LYNNE JOYRICH: I'm
Lynne Joyrich, the chair
of Modern Culture and Media.
I want to welcome
everybody to Stars
in It's Pocket: Conversation
with Samuel Delany and Kara
Keeling.
That event title derives from
one of Samuel Delany's books,
perhaps in fact, my favorite
of all of your books,
if I have to try to to pick a
favorite, which is difficult.
So it derives from
the title of the book,
called Stars in My Pocket
Like Grains of Sand,
a wonderful book title.
But it's also, I think, a
particularly appropriate title
for this particular
event, Stars in my Pocket
Like Grains of Sand,
because I believe
it suggests something about
both of tonight's participants.
Samuel, or as he's known,
Chip Delany and Kara Keeling,
two brilliant writers
and cultural critics,
whose work each in its
own way, in a sense
moves from the sand
to the stars and back
again in their
engagement with both
grounded material conditions.
Like those that
determine and delimit
constructions of race,
class, gender, and sexuality.
So from ground and
material conditions
to wild flights of
imagination, like those
that propel science fiction
and fantasy, cinema,
and afro-futurism,
Witch's Flights and Flight
from Neveryon.
So through their both rigorous
and imaginative critical
and creative exploration of the
terms of our social reality,
and of other realities
that we might envision,
like through cinema, through
the fantastic, through figures
like the black femme
or the city dweller.
Through encounters like sexual
contact or social exchange,
in their exploration
of social realities
and these other realities,
both Delany and Keeling
provide us with ways to know and
to see our world differently.
And therefore, with ways
to begin to think about how
we could see worlds
of difference
and different kinds of worlds.
So I'm really delighted to
be able to hear an exchange
between the two of them.
But first let me just
tell you a little bit more
about each of them.
So Kara Keeling is currently
a visiting professor
here in the Department of Modern
Culture and Media at Brown,
where we are
thrilled to have her.
When she is not here
at Brown, although we
hope she will be here
forever- when she's not here,
she's an associate
professor in the Division
of Cinima and Media Studies in
the School of Cinematic Arts
and in the Department of
American Studies and Ethnicity
at the University of
Southern California.
Keeling's research has focused
on African-American film,
theories of race, sexuality,
and gender in cinema,
critical theory and
cultural studies.
Her book, The Witch's Flight:
the Cinematic, the Black Femme,
and the Image of
Common Sense explores
the role of cinematic
images in the construction
and maintenance of hegemonic
conceptions of the world,
and interrogates the
complex relationships
between visibility,
minority politics,
and the labor required
to create and maintain
alternative organizations
of social life.
Kara is also the author
of several articles,
published in anthologies and
journals, just to name some-
Qui Parle, The Black
Scholar, Cinema Journal,
Women in Performance, etc. etc.
She's co-editor, along with
Colin McCabe and Cornel West,
of a selection of writings
by the late James A. Snead,
called European Pedigrees/
African Contagions:
Racist Traces and Other Writing
And co-editor along with Josh
Kun of a collection of essays
about sound in American
studies, called Sound Clash:
Listening to American Studies.
She also serves on the editorial
boards of the journal's
cultural studies, feminist
media studies, and catalyst,
and she's the editor of
the Moving Image review
section of the journal GLQ.
Her current research
focuses on theories
of temporality, spatial
politics, finance capital,
and the radical
imagination, cinema
of black cultural politics,
digital media, globalization
and deferens, liberation theory,
emphasis on afro-futurism,
African media and queer
and feminist media.
She is currently
co-editing along
with Thenmozhi Soundararajan,
a collaborative multimedia
archive and scholarship
project focused
on the work of Third
World Majority, one
of the first women of color
media justice collectives
the United States.
So that book will be
entitled From Third Cinema
to Media Justice:
Third World Majority
and the Promise of Third Cinema.
And she's completing her second
monograph entitled Queer Times,
Black Futures, a book that
of course will appear in
its own queer time hopefully
in the not-too-distant future.
For those of you who were as
Samuel Delany's talk last night
you heard Joan Copjec's
incredible introduction of his
work, which I cannot
even begin to match.
But I can tell you that
Samuel "Chip" Delany
is an award winning
science fiction
author, cultural critic,
observer of urban environments,
and feminist, queer, and
critical race study scholar.
He was a published
science fiction author
by the age of 20, and he's
been celebrated for creating
some of the most innovative
science fiction out there,
ever since some of which you can
see the books around the room.
From his emergence with
the first book, The Jewels
of Aptor, there's a
beautiful copy of it
right there, from 1962,
and The Fall of the Towers,
with parts written in
between '63 and '65,
up through the recent
Through the Valley
of the Nest of Spiders.
In between those
science fiction pieces,
he published such important
science fiction works
as Empire Star, Babel-17, The
Einstein Intersection, Nova,
Dhalgren, Tales of
Neveryon, Triton, and Stars
in My Pocket Like Grain
of Sands, among others.
