Except there's garbage
Oct. 7th, 2013 08:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
timIt took me about six weeks, but I finally finished reading Samuel Delany's recent novel _Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders_. Maybe I just have a kink for long books -- it's 804 pages and, like _Infinite Jest_ (which is even longer), I suspect it's going to be one of those books that keeps being important to me for a really long time. (The third one like that is _A Suitable Boy_ by Vikram Seth, though it hasn't stayed with me quite the same way _Infinite Jest_ has; I've also only read it once.)
In lieu of more thoughts, some quotations from it:
"'There ain't no normal," Shit said. 'That's what he always told me.' With his scruffy beard, Shit pointed his chin toward Dynamite. 'There's just comfortable and uncomfortable. And I like to be comfortable with pretty much everything.'" (p. 305)
"'Well--' Eric looked back up and put his hand on Shit's warm shoulder--'state supported marriage comes with a whole lot of assumptions about how it's gonna be, a history of who has to obey who, when you're justified in callin' it quits, all sorts of things like that. Now, you could agree with each other to change some of those things or do 'em differently, but for thousands and thousands of years gay men and women didn't have even that--except for a few Christian monasteries here and there, where the monks were allowed to marry each other. But nobody likes to think about those. For us, decidin' to be with someone else wasn't a matter of acceptin' a ready-made set of assumptions. You had to work 'em all out from the bottom up, every time--whether you was gonna be monogamous or open; and if you was gonna be open, how you was gonna do it so that it didn't bother the other person and even helped the relationship along. Workin' all that stuff out for yourselves was half the reason you went into a relationship with somebody else. We had some friends once--back when we lived in the Dump--that was faithful for ten months out the year, but for two months they'd go on vacation and do all their tom-cattin' around.' He realized he was making that up, but hell, it was plausible. 'Then they'd be faithful again. But that's how they liked to do it. Then there were guys like us that just had to make real sure that the other person was feelin' good about things, when they did it and knew they were number one and didn't mind. See, that's what people who get married don't have. Or don't have in the same way." (p. 785-786)
"'Bein' a pervert was the only was I ever learned anything worth knowin'.'" (p. 792)
There's also this epigraph, which, if I ever wrote papers anymore, I would try to include in a paper about GC:
"Except there's garbage, which is part of what we're trying to include in our work and our thought, which is to say, we are attentive still to what remains, what gets tossed away and off. We want to include the trash in many ways, thinking of this refuse according to all sorts of disposal systems." -- Avital Ronell
In lieu of more thoughts, some quotations from it:
"'There ain't no normal," Shit said. 'That's what he always told me.' With his scruffy beard, Shit pointed his chin toward Dynamite. 'There's just comfortable and uncomfortable. And I like to be comfortable with pretty much everything.'" (p. 305)
"'Well--' Eric looked back up and put his hand on Shit's warm shoulder--'state supported marriage comes with a whole lot of assumptions about how it's gonna be, a history of who has to obey who, when you're justified in callin' it quits, all sorts of things like that. Now, you could agree with each other to change some of those things or do 'em differently, but for thousands and thousands of years gay men and women didn't have even that--except for a few Christian monasteries here and there, where the monks were allowed to marry each other. But nobody likes to think about those. For us, decidin' to be with someone else wasn't a matter of acceptin' a ready-made set of assumptions. You had to work 'em all out from the bottom up, every time--whether you was gonna be monogamous or open; and if you was gonna be open, how you was gonna do it so that it didn't bother the other person and even helped the relationship along. Workin' all that stuff out for yourselves was half the reason you went into a relationship with somebody else. We had some friends once--back when we lived in the Dump--that was faithful for ten months out the year, but for two months they'd go on vacation and do all their tom-cattin' around.' He realized he was making that up, but hell, it was plausible. 'Then they'd be faithful again. But that's how they liked to do it. Then there were guys like us that just had to make real sure that the other person was feelin' good about things, when they did it and knew they were number one and didn't mind. See, that's what people who get married don't have. Or don't have in the same way." (p. 785-786)
"'Bein' a pervert was the only was I ever learned anything worth knowin'.'" (p. 792)
There's also this epigraph, which, if I ever wrote papers anymore, I would try to include in a paper about GC:
"Except there's garbage, which is part of what we're trying to include in our work and our thought, which is to say, we are attentive still to what remains, what gets tossed away and off. We want to include the trash in many ways, thinking of this refuse according to all sorts of disposal systems." -- Avital Ronell
(no subject)
Date: 2013-10-08 04:37 am (UTC)Thanks for reminding me to try again.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-10-08 04:57 am (UTC)In _Spiders_, the sex pretty much didn't squick me and basically didn't turn me on, either. I think it's because in that book, the people it's describing and the community it's describing are such that sex is an ordinary, comfortable thing, so it's (intellectually) lovely to read about how it works in that world, but not much more of a turn-on than reading about cooking.
The one somewhat squicky thing (for me) in the book was the incest, but I think I think that in the community that exists in the book, which is basically a utopian community (not in the sense of no conflict or illness or death or pain ever, but in the sense of basically being totally lacking in oppression), incest is something that *can* be okay. And I think Delany knows full well that the world he's describing is not the one we live in and the fact that it can be okay (for some people) in that utopia doesn't mean it's ever okay in this world.
I certainly don't think it's a book for everyone, for plenty of reasons, but I actually didn't find it hard to keep going (I was expecting it to be hard -- Delany's fiction is very hit-or-miss for me that way). One thing that's interesting about it is that it only becomes "science fiction" at least in a sense I'd usually recognize about midway through, because the first half of the book describes a chronologically shorter amount of time than the second half. There's nothing in the first half that couldn't actually *happen*, that would require any technological advances. But the first half is science fiction too, because it's imagining a world that's not fundamentally different from the worlds most of the readers live in, but without oppression. And that's, of course, a much bigger leap of imagination than any of the technologies that show up in the second half.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-10-08 11:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-10-10 09:23 pm (UTC)His memoir _The Motion of Light and Water_ was also great. I actually got into Delany through
I haven't read Dhalgren, though, and have heard it's not a good one to start with (although again, some people love it).
(no subject)
Date: 2013-10-09 06:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-10-18 11:37 pm (UTC)