Category: Uncategorized (Page 411 of 1101)

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Alexandra Francis Pop a Balloon, 2018
Latex balloons, coloured sand and fishing line

 

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Sherrie Levine Beach Ball after Lichtenstein, 2015
‘One could say the beach ball is little more than the balloon’s fat cousin; it is just heavy enough that it wants to remain earthbound, making it an ideal instrument for various beach games that require little to no effort. One might expect, however, that Sherrie Levine’s Beach Ball after Lichtenstein (2015) would, in fact, crush a small child. It’s a badass beach ball – a beach ball from “the other side of the tracks.” Even so, its ability to inflate and deflate has been stunted, like a cancerous lung – reminiscent of Midas’s damning touch that forever immobilizes his daughter. What must the beach ball give up in order to become solid and stable? Drunken losers at Coachella will no longer toss it around, but its effervescence and joyful plumpness must be sacrificed.’

 

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Zhou Xiaohu Even in Fear, 2008
‘Consisting of a weather balloon that swells, then collapses only to swell again, slowly increasing in size over weeks until it is wedged between floor and ceiling until the point of bursting, creating a building sense of anxiety that goes hand-in-hand with a possible thrill. According to the gallery, the balloon did finally burst yesterday, much to the relief of some of the gallery attendants.’

 

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ODL The Meat-Cut Balloon Factory, 2012
‘Each balloon takes about three hours to go through the assembly line. First a hand-sculpted balloon former is dipped in a soapy substance to prime it before it’s dipped in a latex vat. A thin coat of rubber adheres to the surface—this is the actual balloon, which holds the shape of the former. At this step in the process, latex colors can be mixed or the balloon can be hand-painted. Once dry, the rubber is leached and vulcanized (or rinsed and heated), which strengthens it for inflating. Finally, the balloon is stripped and inflated. The whole process is precisely timed to get the maximum output of balloons per day.’

 

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Charles Pétillon Souvenirs de famille, 2016
‘Balloons are surprisingly captivating no matter how many or few are used. When you put them in a particular space they congregate like the fingers on a hand, pointing our attention towards something usually unnoticed. Actually I find this completely refreshes our outlook on our environment. Actually balloons provide a new element to our spaces by altering the way we see things. The viewer no longer merely “views” but actually sees.’

 

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Fredrik Tjærandsen Moments of Clarity, 2019
‘Central Saint Martins graduate Fredrik Tjærandsen is the winner of this year’s MullenLowe NOVA Awards, for his balloon-like fashion collection that became a viral sensation. Enveloping models in colourful inflated bubbles that would then deflate on the catwalk to unveil rubber dresses or skirts, the Norwegian designer’s ‘Moments of Clarity’ collection straddled fashion and performance art for his degree show. He sourced the material from Sri Lankan suppliers that support and buy from local farmers.’

 

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Hester Oerlemans Chairs, 2010
balloons, adhesive

 

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Lee Boroson Canopy, 2010
‘Canopy is an inflatable structure based on images of volcanic eruptions and burning oil wells. Project is built as three separate “plumes” that connect in a crypt-like structure when installed.’

 

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Jeppe Hein Multi-coloured Mirror Balloons, 2019
‘A balloon hangs from the ceiling above people’s heads, sublty moving with the circulation of air. Due to its shape and reflective surface, the balloon produces a distorted perspective of the surrounding space, similar to a fish-eye view. Only the roof seems to prevent the balloon from soaring into the air and expanding the reflection to the infinite.’

 

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Martin Creed Work No.200: Half the air in a given space, 1998
‘The sculpture is installed, based on the artist’s instructions, by putting half of a room’s entire volume into air-filled balloons, filling the room with those balloons, and letting viewers walk in. The title points to space and air manifested as breath and volume. “It is important to me,” says Creed, “that the situation is normal, that, as usual, the space is full of air; it’s just that half of it [is] inside the balloons.” With the balloons above and below the viewer’s eye level, the mass is neither impenetrable nor heavy; rather, it coexists with people.’

 

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Yerbosyn Meldibekov The Fall of the Author, 2021
‘The Fall of the Author is a self-portrait as a destroyed monument. On a white neoclassical pedestal a figurative balloon, painted black, is bent at the shins; the rest of the body gestures to the ground as if contorted by a tornado. The metaphorical wind of the steppe is more powerful than any of the West’s memorialization strategies, be it monuments to great men or notions of individual authorship.’