He's also published
several autobiographical
or semi-autobiographical
accounts of his life
as a gay black man, including
his award-winning autobiography
The Motion of Light and Water.
And he's written about
sex, cities, and histories,
in both fiction and
nonfictional books,
including for example the
novels The Mad Man, and Phallos,
and his acclaimed book Times
Square Red Times Square Blue,
in which he draws on
personal experience
to examine the relationship
between the effort to redevelop
Times Square in New
York, and the public sex
lives of working class
men- both gay and straight-
in New York City.
For his incredible output he has
one Nebula Awards, Hugo Awards,
LAMDA Awards, a Stonewall
Book Award, the Bill Whitehead
award for Lifetime
Achievement, the Brudner Prize,
a J. Lloyd Eaton
Lifetime Achievement
Award in science fiction,
along with being inducted
into the science fiction
and fantasy hall of fame,
and being named
a science fiction
writer of America grandmaster.
He also has been the subject
of a documentary film called
The Polymath, or,
the Life and Opinion
of Samuel R. Delany Gentleman.
Which, in fact, we are screening
along with the Q&A tomorrow
evening at 7 PM in
Martino's auditorium.
That's room 110 of the Granoff
Center for Creative Arts.
That's on Angel Street.
So hopefully folks
will come to that.
We will also show in addition
to the documentary about Chip,
a short experimental film
that he himself has made
called The Orchid.
And finally in addition--
CHIP DELANY: That he
made a long time ago.
LYNNE JOYRICH: And
still worth seeing.
Especially worth seeing.
And finally, in addition to all
of his writing and film work,
Chip Delany has done a
great deal of teaching.
He's been a professor
at several universities,
including the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst,
the University of Buffalo,
Temple University,
and he's had several guest
professorships visiting,
guest professorships
like at the University
of Wisconsin, Milwaukee,
University of Albany
and Cornell University.
So we are thrilled that he
is also visiting here with us
for a one week residency.
We only wish we could
keep him longer.
So I know I've going
on for a long time,
but I've still only told you
some things about both Kara
Keeling's and Chip
Delany's work,
but I think that
hopefully you can already
see why- given the
kinds of cultural issues
and interrogations
and imaginings
that they each bring
together in their own work-
why it's particularly exciting
to bring them together
for a conversation.
So please join me in welcoming
Kara Keeling and Chip Delany.
[APPLAUSE]
KARA KEELING: Thank
you, Lynne, for that
and thank you all for
coming here today.
It's hard, I'm hoping you can
hear me, I'll try to project.
But I just wanted
to start by saying
that I feel wholly inadequate
to the task of having
a conversation with you.
But I think for me
that's partially
because I'm not used to these
types of public conversations
or public performances.
And I wanted to maybe suggest
that I toss a question at you
to get the ball
rolling, and then we
can see where we go from there.
But along those
lines, when I was
thinking about doing this
and preparing for it,
I notice that you've done a
lot of public conversations.
And in fact, the public and the
being in public, out in public,
those types of things
are important to you.
And I thought maybe it
would be interesting
at least for me to hear you talk
a little bit about why that's
been an important
component of your life.
So whether it's talking about
public things like this,
or public sex, or the notion of
even Facebook, which I've heard
you're on Facebook
quite a bit now.
CHIP DELANY: Yeah.
It's where so much- most- of
my writing energy goes to,
or a lot, certainly a lot of it.
Why?
Because it's there, and
because people ask me to.
People-- as I used to say to
people, I have round heels,
so I'm a pushover.
And that's what when
one does what one does.
It always interests me what
people leave out and when
they're--
I noticed there isn't
a copy of Through
the Valley of the Nest of
Spiders on the books there.
I notice nobody mentions the
Stonewall Book Award winning
novel that has nothing to
do with science fiction.
Or my most recent
things, or a couple of--
an essay-- and an interview
in the Boston Review
about basically sex
among older gay men.
Why do you-- why do you want
to talk in public about sex
with older gay men?
Because I'm an older gay man
and occasionally I have sex.
I mean, that's why these things,
that's why these things happen.
Among the titles you get, and
you get these bizarre titles,
you know.
Afro-futurist sex radical
and grandmaster of science.
The radicalness is almost
entirely a rhetorical move.
It's a matter of saying
things in venues where
you wouldn't usually say them.
That's the extent
of the radicalness.
The rest is stuff that
you just happen to do.
And that's-- and I am the kind
of gay man who occasionally
sits in front of a room like
this and talks about sucking
dick.
And suddenly he's a
sex radical, you know?
No, I don't.
What you do is,
you do what you do.
And then if you happen to
be an articulate person
you try to articulate what
would be articulate about it.
You don't pretend.
I used to tell a long
time ago, and I still
do if I get-- when
I get the chance.
You have a sex life.
You don't lose any of your
dignity by talking about it.
And, you know, sometimes
you can help people
by talking about
it, and by talking
about it in places where you
wouldn't ordinarily do that.
