Doug, thanks for the suggestions. I saw a half dozen odd Delany novels
in a second hand bookshop while in Sydney, last. I already have four and
couldn't get them then, running out of cash and already had more books
then I could comfortably carry. I hope to read all the Delany I can find
next year. Currently working my way through Gore Vidal's oeuvre. My
reading is more methodical then it may appear, even if I do have the
time only to read and write, without work or teaching like many others
on this list.

It is good to hear Delany is getting more attention. Yet again, I am
going to give the literature departments in universities a thrashing for
unacknowledged homophobia. To study, at graduate or doctorate level the
writings of Gore Vidal or even Delany gets shafted into the highly
specialised and limited area known as gay fiction. Graduate students get
told; study that far too narrow specialised area and you won't find a
teaching job. Too narrow, too specialised, how can you then be expected
to teach something like modernist poetics. You won't have the skills. I
don't know whether to laugh or cry at being told this, I really don't.
The professor sprouting these words considers himself a bit of an expert
on modernist poetics. He knows all about it. Hasn't he ever heard of
modernist fourth person singular point of view? Has he even read Vidal?
Mention Santayanna, Vidal's favorite philosopher, and you'd probably get
a blank stare. Christopher Norris _On deconstruction_ would do for him.
A lazy fashion for deconstruction, to echo Derrida's own words. 

A lesbian does a doctorate on Gertrude Stein. A highly specialised
experimental lesbian writer, she is told. she finally finds a teaching
post in a new out of the way university and spends the rest of her
career fearing for her job with each shake-up the Government is giving
the universities. Far, far, far too specialised, she is told. How can
you possibly teach modernist poetics with a background like that? I have
Gertrude Stein's _Lectures in America_ beside me as I write this. What
can this professor, a self proclaimed specialist in modernist poetics be
thinking? Has he even read Gertrude Stein? It is becoming a generalised
story which repeats itself over and over and over and over again. How
many times have I been told I couldn't possibly have learnt any
modernist aesthetics with a graduate thesis on queer aesthetics. I think
of the younger generation; Stephen Dunn, for example, who wrote his
thesis on the history of gay plays in Sydney and was awarded a first
class. He went on to be an award winning drama critic. I don't know what
he is doing now. I hope he is permitted to continue onto a doctorate, if
that is his wish. Dean Kiley slipped through and scored a doctorate
reading old _Art and Text_ journals edited by Paul Taylor and Paul Floss
and published in the 1980's on deconstructive mimesis. Best, perhaps, to
side step the article published in 1985 in _Art and Text_, Nomad Art, by
Gilles Deleuze. Too specialised for the modern literary department, that
one.

Still the fight goes on. Shafted into the too specialised area called
gay studies or gay literature. It is called homophobia. Structural
discrimination against lesbians and gay men which slips pass the
anti-discrimination policies of most universities because a heterosexual
professor considers the area too specialised, considers these writers
cannot possibly have anything to do with modernist poetics or any other
lame excuse they like to drag out when that one fails. Perhaps it is too
much of a truism: most innovative, original and groundbreaking thinking
in the liberals arts and humanities in Australia happens outside of the
universities. The universities of stupidity. That is homophobia.

best wishes

Chris Jones.

(Not aimed at you, of course, Doug. Officially, at least, I too am a
member of the liberal arts academy, listed as an expert in several
areas.... right now happy not to have to teach.)


On Mon, 2003-04-28 at 02:10, Douglas Barbour wrote:
> Alison & Chris
> 
> on Lacan & that particular lack, the funniest, & wittiest (with all the
> connotations of that term) refusal of it that I know can be found in Samuel
> R Delany's first Neveryon book, Tales of Nevèrÿon, 'The Tale of Old Venn.'
> But then the whole tetralogy is well worth checking out. I won't even try
> to explain what he does i the 'faux' anthropology of the tale, but it's a
> hoot.
> 
> doug