 

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Kathryn O’Halloran Self-portrait from March 2016, 2016
Wool/cotton trim, aluminum leaf, balloon, helium

 

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Jenny Marketou Flying Spy Potatoes, 2003
‘A display, modeled after surveillance satellites of the 70”s is built out of domestic cheap materials such as wood and plastic which is connected to a variety of audio-visual inputs such as surveillance cameras, DVD players and 3 TV screens. The TV screens feature < Flying Spy Potatoes> series digital recordings with a custom made by wireless cam and radio receiver mounted on a helium balloon which Marketou was holding at the end of a 30feet tether while she was walking in high security public spaces in NYC which were declared as hard targets against terrorism.’

 

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Shake Tank Man, 2019
‘An inflatable artwork depicting the infamous “Tank Man” incident has appeared in the heart of Taiwan’s capital, Taipei, nearly two weeks before the 30th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing. Taiwanese artist Shake’s balloon artwork recreates the moment when an unidentified man stood before a row of tanks in a Beijing street following a military crackdown. Estimates of the death toll from the crackdown range from several hundred to thousands. An official death toll has never been released.’

 

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Doug Aitken New Horizon, 2019
‘Over the course of seventeen days in July, a hot air balloon designed as a reflective and kinetic light sculpture traveled from iconic Trustees land conservation sites in Martha’s Vineyard, greater Boston, to the Berkshires, making seven stops along the way for a series of site-specific happenings and conversations regarding the future of our culture.’

 

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Panamarenko The Aeromodeller, 1971
‘Panamarenko built The Aeromodeller between 1969 and 1971. The dirigible is the embodiment of the artist’s dream of being able to move freely through the air at any time. The basketwork gondola was designed as a living space. Two aircraft engines on top of it are used to steer the imposing airship, which is held aloft by a cigar-shaped balloon, thirty metres long. Panamarenko tested the airworthiness of his dirigible in 1971 in a field belonging to the artist Jef Geys in Balen. The plan was then to fly it to an arts festival in Sonsbeek in the Netherlands. The Dutch aviation authorities sent Panamarenko a telegram, however, banning the flight. To make matters worse, a storm blew up over Balen, causing the attempted take-off to fail.’

 

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John Knight Headshots, 2019
Latex, Helium, Fabric, Stainless Steel, Lead

 

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Philippe Parreno My Room Is Another Fish Bowl, 2016
‘The work consists of helium-filled fish shapes that have been delicately weighted to float at different heights. Circulating around these floating objects, the visitors have an experience that may be equated or contrasted with that of the fish moving aimlessly within the gallery.’

 

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Nicolas Lobo Balloon collage (Palsy version #2), 2013
‘“I hope people feel a certain kind of hate during the first moment they encounter [my work],” he says. “Later if they keep dealing with it I want them to feel like they can’t look at other things the same way anymore.”’

 

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Guy Overfelt Untitled (my 1977 Smokey and The Bandit Trans AM as an inflatable), 1999
inflatable nylon and electric blower

 

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Andrea Galvani Death of an image #9, 2006
C-print on aluminum dibond

 

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Tadao Cern Black Balloons, 2016
‘Tadao Cern uses different gases sulfur hexafluoride and helium, because helium is lighter than sulfur hexafluoride to hold the balloons in the air. Each balloon is connected to each other with metal string in space where the balloons float geometrically and serially. The artist only uses metal, rubber, sulfur hexafluoride and helium to create this hypnotic composition. ”I’m building these sculptures one by one, keeping my fingers crossed and hoping that soon enough everyone will have a chance to see them alive” says Tadao Cern. Knowing that these particular installations last for a considerably short period of time, they are really alive.’

 

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Karina Smigla Bobinski Ada, 2010
sphere, helium, charcoal

 

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Gordon Matta-Clark Sky Hook (Studies for a Balloon Building), 1978
‘In 1978, after his Building Cuts, Gordon Matta-Clark began working on Sky Hooks (Study for a Balloon Building). This project wanted to create a form of vital aerial space attached to buildings without involving the use of urban land and thus avoiding all real estate speculation. The title of the project, Sky Hooks, comes from the Russian constructivist El Lissitzky who, in the 1920s, designed an elevated transport system. Significantly, Matta-Clark’s last project brought together Russian utopianism, science fiction and the need to find imaginative alternatives to the increasing pressure of the price of urban land in big cities.’