It's all very simple but
it gets these weird titles
occasionally.
And, you know, so
that's for an opener.
KARA KEELING: Well
that's, for me often,
these types of
situations are, for me,
just very anxiety provoking.
So I think part of it is in
terms of thinking about what
it means to be an artist.
And then also an artist who has
a commitment to a certain form
of being out, or
being open, or being
in public in whatever ways.
I don't know that I
would say it's radical,
but I would say it
seems to me like there's
a certain kind of
commitment that one
must have to be able to and to
want to do that time and again.
CHIP DELANY: Things cause it.
I mean you know, I was 27 years
old before Stonewall happened.
So I mean, I didn't grow
up before Stonewall.
One of the reasons I
moved towards writing
is because I was aware.
I was aware I was gay when I
was 10, and I thought well,
I have heard that the
arts are a little bit more
accepting of gay
men than others.
So that's how that starts.
I was married and I have a--
I had a wife, and
I have a daughter.
And why did I do that?
It's because many,
many of the gay men
I knew before Stonewall when
I was a kid, when I first
had-- were getting models.
That's what they did, and you
imitate the people around you.
You know that it's as much
Rene Girard as it is Freud.
Mimetic, you know,
the mimetic desire.
And you know, whether it's
looking out of the window,
oh, they are
carrying an umbrella,
I think I will carry
an umbrella today,
because it probably will rain.
These things are spread by
imitators, spread by imitation.
And then you do something else.
And these other
people I will tell
about this, that, or the other.
And so I moved towards a bunch
of people whom it was more
comfortable to be out than not,
well before somebody said hey,
you know this is a big-- this
is something that you should do
politically because if we're
all out we can't no longer--
we can no longer be blackmailed.
Which is a political
thing, all these things--
and all these things
build together.
I don't-- I wouldn't be
surprised if there is less
public sex since we all came
out than there was before.
Because it did-- one hate to
say it, but being in the closet
did provide a certain
kind of protection.
But it also had a
certain danger because it
meant that people got--
all somebody would do is jerk
open the door of the closet
and point it out.
Ha-ha.
You know?
And people got
sacrificed by that.
And so that's how those
things work and when you get--
at 75, you realize things
have changed a lot,
but in many ways the
basic structures have not
and that's--
you do with them as you can.
It's not-- if there is a bravery
or if there is a commitment
to it, it's a survival.
It's a commitment to survive.
You know, I don't want to be--
I don't want to be killed.
And sometimes it
is hard to explain
to a group of graduate
students for instance,
who are suddenly there to--
and what are you interested
in doing in graduate school?
Well, I would like to study
male sexuality and the gender
problems.
You realize and you
want to say hey, that's
really great but are you aware
that a mere 20 years ago,
or 25 years ago, if
you had come and said
that the same school they
would've called the police,
or whatever?
You know, things change.
This country-- which is a
country that I think has been
very good to me--
but I also think,
I also see things
like for a while we did
not have a death penalty.
We did not have-- and
then we lost that.
So you can lose these
things very, very easily.
And you see how some of
these things do get lost.
You see how things do revert.
How-- how racially--
you see someone
puts together a documentary on
large meetings of the Ku Klux
Klan in 1927 and 1937
and 1947, you know.
And you think, wait a minute.
I can remember the very
first time I taught in 1975.
I went up to Buffalo and I
went into an Italian restaurant
and I sat down and I was--
very crowded.
And there were a lot of people
eating, a lot of working class
people eating, and I looked
over at the table next to me
and what was I
looking at in 1975?
Not 1935, not 1925.
But 1975.
I was looking at two garage
mechanics in their gray shirts
and what have you,
with their names on it,
and they had little
swastikas in their ears.
Both of them, you know.
And I thought, where
the fuck have I come to?
I'd never seen that before.
Well, Buffalo, in
that time was the head
of the American Nazi party.
And you just walk into
a pizza restaurant
and that's what you saw.
And they were just as
serious about what they
were doing as anybody else.
So you talk about them, and it
is necessary to say something,
I think.
And you don't pretend
that it isn't.
And that's-- and you say
I'm going to talk about it
because I don't want to
be hurt by those people.
And then you also
do something else.
You also listen to them.
You also, if you
possibly can, you
engage them in conversation.
You say, OK talk to me,
tell me what's going on.
And what do you
think is going on?
I was talking to somebody
yesterday about--
at dinner.
And I was talking about the
fact that Trump's success
in the last thing did
not surprise me at all.
In fact, I expected it.
I expected it, I would
have been surprised
if it had gone the other way.
Here is something-- why
did Hillary not win?
Here is an offensive statement
that a friend of mine made,
but it's true.
She did not win because
she pees sitting down.
That's what it comes down to.
Yes, it is offensive,
but the point
is, it has to do with things
like, the country doesn't
want a woman president yet.
And yet at the same time, she
also won by a popular majority.
