Friday, July 27, 2012

Reading Matters

Now that I've turned in the novel, I can spend some time reading (an activity that for any writer is as important as hammering the keyboard).  First up, Andy Duncan's fine collection of esoteric Americana, The Pottawatomie Giant and other Stories, and Samuel R Delany's Through the Valley of the Nest of the Spiders: enormous, enormously challenging because of its frank depictions of polymorphous perversity, thematically congruent with his examinations of the responsibilities of freedom in Trouble on Triton: an Ambiguous Heterotropia and Dhalgren, and a moving, beautifully humane story of a partnership that endures the hopes and hazards of the next seventy years.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Sergey said...

I've tried to read some pages from new novel by Samuel Delany via Amazon preview - though I very like his style - it was unbearable for me.
For me Delany as writer is ended with this book.
Sad but it seems that he didn't notice the world around him in last decade.

August 10, 2012 8:37 pm  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I've been reading S. R. Delaney since he began publishing years ago in the 60s. I still love "Dhalgren," although on last reading I found it curiously dated even for speculative fiction.

I tried to read “Through the Valley of the Nest of the Spiders" and could not get past the first 20 pages.

I am life-long gay, older than SRD, and familiar with what he writes about going back to the early 50s. But the relentless of his characters constantly eating shit was just too much for this old queen. It gets boring.

Get a job in a waste processing plant if you like shit that much.

What does eating shit have to do with homosexual orientation anyway? I thought eating shit was what heterosexuals did!

October 20, 2012 1:21 pm  

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