 

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Lizabeth Rossof 5 XI’AN AMERICAN WARRIORS, 2019
Nylon fabric, electric fan

 

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Ricky Swallow Caravan, 2008
‘Caravan represents a sort of hardened or fused time in which an impermanent or temporary set of forms become capable of outliving the people and events they were created to signal. Balloons are formed in a minute of our time and attached to structures, fences, awnings, letter boxes to signal and specify an occasion. Within this sculpture the balloons seem lost or detached from any occasion, moored to the floor by their weight and altered materiality, thus allowing the barnacles the opportunity to populate the surface.’

 

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Ahmet Ogüt Castle of Vooruit, 2012
Helium-filled balloon floating above the ground at a height of eleven meters. Diameter of eight meters.

 

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Mark Fell Factoid #3, 2011
‘Philosophy has investigated the linkage between the structure of consciousness and the structure of the present, but it has not taken sound into consideration. How does sound contribute to this linkage? Thinking of the repetitive temporal struc- tures of techno, or the prolonged tones of Tibetan music – some primary relationships between time, consciousness and sound could be imagined. Informed by recent studies in the psychopa- thology of time, Fell’s intense and confrontational installation Factoid #3 promotes a destabilised association between time, the self and sound. Phenomenological emphasis on flow, linearity, and the present as embedded in both the previous and the imminent, are rejected in favour of disas- sociated suprasequential nows. This work contains extremely bright flashing light, high intensity sound and generative temporal structures.’

 

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Piero Manzoni Artist’s Breath, 1960
‘Artist’s Breath consists of the remnants of a red balloon tied to a piece of string on which there are two lead seals. These elements are attached to a wooden base to which is also affixed a small metal plaque bearing the artist’s name and the title of the work. Originally the balloon was fully inflated with Manzoni’s breath but as it deflated the rubber became stuck to the wood underneath. It is now brittle and, in places, very fragile.’When I blow up a balloon, I am breathing my soul into an object that becomes eternal’, Manzoni said in 1960. Each Artist’s Breath was, however, far from eternal and the value of the deflated balloon, emptied of the very breath that warranted it, has become a humorous paradox. The balloon can also be seen as an object of pathos, the result of a gesture of creative resignation that is now a metaphor for a deflated body.’

 

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Fiona Tan Tilt, 2002
‘It’s a video of a baby, suspended in a harness by myriad white balloons. He’s having a lovely time – the soundtrack sees him gurgling, the visuals closing in on his grinning little face. The baby hasn’t learned to be scared. Hell, he doesn’t know what a balloon is.’

 

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Jan Hakon Erichsen Various, 2018 – 2019
‘The Norwegian artist is on a mission to destroy every balloon he encounters with an endless array of awkward Rube Goldberg-esque setups. Erichsen documents his inventions in “Destruction Diary” videos, which he posts daily on Instagram, and aggregates into compilations on YouTube.’

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! I think you won’t be sorry. I think love can find some space in his magical ability to make Julia bookshelf-sized for you. Love becoming 2 meters tall jeans19’s svengali-like manager, G. ** NZ, Hi, NZ! I envy your college days. Well, if you’re marked for life by the CIA there must be snipers on the roofs pinpointing me every time I walk out the door. ** Rude Mike, Hey, Rude Mike. Welcome. You don’t seem particularly rude, but maybe that’s … what do you call it … reverse psychology? Prayers that your friend gets through it because you’re obviously a very valuable friend to him. ** Misanthrope, There are people for whom scat is an electrified fence. Change is almost always good, especially in regards to language. Oh, please, yeah, if you’re a fact nazi who wants fiction to exactly mirror reality in every detail then, yeah, you might have problems with the ‘Jurassic’ movie or, well, every movie including documentaries. ** David Ehrenstein, Hm, I’m thinking about that ‘America’s greatest black gay writer’ claim, and it’s true that I cant think of a competitor off the top of my head, but I might if dwelled further on that. ** Sypha, My memory is that scat is an absolute ‘no’ as a subject matter with you so that would explain it but if so. ** oneofmanyhsus@yahoo.com, Wow, you are your email address today. No, I haven’t had Rivera Garza’s book here before, it’s in the post that’s coming up tomorrow. I don’t know how my friend’s doing yet, I will find out this weekend. He’s here, yes, in Marseilles. ** Robert, Greetings, Robert! If you have an instinctive nausea or other ill effect at reading about scat, and I mean a lot of scat, then I think you should prepare yourself. I like Chicago physically. Every friend I have who’s there or from there is very cool and actually does read interesting books and see/listen to interesting stuff in general, so it seems like a solid location for you at least in theory from what I know. Curious to hear how you take to it. ** _Black_Acrylic, ‘Hogg’ is definitely some kind of test of how ‘transgressive’ one really is, I think. I’m pretty sure you can meet the challenge handily. ** Billy, The only Delaney books I’ve read are ‘Hogg’, ‘Madmen’, and ‘The Motion of Light in Water’. ‘Hogg’ is definitely the best of those for me. I’m a very weak reader in the sci-fi realm for whatever reason, so I’m not naturally inclined towards most of his books. Seems like pretty everyone considers ‘Dhalgren’ his masterpiece. ** Steve Erickson, Indeed. There were some very good bands associated with Queer Punk like Tribe 8 and others, but … I knew a little about that riot grrrl history, but I need to read more. Courtney Love, of all people, told me a lengthy-ish history of riot grrrl when I interviewed her way back when. Well, it is kind of an adventure novel, I mean, basically or sort of at least, ha ha. ** Right. Super simple today. Balloons. All you need to know. See you tomorrow.