The largest popular majority
who won over a winning--
in the history.
And you watch people talk on
Facebook, or anyplace else,
people still are not talking
about we got to get rid
of the Electoral College.
It is an absolutely troglodytic
institution at this point.
That is just crippling.
Why aren't people talking
about things like that?
What do you do you?
I tend to--
OK, let me just stop
there and forgo,
and we will roll around on
it, and we will intellectually
roll around on the floor
and see what we get.
KARA KEELING: OK.
That sounds fun to do in
front of all these people.
I mean I take your point about
the dearth of public discourse
around really important
things, and also
how that can be a
protective mechanism
to be able to actually have
a certain kind of visibility
and a certain kind of voice.
I mean I know for
me, a lot of times
the people who have done
that kind of work before me,
I know that that work
carved out the space for me
to be able to do what I do.
Whether it's in public or
just in writing, which I think
is another public forum, but
it feels more contained for me.
When I'm writing, I can
imagine people reading it,
but I don't have to face them--
CHIP DELANY: Yes, yeah.
KARA KEELING: --in that moment.
So I take what you're saying
to be an important part of what
it means to sort of
pass on something
and to have a politics.
And to be able to participate
in shaping the world.
CHIP DELANY: Can we
all hear, by the way?
Does this room
have the acoustics,
or are there people
in the back who just
are wondering what's going on?
OK, I just wanted to--
because it's not--
the room is not mic'd.
We are mic'd for
the guy over there,
but that's all we're mic'd for.
I just want to--
and why do I ask this?
Because a couple of times I
have been in rooms like this,
and had gone on, and
people in the last
had said probably what you
said was very interesting
but I didn't hear a word.
So that's what makes you ask
these kinds of questions, just
your experience with it.
I hope it's working.
KARA KEELING: So speaking of
gender issues around Clinton
or otherwise, I mean,
one of the things I've
been thinking about
when I was thinking
about talking with you--
which comes from some of
the stories that I've heard
you tell, in the
polymath or elsewhere,
about how you wanted to write
your first books for your wife.
To be able to write about
women in those books in a way
that your wife could feel was--
I don't know what the word
you would say would be--
CHIP DELANY: To enjoy.
KARA KEELING:
Satisfying-- enjoying.
That she could enjoy.
And I wonder whether you
would say that gender--
writing in a different
way about gender-
requires you to do something
different with language.
If that makes sense
as a question.
CHIP DELANY: I don't think it
requires you to do something
different about language.
I do think it requires
you to do something
different about
structuring what you
allow the women
characters to do I
don't think it's a matter of--
and then you discover places
where you make mistakes.
I came-- very, very early--
I have this kind
of analytical mind.
Marilyn and I would walk across-
spend that time walking around,
walking across the
Brooklyn Bridge,
and talking about books
we read that we liked
and how they worked.
And somehow when
there was contact
between the social
classes and people
learn things from
one social class
to another, that would
usually really interesting.
When people that we--
I noticed that there were, that
characters could have three
different kinds of actions.
They were purposeful actions,
there were gratuitous actions,
and there were habitual actions.
And while both men
and women writers
were very good at giving men
characters- they did it almost
without thinking- all three
different kinds of actions,
somehow both men
and women reacted,
because this is the way
the fictions were set up,
tended not to give
women characters
the same range of the three
different kinds of actions.
They would, if the
women were good women,
they would be all gratuitous,
but no purpose and no habits.
And if they were bad, they
would be all purpose, but no
habits and no gratuitousness.
They would be femme fatals.
So what do you do?
So what you do is, you
try- you think, well
can I paint the characters
with the same palette?
The same palette of
actions and what have you.
And sometimes you do
it and sometimes you
don't, and sometimes you make
it and sometimes you don't.
You have a fight between two
characters, and one of whom
is a woman.
And you suddenly discover
at the end where you gave--
OK, I've actually got a fight.
It doesn't matter who
wins, but you suddenly
realize while you got
through the whole fight,
but somehow- that
while occasionally he
reels from her blow
she never hits him.
Now, is that language?
Is that habit?
Is that a step in the right
direction, vis-a-vis something
else?
So then, the next time, I've
got to use some active verbs.
And make my women characters
the subjects of the sentence,
as well as the
subject of the story.
And this is how
these things work.
And then you eventually, come
up with a little charac--
and very, very early I
came up with something.
Well, if you want to try a
story that really is not,
that just doesn't completely
fall into total sexism
and what have you.
Well, then you need a minimum
of two characters who are women,
and they have to talk with each
other about something other
than men.
Yeah, I know, but it was--
only I did it.
About 20 years before Alison.
About Alison and her friend Liz,
read it in a- something called
the women in science fiction
[? composium- ?] and brought it
back to Alison and said,
hey, this is what we'll do
for movies.
And so the Bechdel
rule, that I invented,
sort of got passed on.
And Alison was very good about
sort of acknowledging it.
