the 30th Street Station, I struck up a conversation with a black poet also down at the AWP program, named Walter Mosley, who’d gone to U. Mass., and who recommended several restaurants to me in my own neighborhood I’d never heard of before.
The next three issues of the New York Review of Science Fiction will see the “Intro to Deconstruction” (my Lowell/Erie lecture) serialized in three parts. It’s kind of fun. I’ll send on copies, when I get some.
A couple of nights back, I stayed up till all hours reading René Daumal’s Mount Analogue, its completion interrupted by Daumal’s death in 1944. Then I started on his earlier, completed book, A Night of Serious Drinking. (My journal says: “Finally—after how many years [finding it first on the shelf in San Francisco’s City Lights in ’69]—read Mount Analogue.”) What an eccentric and interesting little book. A mystical tract almost wholly without God. Only one of the editorially appended notes gives in to a “Being that holds each thing accomplished,” residing at the mountain’s peak.6 But even that’s only a mountaineer’s song, which Daumal finally decided not to include in the book. In its incomplete and fragmentary form, it seems largely of the Novalis / Heinrich von Ofterdingen or Oberman tradition. Can’t think of another book that comes apart less into its respective sentences. A good book to read on a day when you’ve got a hangover [I’d overindulged at dinner the night before.] … The novel proper ends, mid-sentence, in the midst of an ecological parable that is eminently completable on the ideational level; and mentally completing it is one of the most seductive pleasures of the text.
I’d recently recommended it to our department professor who specializes in mystical literature, Lucian Miller (who’d never heard of it! Which gives you an idea of the quality of some of these guys); but I thought I’d really better read it myself before I handed it over. It quite lives up to its reputation.
Then, day before yesterday I got a call from Frank—down in New York. He’d gone over to the apartment, checking for mail in the mailbox. (Can you imagine. Three years after our break-up, he’s still getting mail there!) Because it was kind of stuffed, he took everything out and called me up to find out if I wanted him to read any of it to me over the phone. Among the stuff there was a new copy of the Australian SF Review; they just devoted an entire issue to me. He says he’s going to get the mail back to the house, but, though I know he has the best intentions, I suspect I’ll never actually see any of it again. But that’s just Frank.
Still, I’d rather like to find out what Russell Blackwell had to say about me. He’s really the best critic yet (present company excepted!) who’s written about me. Too bad he’s down under.
But that more or less brings you up to date.
I wish there was that much to tell you about the work. But I’m not even going to try.
Well, this is about half the letter I should write you! And I have not even started to respond to your letters. But I want to get this off, just so you’ll know I haven’t forgotten you.
Someone is supposed to show up here at ten to start giving me lessons in American Sign Language7 (which I know a little bit of already), and there is an Undergraduate Studies Committee Meeting at noon. And someone just printed up and distributed a poster for a guest speaker (Henry Sussman), that apparently has the wrong date on it, about which various people are running around and being mildly hysterical.
My love to you and yours.
Really, I still owe you a letter in which I actually answer yours! (I ought at least to mention that the awful situation with Michael P. is one I’ve encountered a couple of times in the last year. Larry McCaffery just went through his own version of the same thing, when a young graduate student brought charges of sexual harassment against him [from what I know of both the man and of such situations, it’s equally as unlikely as it was in Michael’s case] that flowered into something truly unpleasant. I wonder what this is indicative of?) But that will have to wait till the next moment I get some time.
All good thoughts
for more good things,
Samuel R. Delany
1. Lent to SRD by SF writer and translator for the deaf Geary Gravel.
2. “Neither the First Word nor the Last on Deconstruction, Structuralism, Post-structuralism, and Semiotics for SF Readers,” in Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary, by Samuel R. Delany (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Wesleyan University Press, 1999).
3. A dozen years after Ginsberg’s death, SRD would teach at Naropa for fifteen summers in their Summer Writing Program.
4. “Anthony Davis—a Conversation,” in Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics, by Samuel R. Delany (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 289.
5. “Gay Writers / Gay Writing.”
6. This, of course, is discourse; though it is not a being, it is a process entailing brains and a world—the ones that are the cases (Wittgenstein).
7. Geary Gravel—see note 1 above.
2
TO ROBERT BRAVARD
May 22, 1990
• • •
21 Cowles Lane
Amherst MA 01002
May 22, 1990
Dear Bob,
Received yours of March 1 / May 17th, and responded pretty much by rereading everything you’ve sent—back to October 25th, 1989. Though it’s entirely my fault, there are a few holes in the story I’d like to catch up on. First off: How is Cynthia?
You told me about the beginnings of her knee problem—then, your own hip problem (understandably!) superseded it in your account. Nevertheless, while I have a sense of how you’re doing (and it doesn’t sound fun!), I’m still concerned whether both or just one of you is currently severely limited in getting around!
We’re a handful of days beyond the end of classes. I spent the afternoon writing letters (one form letter, actually, but with a personalized first paragraph) to all the graduate students who’d received Teaching Assistantships, telling them which faculty member each would be working with (if any), and what courses each would be teaching.
I did the personalizing, however, so I might as well have been writing out 12 letters.
I also told our reigning disaster case, a 30-ish young man from Hungary (Rajmund), that the department had decided not to support him this year. Because he’s from an eastern bloc country, essentially this means he’ll have to drop out of graduate school here. He’s been known to have quite a temper—but he likes me, so I’m afraid that, rather than get angry, he just kind of fell apart. The sad thing is, it’s not his marks that are the problem—though they are not spectacular. He simply has an appalling attitude toward things intellectual and work in general, which the department has no way to deal with. Fundamentally, he can’t conceive that there might be anything worth knowing that he doesn’t already know. Thus, when a term or phrase (e.g., “lexia,” “contradictory relationship,” “irony against both sides”)