* (restored)

 

‘Any review of Samuel R. Delany’s Hogg must prepare the reader for the explicitness of the content; an explicitness marked even before you begin to read the book by the keyword indicators in the peritext.

‘”1. Rapists – Fiction. 2. Sex crimes – Fiction. 3. Pedophilia – Fiction. 4. Victims of violent crimes – Fiction. 5. Children – Crimes against – Fiction.”

‘Hogg is explicitly and violently pornographic. Delany takes his readers to the limit of readability – but as long as you keep reading, you repeatedly face up to some of the darkest and most carefully hidden parts of your own desire. Presented in a similar format to the conquests of Walter in My Secret Life by Frank Harris (1890) and the narratives of de Sade, Hogg follows the encounters of the boy-narrator-protagonist in a catalogue of sexual and violent acts which he witnesses, or more often participates in, particularly in relation to the dirt-encrusted trucker come hit-man Hogg.

‘Delany forces his reader through page after page of violence and abuse. As a reader I found myself varying between arousal and disgust (and occasionally disgust at my arousal), between groping my throbbing erection and plunging my hand into my crotch the way nervous children do, trying to find my shrivelled cock, which had withdrawn in horror at the narrative. Reading Hogg makes you viscerally complicit. …

‘Written in San Francisco in 1969 and revised over the next four years, Delany did not find a publisher for Hogg for over twenty years after its completion, despite a backlist of popular successes as a writer of fiction, science fiction and non-fiction. Even the editor at Olympia Press, who first published Lolita, said that Hogg was the only novel he’d ‘ever rejected solely because of its sexual content.’ When it was issued by Black Ice Books and FC2 in 1995 it was published in an edition of just five-hundred. The current reprint by FC2 is the first time Hogg has been issued to a wider readership.

‘Although Hogg is not autobiographical, the unnamed child protagonist and narrator would appear, in part, to be Delany. The racial ambiguity of the narrator-protagonist (he slips between a black/white identification) could very easily be Delany himself, who has described elsewhere his ability to ‘pass’ as white. Hogg is an autobiography of the pornographic imagination. Related works by Delany include the memoir The Motion of Light in Water (1988), the novel The Mad Man (1994), and the graphic novel Bread and Wine (1999). Even where there is no ‘resemblance’ to be found, the extreme nature of the content brings us back to the life of the author; we inevitably ask: what kind of guy would write this stuff? …

‘Unlike sex itself, Hogg is not more-ish. I was relieved to get to the end. But the relief was not that of dutifully completing a novel I got no pleasure from, rather it was the relief of a challenge accepted and fulfilled, an exhausting journey that made me want to consider what I had discovered along the way.’ — Joshua Sofaer

 