You know.
She got it from Liz,
from her friend Liz.
But this is- the analysis is,
this is how these things move
around in this society.
I don't care who
call, what it calls--
the point is, people do
it, as long as you do it.
Yeah, it's fun to be able
to say I figured it out.
But so apparently Allison
thought it came from another
equally great book about this
subject, A Room of One's Own,
but it didn't.
Or at least maybe
it passed through.
And I'm sure Wolf
was aware of it too.
Wolf wrote one of the most
amazing science fiction novels
that I think I have ever read.
It feels to me like a
science fiction novel
it was her only best
seller in this country.
And it was a best
seller in this country,
and it's the one that's--
it's called The Years
It's a wonderful book.
It's a wonderful book.
In this book, a woman
standing on the platform
of an underground subway
as they call them.
Looks at another
woman who happens
to take a little
cylinder that she's never
seen out of her pocket book.
And she takes the
top of the cylinder
and she turns the bottom of it.
And this little thing
of red comes out of it.
The other woman has
never seen this before,
and she moves this
stuff over her lips.
And what have you.
And the first, the older of the
other woman, for the first time
sees another woman put
on lipstick in public.
And you realize
hey, at some point
that had to have happened.
That had to happen.
At another point she
looks up in the sky
and sees the first airplane.
At another point the
two of the sisters
get the first hot shower.
And these all come in the 1880s.
And it feels like a
science fiction novel,
and not only that it
was extremely popular.
Leonard didn't like
it, it wasn't--
and it was a book that
was supposed to be
about the position of who?
Women, in the society.
And she once tried to do it
originally with as another,
as a half essay half fiction.
That was going to be
about the [INAUDIBLE]
and that part has
actually been published.
And it's fun to read that.
And then she decided no,
let's take out the essay
and we'll just do it as
fiction and so she did it.
It works better, she
thought, but it's
interesting to read the others.
You should read it because
it's a very thought out book,
and it reads very fast.
It's a good read, it's a big
book, and it reads quickly,
and it's just as beautifully
written as all of her others.
But this is how
these things work.
And you know, you've got to--
these things they are
there to be talked about.
And some time we got
married, my wife and I.
And I am as gay
as a plaid rabbit.
But we were also
friends and I wrote
about this in a book called
The Motion of Light and Water.
One of those Hugo winning
autobiographical works.
And my wife came in the
door and she'd been--
she was soaking wet.
And she was in and she put some
groceries down on that thing.
And I said, at that
time, believe it
or not we wore the
same size jeans.
No longer.
But I said well, look you know,
here's a pair of my jeans,
why don't you slip them on?
And so she put them
on and then they fit.
And then she put her
hands in the pockets.
This is 1961.
In 1961, and she put her--
her hands went into the pockets
and went all the way down,
this weird look
came over her face.
And I said, what's the matter?
She said, the pockets.
I said, what about them?
She said, they're so big.
Had I ever known that women and
men had different size pockets
in ordinary jeans back then?
These problems come up from
things that actually happened.
And I began to see what
would happen if I had lived
my entire life without pockets.
Without pockets that
could hold more than half
of a pack of cigarettes in them.
I would be a very
different person.
And you suddenly
realize that what
defines your relationship--
what makes who you are?
Your relationship to food,
your relationship to money,
your relationship to clothing,
and all of these things.
And this is-- and so you have to
start putting these in stories.
You start writing about them.
And that changes.
I first, I tried to do it in my
very first book and realized I
couldn't.
I wasn't doing it anywhere
near as well as I--
I tried if I did a--
three- I thought of them
as three full length
novel at the time, they're
now I think of them
now as three short
novels- in a book called
The Fall of the
Towers in which there
are a couple of places where
women do have friendships
with one another.
It's not that good, it's
called The Fall of the Towers.
And there are pockets.
And you deal with
all of those things.
It's very, very early and
as I said, by the time
we got to 1963 I had
decided that probably-
and my wife had, too-
that the most important
political question was the
position of women in the world.
And that all of the
others were based
on all the other oppressions
were based on that.
The kind of infantilizing
that goes on
with people in different
races, the kind
of infantilizing that
goes on of people
with different sexual
persuasions, and what have you.
It is all based on that.
Some things work better and
work faster, but all this--
And then somebody came
out- Betty Friedan,
shortly after that, came
out with a book called
The Feminine Mystique.
Brilliant book,
brilliant fucking book.
But how did, why
was it brilliant,
and why was it such a success?
Because all these--
I assume it had to have been
because women would come
and talk with-- our women
friends would come and talk
to us about the problems
they had getting jobs.
And what were the problems
about getting jobs?
The New York Times in the want
ads would say, would advertise,
there were men's jobs, and
there were women's jobs.
There were two sections.
You know you didn't know that?
Those were segregated
by sections.
And in the women's jobs,
they were jobs for--
oh, people who want--
for young architects, or young
this, that, or the other.
