Samuel R. Delany - Occasional Views: More About Writing and Other Essays

Other Books by the Author

FICTION

The Jewels of Aptor (1962)

The Fall of the Towers: Out of the Dead City (formerly Captives of the Flame, 1963)

The Towers of Toron (1964)

City of a Thousand Suns (1965)

The Ballad of Beta-2 (1965)

Empire Star (1966)

Babel-17 (1966)

The Einstein Intersection (1967)

Nova (1968)

Driftglass (1969)

Equinox (formerly The Tides of Lust, 1973)

Dhalgren (1975)

Trouble on Triton (formerly Triton, 1976)

Return to Nevron:
Tales of Nevron (1979)
Neveryna (1982)
Flight from Nevron (1985)
Return to Nevron (formerly)

The Bridge of Lost Desire, 1987)

Distant Stars (1981)

Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand (1984)

Driftglass/Starshards (collected stories, 1993)

They Fly at iron (1993)

The Mad Man (1994)

Hogg (l995)

Atlantis: Three Tales (1995)

Aye, and Gomorrah (stories, 2004)

Phallos (2004)

Dark Reflections (2007)

Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2012)

A, B, C: Three Short Novels (2015)

The Hermit of Houston (2017)

The Atheist in the Attic (2018)

GRAPHIC NOVELS

Empire Star (with artist Howard Chaynkin, 1982)

Bread & Wine (with artist Mia Wolff, 1999)

NONFICTION

The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (1977)

The American Shore (1978)

Starboard Wine (1978, revised 2008)

Heavenly Breakfast (1979)

The Motion of Light in Water (1988)

Wagner/Artaud (1988)

The Straits of Messina (1990)

Silent Interviews (1994)

Longer Views (1996)

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)

Shorter Views (1999)

1984: Selected Letters (2000)

About Writing (2005)

Ash Wednesday (2017)

Letters from Amherst: Five Narrative Letters (2019)

More About Writing and Other Essays

Samuel R. Delany

WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS

Middletown, Connecticut

Wesleyan University Press

Middletown CT 06459

www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

2021 Samuel R. Delany

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Typeset in Monotype Baskerville, Mona Lisa Recut, and Futura Now by Passumpsic Publishing

For acknowledgments of previously published essays, see

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

NAMES: Delany, Samuel R., author.

TITLE: Occasional views / Samuel R. Delany.

DESCRIPTION: Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, [2021] | V. 1: More about writing and other essays | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: Gathers the writings of award-winning author Samuel R. Delany on a wide array of topics related to writing, science fiction, race, sexuality, literature, and literary theoryProvided by publisher.

IDENTIFIERS: LCCN 2021003527 (print) | LCCN 2021003528 (ebook) | ISBN 780819579744 (cloth) | ISBN 9780819579751 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780819579768 (ebook)

SUBJECTS: LCGFT: Essays.

CLASSIFICATION: LCC PS3554.E437 O33 2021 (print) | LCC PS3554.E437 (ebook) | DDC 814/.54dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003527

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003528

5 4 3 2 1

Front Cover Illustration: The wheel of time, collage, by Emin Qahramanov.

For
Iva Hacker-Delany
Mischa Adams & Peggy Delany

More About Writing

The Life of/and Writing

The Life of Writing is a phrase we associate with the eighteenth-century writer, Dr. Samuel Johnsonresponsible for compiling the first comprehensive English language dictionary. He also wrote a fantasy, Rasselas, that now and again appears from various contemporary paperback houses attempting to add some tone and history to their science fiction and fantasy lines.

When Dr. Johnson used the phrase, the life of writing, it meant, of course, the literary lifeand referred to the kinds of things an eighteenth-century writer might be occupied with in the course of an eighteenth-century day, from sharpening goose quills, grinding ink stones, and debating in coffee shops what historical material would or would not make successful subject matter for a profitable poetic tragedy, to negotiating with booksellers (what the eighteenth century had in place of publishers) as to what percentage of the costs you might put up toward printing your most recent profitable poetic tragedyas all publishing at the time was more or less vanity publishingthough most of your time, money, and energy might be reserved for putting out polemical pamphlets on any subject from the foppery and decadence of women, the nobility, or the young to meditations on taxes, fashions, or God, for which opinions you risked fame, notoriety, or (sometimes) jail.

The life of writing has changed drastically in three hundred years.

But, as the phrase fades into the memory of literary antiquarians, it passes through a strangely luminous moment, when, as its historical meaning verges on the obsolete, it opens up to a host of other possible meanings, comic, surreal, suggestive: in 1970, the poet Judith Johnson Sherwin published a book of experimental short stories with Atheneum, The Life of Riot, the title of which clearly takes its resonances from Johnson. And it does not take much for us to read in the original phrase, The Life of Writing, the notion of what, in any piece of writing, makes that writing lively: the life (or liveliness) in writing. And if we look at life, not as referring to general liveliness, but to the range of everyday life, then, with only a little catachresis, we can read the life of writing as meaning the way everyday life is reflected in writing. Thus, as we multiply and survey the possibleif sometimes improbableinterpretations we can unpack from this most unassuming phrase, finally we have to admit that, buried in its text is pretty much every possible relationship that we can conceive as existing between writing and lifethat is, writing in any of its meanings and life in any of its.

Sometimes I try to suggest that range and multiplicity by taking that weakest of English prepositions, of, and placing behind it a slash, that, like a slant mirror, reveals that what can be hidden in that loose and lax preposition is the strongest of English conjunctions, and. Indeed, the of and the and, on either side of that virgule, mirror each other and, I hope, problematize our original phrase out into an infinitude of possible relations between world and text, word and world, action and articulation:

The life of/and writing

What are some of these relations?

Teaching at various writers workshops for more than forty years now, certainly I can remember when some of the complexities of this relational complex were first brought home to me.

A young writer of seventeen or so had handed in a story that struck me at once as both extremely talented and deeply flawed.