‘Samuel Delany’s novel Hogg (written in 1969 but unpublished until 1995) is an extreme text by any imaginable standard; it engages, in excruciating detail, troubling and taboo subjects including incest and pedophilia (forced and consensual), necrophilia, scatophilia, mutilation, and rape. Indeed, scenes of graphic sex and violence comprise the entire novel and are flatly narrated in the first person by an unnamed 11-year-old boy referred to, descriptively, as “cocksucker.” Hogg wants us to feel disgust: expressions of revulsion are found in nearly all of the 340 Goodreads reviews. And yet terms of literary value — whether the novel is “good” or “bad,” according to the site’s five-star rating system — are incredibly inconsistent, and some readers admit to being utterly paralyzed: several readers articulate some version of “I can’t even rate it.” For many readers, a text’s value lies in its ability to deliver those straightforwardly positive or pleasurable emotions which Hogg refuses to do. For others, the text’s prodigious ability to disgust is proof of its excellence. Hogg helps us, then, examine our divergent modes of evaluating and discussing literature, and the centrality of affect (positive and negative) for readers both inside and outside the academic realm.

‘The mainstream literary market produces few texts that force these considerations as powerfully as Hogg does. Many readers are not used to accounting for negative emotions (or “ugly feelings” in Sianne Ngai’s terms) like disgust in their positive evaluations of a text. Extreme texts like Hogg are so affectively challenging that readers’ ability to evaluate the text is suspended by their immediate physical response. They are simply disgusted — their affect is their interpretation. I use the term “affect” — instead of “feeling” or “emotion” — because it is a way to focus on embodiment (the way we are “affected”) rather than on moral judgments that many readers conflate with the way they “feel” about a text. “Literary value” means different things to different people, but to ask, “What is the value of this disgusting text?” requires that we also ask: “What is literary value — and for whom?” It can help us reconsider the supposed “enormous gap” (in John Guillory’s terms) between “professional” and “lay” reading practices. Hogg and other extremely disgusting texts force questions about what we read, why we read, and why or how we should read.’ — Liz Janssen, LARB

 

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Further

Samuel Delany Info Page
Samuel R. Delany, The Art of Fiction No. 210
Samuel Delany Autobiography (written under a pseudonym)
Errata for all of Delany’s novels
“Racism and Science Fiction” by Samuel R. Delany
Samuel Delany @ Facebook
‘A Conversation With Samuel R. Delany’
‘Alone as a queer, young, black sci-fi nerd: then I discovered Samuel Delany’
‘The Samuel Delany / NAMBLA Conversation’
‘The Motion of Light: Celebrating Samuel R. Delany’
Samuel Delany’s review of Kubrick’s ‘2001’
Film: ‘The Polymath, or The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman’
‘Studying the Works of Samuel R. Delany’
‘A Celebration of Samuel R Delany: Aye, and Gomorrah’
‘Samuel R. Delany: Another Roundtable’
‘Samuel R. Delany: The Grammar of Narrative’
‘When Gloria Steinem and Samuel Delany clashed over Wonder Woman’
‘Sage of the Apocalypse’
‘About Samuel Delany’
‘Samuel R. Delany on Why Science Fiction and Literature Are and Should Be Different’
‘Space Cowboy: An Interview with Samuel R. Delany’
‘Opposing Forces and Ethical Judgments’
’10 Reasons Why Everyone Should Read Samuel R. Delany’

 

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Additionally

Pratt Lecture Series: Samuel R. Delany

Samuel R. Delany reads from ‘Through The Valley of the Nest of Spiders’

Robert Reid-Pharr interviews Samuel R Delany at University of Maryland

JNT Dialogue 2013: José Muñoz and Samuel Delany

 

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Covers

 

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Interview

 

TERRY ENRIGHT: One of the few things that’s comforting about the book is that there seems to be a real acceptance of human beings—the narrator accepts them young or old, fat or skinny, hung or not. And not just every kind of human but everything that comes out of them. In addition, no one seems ever to get jealous—Hogg never tries to claim the boy solely for himself or anything. Since this attitude prevails in The Mad Man and from what I know of your autobiography, it strikes me that you might be endorsing this as a utopic vision of love and sex. Would that be accurate?

SAMUEL R. DELANY: I feel a little odd talking about a novel as “endorsing” anything. Always, I’ve felt that novels were fundamentally records—and necessarily distorted records—of things observed in the world. It would be disingenuous not to admit that some things I observe I like and some I don’t like, but the basic enterprise is to portray them—with all the distortions—in some sort of esthetic pattern. My like or dislike of them should be of secondary, or even tertiary importance.

Because, with jealousy, you feel majorly disrespected, jealousy is different from the simple sadness of not getting what you want. With jealousy, you feel you should have what you lack—as a man, as a woman, as a wife, as a husband, as a worker overlooked for a promotion, as a child who has not received a present some other sibling has gotten, as a friend who hasn’t gotten a phone call thanking you for a gift you gave or a dinner check you picked up at a restaurant.