But the job would say
some typing required.
And some typing
required was a code
for, you will be
some guy's secretary.
And they didn't want to pay
full wages they would have
to pay somebody who is actually
from secretarial school
and knew how to
do all this stuff.
You had to-- and
people had decided--
I remember, some people- one
of the things that how-- well,
they are lying to me.
They don't want a
person who is actually
going to go up in the
business, they want somebody
to be a secretary.
So they lie to me,
I will lie to them.
I type enough for my
own correspondence.
How do you deal?
What do you do?
How do you deal with that?
If your a boss, you
just don't hire them.
Anybody who writes
back saying I type
enough for my own
correspondence,
well, we don't want
her because she
doesn't want to be a secretary.
You know, we want a secretary.
And so forth and so on.
And all of these things.
You don't get-- now all of
this is ancient history.
And yet it's still
going on in many ways.
The codes change and women still
don't break through these quote
artificial ceilings unquote.
And you know people don't
know what to do with--
we don't know what
to do with someone
running for a political
office in this country.
And if somebody can play
the Electoral College
against the entire nation,
we have the particular fuck
up that we've got.
And I'm talking about the whole
situation as well as the man
that we have now.
So this is all relatively
simple, I think.
And yet at the same time, it
does require some analysis
in order to figure
out what is going on.
KARA KEELING: It's-- I
mean, as you were talking,
I was trying to--
I got a little stuck on thinking
about what my life would be
like if I didn't have pockets.
CHIP DELANY: You know,
so one of the things
is you start
wearing men's jeans.
If you need the pockets.
You think, can I
get by without them
or, if you can't then
you get them or you
make your own clothes,
which was also something.
I used to make clothes.
KARA KEELING: But how do
you think you would be--
so I mean, I was
following what you're
saying in terms of how
these sort of structures
preclude the possibility for
a certain kind of equality
between men and women,
or between people
of different genders.
And then I mean,
in part because I
know you write fiction
as well as nonfiction,
but in thinking
about the fiction
you write it made
me start wondering
whether something- because
you said in the book, there
were pockets.
Whether if something like
that where you think,
I would have been
a different person
if I didn't have these pockets.
If that's something
that would spark
a kind of enterprise, a creative
enterprise in a certain way.
If that's this kind of
mode of thinking about what
would be different
if this one thing
that's seemingly a small
thing, if that were not.
If it didn't, if
it wasn't that way?
CHIP DELANY: Yeah.
KARA KEELING: Yeah so, I mean
I think, as a kind of exercise
I did start thinking
what does something
like that do in terms of
the formation of a person?
But even in terms of the
formation of a world?
CHIP DELANY: Yeah, you
have to think about it.
My first five science fiction-
well my first four science
fiction novels-
The Jewels of Aptor
or the three novels that made
up The Fall of the Towers,
there's not a rocket
ship in one of them.
I thought rockets, I thought
rocket ships were amazing.
I thought rocket ships
were really amazing
and I had to work
through four of them
before I dared to put anything
resembling a rocket ship
in a novel.
I was too busy with the pockets.
I was too busy with
writing about pockets
and social classes and the
relations between them,
and what have you.
Yeah.
KARA KEELING: I did just
also just look at the time.
CHIP DELANY: How are we doing?
KARA KEELING: It's 6:20.
So
CHIP DELANY: Do we want
to open this up to--
does anybody have any--?
KARA KEELING: Should
we open it and see
if other people want
to say something
instead of sitting there?
Yeah.
So is anyone out
there have anything
you want to ask or add?
AUDIENCE: I've got a question.
I heard something you
said about memory.
And there's a sort
of current theory
that when you have a memory
about something you basically
take the memory out of
the box, look at it,
tell something about the memory,
you put it back in the box.
The next time you
think about the memory,
you're actually not
remembering the original thing.
You're remembering--
CHIP DELANY: --what you said.
It may change with each time.
AUDIENCE: With you,
in this situation,
I'm sure you've told
lots of stories.
CHIP DELANY: I've told many
of these kinds of stories.
She's
AUDIENCE: And each time you tell
the story it kind of changes.
CHIP DELANY: Just a little bit.
And then the question is,
what does the remembering?
What does memory?
Where does a visual
memory lie in the mass,
in the jelly, you know or
the little filaments that go,
the dendrites and the
what do you calls them?
What are they?
The axions and the
dendrites, and what have you.
Where does it-- I don't know.
We don't know.
Somebody tried to explain
to me recently- was it you?
Was it bill?
Was it you?
My assistant who's
sitting in the back-
that dogs can remember
things- or maybe was
Paul DeFellippo- of
the dogs can remember
things for about five or six
seconds and that they did,
and yet at the same
time they learn tricks.
Is that all muscle
memory that they-- or is
that all conditioning?
And do they remember?
Do they remember
they live in a world
where smells are
much more important.
Then they are with us, but
you know, but at the same time
they like running around with
their noses to the ground.
