Samuel R Delany is a writer which fascinates me. I find some of his fiction
quite difficult, which is a high compliment. _Stars in my pocket like grains
of sand_ made me think of Djuna Barnes _Nightwood_ (spelling and title
unsure, sorry) with its monolog in the middle of the novel. Since Delany
speaks approvingly of Gertrude Stein I begin to suspect he has read Barnes,
also.
Following are a few short excerpts from an interview with Samuel R Delany by
Jayme Lynn Blaschke, April 2001. Unfortunately I did not bookmark the
interview but his website can be found at:
http://www.vvm.com/~caius/JAYME1.html
[Delany speaking in all excerpts]
Fiction -- at least for me -- requires long, relatively uninterrupted time
stretches in which to bring it to fruition. I've never been a
two-hour-in-the-morning writer, who could put in another six hours on Sunday
afternoon. For me, a novel requires weeks of living in a largely mental and
wholly internal landscape. Everything else has to be relegated to the odd
hour here, the bit of time there. Sadly, however, uninterrupted time blocks
are not what life doles out today to any of us with regularity.
While publishers are convinced fiction readers are only interested in reading
about what they've read about before, the reality is, I suspect, more
sanguine: People want new stories and new materials to explore and
interrogate and have adventures in.
If anything, though, I find my encounter with academia only confirms me in my
own sense of what literature (and literary activity) is. First of all, it's
not and never has been a consensual enterprise.
Concepts of what constitute good writing form a conflictual field -- highly
so and they always have. That is the only reason why, say, simplicity and
concision are just as much esthetic virtues as ornamentation and rich
ambiguity. It's also why either one, out of control, can become an aesthetic
failing -- dullness and banality in the one case, and overwrought clutter in
the other.
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