Fundamentally, jealousy is a social emotion. People are jealous because they are brought up to feel that they have a right to certain treatment—to other people’s attention, to other people’s work, to other people’s sexual fidelity. When they don’t get it, they feel diminished, insulted, and cheated out of something they believe society marked out as their due. Jealousy is not particularly “natural”—or, for that matter, “unnatural.” Nor do I think it’s necessarily “healthy,” or “unhealthy.” I think it’s learned. When it’s extreme, often it’s a pain in the butt, both for the person feeling the jealousy and for the person who is the object of that jealousy, as well as the world around both persons. Once we learn what it is, however, in some cases—if we live certain kinds of lives—we can unlearn how to be jealous.

The vast majority of us live in our superegos, rather than in our ids or even our egos. It’s much easer to do something we think is right (even momentarily) than it is to do something only because it’s pleasurable (and, even trying, we cannot think of an ethical justification). Indeed, it takes a highly civilized person with a highly cultivated aesthetic sensibility to do something just because it’s pleasurable. And most of the time, the necessary prior cultivation has been the setting in place of a discourse that says a certain amount or type of pleasure is itself good, moral, right, and beneficial to the individual and promotes the greater good.

Only the strongest egos can occasionally break through this mental stricture—at the behest of sex, say—and even that usually leads to a restructuring of an ethical discourse. The vast majority of the “evil” perpetrated in the world is perpetrated in the name of the superego, through which, as Freud showed us, the ego and the id try blindly to live.

In your question up there, basically you’re right as far as my own feelings are concerned. I’ve never thought of myself as a particularly jealous person. But because I’m a gay man who’s lived a relatively active sexual life, in many places the idea of sexual jealousy is so self-contradictory that I simply couldn’t tolerate it in myself. So I’ve worked—not terribly hard, when all is said and done—to eradicate those feelings. I’m glad I did. Yet once in a while a surge of it flares up and surprises me. Today, rarely do I feel jealousy for sexual reasons. Social attention from a friend—or its lack when I’m expecting it—is far more likely to set me off and leave me feeling the painful, angering deprivation that’s what jealousy is. Frankly, today even that’s pretty rare for me.

Still, I work on it.

A few people—often ones who have never thought of themselves as particularly deserving of anything in the first place—are astonishingly “non-jealous.” Certainly this is the case with the narrator of Hogg as well as Hogg himself. But, yes, such a lack of jealousy is one of the things a sexually active life may actually be able teach you.

It was Blake who said the Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom. I always suspected this was one of the things he had in mind.

Fundamentally, I don’t think there’s anything necessarily healthier about monogamy than there is about promiscuity, either. Or vice versa, for that matter. But, yes, if you lead a promiscuous life, putting some curbs on your tendency toward jealousy is the only reasonable way to do it. Only extremely powerful—and dictatorial—people can afford to be both promiscuous and jealous.

TERRY ENRIGHT: The most disturbing element of the book—aside from particular scenes of especially gruesome depravity—is the utter passivity towards the pain of others (when that pain isn’t being actively inflicted). Even the characters who ostensibly provide contrast to Hogg and his crew exhibit a stunning unwillingness to intervene in the suffering of others. Red, Rufus, Mona and Harry all at least suspect Big Sambo of abusing and raping his daughter, but none of them does anything about it. Then there’s the narrator who seems almost completely indifferent to the suffering of the women—he seems aware of what they’re enduring and, at the urging of others, helps assault them. Is he supposed to be too young to be able to think these things out for himself? One reviewer was under the impression he licks a girl to ease the pain of the rape—but to my eye that’s a misreading of a pretty straightforward text. He prepares to lick her and as he does so, it occurs to him it might ease her pain—but they weren’t cause and effect.

SAMUEL R. DELANY: I think you’re perfectly right in that particular reading. But just as I believe jealousy, even sexual jealousy, is a fundamentally social emotion, I also believe identification with other people’s suffering is almost entirely an aesthetic emotion. When we watch real suffering occur, out on the street, perhaps, the fact is, most people don’t feel very much. The offers of help may be real. The shows of concern tend to be a variety of emotional miming. Sometimes people feel fear—and sometimes that fear can even linger. But that’s about all. To watch real suffering causes our emotions—unless we’ve had a particular kind of education—immediately to clamp down.