And licking up this
that and the other.
KARA KEELING: Well it's
almost the habits part
that you said in terms
of your characters.
The actions, and habits,
and the third one was?
CHIP DELANY: Gratuitous.
KARA KEELING: Gratuitous, right.
CHIP DELANY: Those
are the ones that you
don't know what causes them.
KARA KEELING: Yeah
I was really--
CHIP DELANY: Some of them
are habitual, some of them
are purposeful, and some
of them are gratuitous.
KARA KEELING: OK.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's funny.
CHIP DELANY: When you
write a quote character
that it's missing one of
them, everybody can see.
That this is I'm
not dealing with,
I'm not dealing
equally with that.
And a lot of that is
because sometimes there
are social situations in
which women are not encouraged
to tell what there purp--
why they're doing things.
Etc cetera or things like that.
And so that this is--
but you need to, can I
find a situation which
this is important.
So you have to get
a story where this
is important to talk about.
AUDIENCE: Yes yes.
I'm curious to
your earlier point
about how things that we take
for granted can get kind of,
disappear pretty quickly.
And it feels like that
might be happening
or is happening
a lot, of course,
socially and politically.
And yet at the same time
we start to see technology
catching up to a lot
of science fiction
or feels like it might be.
People are breathlessly
talking about the moment
of singularity, right?
How do you make sense of that as
a writer, this sort of- in one
direction it feels like
we're regressing socially,
and yet in another
direction technology things
are taking off in ways that are
maybe exciting and maybe scary.
CHIP DELANY: I don't know.
I mean, what do you make of it?
I don't know.
I couldn't tell you.
One does what one can.
And hope, and tries
to write about what
one sees in front of them.
And I think at a certain
point, at a certain point
you do- I'm trying to
write about being 75 years.
I'm trying to write
about being 75 years old.
Why?
Because I am.
Although I've also,
I was just telling
somebody- a 20-year-old was
interviewing me earlier today,
and one of the
things that I think
I've quoted this several times
from, of all people, Goethe.
You know, he said a man of 50
knows no more than a man of 20.
They just know different things.
I think that's kind of
the way it probably works.
I don't think I know that
much more than anybody else.
I don't know that,
including a 12-year-old,
or a 15-year-old, or
25-year-old, or 35,
or a 50-year-old.
But I did run into a
woman in the hope club
where I'm stashed
by Brown University.
Who was born only, who
was a mere three months
younger than I am.
So we're practically
the same age
and we got along wonderfully.
And one of the things
I've been thinking about
is some anthropological
studies from years and years
ago about tribes where
you are only allowed,
you can only be judged
by your age mates.
Which I think is
interesting, where
the people who are
your own age are
the people who can judge you.
You don't ask people
to judge someone.
A 50-year-old, you don't--
the notion that you are
judged by your peers.
But what are your peers?
A jury of his peers, a jury of
her peers, as the case may be.
But what are peers,
are peers, people
who are the same age as you?
Are they something else?
Is it necessary to be--
is it necessary to
be the same gender?
Is it necessary to
be the same race?
Is it necessary?
Is it necessary to be--
you know, what makes
somebody a peer?
Or is it necessary
to be the same age?
I don't know.
AUDIENCE: I have a question
that might build on that.
About identification and how
you see identification working
differently,
perhaps as a writer,
than as a reader or spectator.
Because I'm thinking about
the moments in your talk
yesterday where you
spoke to the young Latino
boy about Spider-man 4
and then about King Kong.
And you were saying
we might have both--
you might think, I think
you said to the audience,
that we might both
have been looking
for a Latino young
person or an older
black gay man in the films.
But that's not
what we were doing.
And then you just said--
CHIP DELANY: And the
genre did give both of us
somebody to identify
with, who was basically
the character of
Billy, the cabin boy.
AUDIENCE: But at
the same time, you
were just saying why write about
a 75-year-old, because I am.
So I'm curious about how you
see that perhaps disjuncture,
that you're seeking to put
your own identity into writing
in some way but what
you're also recognizing
a kind of cross
identification commonly
as a reader as a [INAUDIBLE].
CHIP DELANY: You do notice--
you do notice when
something is left,
when something is forbidden.
When you suddenly realize
who their can't be,
know you can't see.
There's about a
50-year-old, you can't
see a 50-year-old Asian woman
in a particular situation
because for some reason
it's not allowed.
It's not allowed by the genre.
And maybe someone would
want to, I don't know.
I can see, I can
see wanting to see
a 75-year-old black gay man.
AUDIENCE: I can imagine
you writing the whole story
with a male wife hero.
CHIP DELANY: I have.
I have.
AUDIENCE: But at the end of
it, say OK, well now I've
written that whole story.
Now I'm going to switch
it, to a brown and black.
CHIP DELANY: As soon as I got
brave enough to put in a rocket
ship, I wrote about
a 26-year-old--
I wrote about a
26-year-old Asian poet.
