard Miller's translation). (For more on Barthes, by the way, this is an interesting site.)

But for my purposes, "lexias" is fun, too, because it is the term Samuel R. Delany picked up (from Barthes) for The American Shore, which can be described as a book-length study of Thomas Disch's "Angouleme" (as S/Z can be described as a book-length study of Balzac's "Sarrasine" -- and I say "can be described as" because to say either book is that seems to me too reductive -- each book is an awful lot of things).

Which is not to say that I think I belong in league with Barthes or Delany (ha!), any more than anyone who picks up a term belongs in the same league with anyone who has used it before, but that I like having a title that suggests fragmentation, experimentation, close reading, and realms of both subversive (or subverted) literature and thoughtful science fiction.