I was a 24-year-old black gay
man with a Jewish white wife,
who was a poet, and I
wrote about an Asian woman
poet who ran a spaceship.
And it was fun.
And it was fun.
Yes.
I'm sorry, I didn't--
you're the one.
AUDIENCE: Forgive me
if this is something
that you've already covered
in one of the other events.
Last weekend I
read Bread and Wine
and was completely
blown away by it.
CHIP DELANY: Thank you.
Yes.
AUDIENCE: I was
very moved by it.
I was in upstate New York.
And I just think a lot
about graphic novels.
First of all, I think
it's extra brave to put
an autobiographical story
into a graphic novel,
not only because of
imagery and the intensity,
but because you've handed off
the visuals to somebody else.
And the structure of your
identity and of your lovers,
it gets shaped by effects
in a graphic novel.
I don't know if you've already
talking about graphic novels.
CHIP DELANY: I haven't, no.
That's a book that
I was very fond of.
AUDIENCE: Any words that
tumble out of your mouth
would be very appreciated.
CHIP DELANY: Well, I keep
on worrying whether Dennis
is eating enough.
Poor Bill has got
to listen to me--
should I order him a pizza?
Make sure he's got something.
And then I call him up
and say how are you doing,
are you sure you've
got enough to eat?
He says, yeah.
So we're talking
about the phone call.
The last couple of phone calls.
AUDIENCE: But what I'm
really wondering about
is what it meant to you to
add this visual- this drawn
visual component to
your story-telling.
CHIP DELANY: Well, all of
them, they change things.
They change- they change things.
I think one can more or less
leave it at that, I think.
They do change things.
They change things, and
sometimes in surprising ways.
You'll notice at the end there
is kind of a critique, where
the characters all get together,
and sit around and discuss
what was done improperly.
The weirdest things
get pointed out.
I never would have noticed that
Mia, the artist who did it,
got the traffic going in the
wrong direction on 72nd Street.
Dennis went right to it.
That's where he used to sell
his books and what have you.
I did notice that she managed
to draw an accident at 42nd
Street and 8th Avenue without
making it clear that it was
42nd Street and 8th Avenue,
where the truck came along
and it hit me.
So you just tell all
that, you tell that stuff.
Yes.
AUDIENCE: I'm just
very, very curious,
having read Times
Square Red, Times Square
Blue, what you would say
about Times Square today.
CHIP DELANY: Different.
Yeah, it's different.
And it's that kind of stuff
does not go on any more.
It's been taken over by
internet pornography.
It's been displaced by
internet pornography,
and I don't know what that
means when finally all
is said and done.
AUDIENCE: Can you
speculate on that though?
What do you think it means?
CHIP DELANY: Well, let me see.
I don't know.
No, I can't--
AUDIENCE: Do you have
thoughts about that?
CHIP DELANY: Maybe, yeah.
AUDIENCE: Is
internet pornography
a network instead of contact?
CHIP DELANY: Well
maybe, it maybe have a--
well, it's one of
the things that
happened is that in theaters,
the pornographic film
with a real plot was paramount.
And now there are film
clips with no plots.
That's what dominates the
stuff, and then the chat rooms
and things of that sort which
bore the shit out of me.
And so it's a lot
of-- then there
are actual sex like in the,
I don't know, some of you
may have seen my
article last Wednesday
about older gay men in
the Boston Review, which
is probably one of the more
recent things that I published.
And that's a whole different
thing, and some of the film--
and two films that
have been made
about that particular group of
guys that I went up to have,
to endure, to participate
in a sex party
with- a couple of months
ago, a few months ago.
Which was interesting.
It was interesting and
it was interesting to go
to a movie about the same group
of men and sit in the audience
and see all these
guys that I I've
been screwing around with a
mere couple of weeks before.
Because the guy-- this guy
named Charles [? Lumm ?]
had made a documentary
about that group
having-- in which there
was a lot of explicit sex.
So it was an interesting thing.
KARA KEELING: So on that note.
CHIP DELANY: On that note.
On that one.
Is there anything you'd
like to say at the end?
KARA KEELING: At the
end, well, I mean, I
think I've been wanting to just
say thank you for your work
and acknowledge that what
I think I said earlier,
that I think that the
work that you've done
the body of work
that's around here,
it has given us a great deal to
think about, to work through,
and to debate.
To marvel at.
And so I think that my
own writing in my own work
has traversed many of the themes
that I've found in your book.
And there's a lot
more that I would
love to talk to you
about, but I'm not sure
that people want to sit and
listen to that and any longer.
LYNNE JOYRICH: So we can all
talk sort of more informally
at the reception
that's downstairs.
So everybody's invited to that.
Again I do want to remind you
that there's a film screening
tomorrow evening.
The Polymath, a documentary
about Samuel Delany
as well as one of his own
films, that's at 7 o'clock
at the Granoff Center.
Thank you both so much.