Think of the young people in Pride and Prejudice, girls and boys of 18, 19, and 20, who come in, laughing and chattering, from a pleasant afternoon watching a sailor publicly flogged—a sailor who, as happened in three out of five such floggings at the time, probably died over the next couple of days.

We learn compassion for others through works of art. It’s one of the ways art civilizes—it’s something narrative art really can teach. The major thrust of Aristotle’s argument on tragedy—pity, terror, and catharsis aside (they’re only the machinery through which it happens)—is that tragedy promotes compassion in the public audience for that public’s leaders, leaders who often, however inadvertently, make terrible mistakes. This compassion in the people is politically advantageous to the greater society, Aristotle argues. If they feel this compassion, they are more easily governed. (The fact that Hogg starts to make people feel some compassion for people both like Hogg and the narrator is, I suspect, what readers find most unsettling.) Aristotle also argues, in effect, that to have such compassion for ordinary men and women—the working classes, say—would be silly and socially counterproductive. There’s far too much suffering in the world and no practical way to relieve it. It would only gum up the social workings—and, for 4th Century BCE Greece, he was probably right.

But the fact that my characters don’t feel much compassion for each other—people who are being really hurt—only means that they haven’t spent a lot of time at the movies or watching TV.

That’s all.

Even by the end of the 18th Century, there was probably less compassion for the working classes among the bourgeoisie and aristocracy than there is today for the run-of-the-mill child molester. While people were proud of their own country’s soldiers killed in the line of duty, nobody felt sorry for them—unless a casualty happened to be a personal friend. Even the working classes themselves, while often they felt severe family loyalties, had little compassion for one another, as individuals or as a class. The general wisdom—which the working class itself shared—was that 95% of them were thieves and layabouts, when they weren’t retarded. Unless they were under strict supervision from overseers or army officers, they would probably rob you blind and, with half a chance, rape your daughter. (Think of all those scheming peasants in all those Balzac novels!) This was the life Hobbes described as “solitary, nasty, brutish, and short,” and thus a relief for everyone else when you were finished with it—and nobody gave much thought at all what losing it might mean to you.

In Sentimental Education (1858) Flaubert’s portrait of Dussardier is a mid-19th century analytical attempts to bring a member of the urban working class into the circle of middle-class compassion, through the aesthetic strategy of revealing what happens when that compassion is withheld, dissembled about, faked, and the bourgeois characters continue on in what at the time was their traditional manner. Dussardier’s death on the blade of Sénécal (the coldly calculating politico, Frédéric’s truly terrifying “bad conscousness”—and by implication what would be left of Frédéric were all his wishy-washy romanticism stripped away) is the moral and intellectual climax of the novel. Frédéric likes Dussardier, certainly. But he accuses him falsely of thefts to justify Frédéric himself borrowing large amounts of money (ineffectually to run after his pipe dream of an affair with Madame Arnoux), and generally abuses him shamelessly. The twin things Frédéric lacks for Dussardier are respect and compassion, and the result is that Dussardier is the character for whom the reader feels the most compassion—at least, by the calculus of 19th century melodrama that was alone available to even such an innovator as Flaubert, however flat it falls for readers today. (How could one person, for the coldest and most inhuman political reasons, Sénécal run through with a sword someone who once so good heartedly invited him to a party he gave in which he went out of his way to impoverish himself so that Sénécal might have a bottle of decent beer—that’s the question the novel asks in effect, as though writer and readers were all cousins of Nick Carraway, the narrator of Gatsby. The argument is finally one about the value of pleasure, as are finally all arguments about compassion—its poetry, its unbiquity.)

For thousands of years, people have been saying war is a terrible thing. There have still been wars. What there hasn’t been, however, is “war movies.” Starting with Battleship Potemkin, Napoleon and Intolerance, up through The Grand Illusion, Paths of Glory, The Battle of Algiers, Apocalypse Now, The Big Red One, Saving Private Ryan, and The Pianist, those are what, in not quite a century, have helped stabilized the idea that war is terrible in a world economic order where it is far more profitable to take over a country’s functioning industrial system already in place rather than to first smash its infrastructure with bombs and troops beyond the point where it can function. Wars are relatively reasonable for conflicts between agricultural countries. Replanting a battlefield is not particularly difficult. For conflicts between industrial nations, it’s extraordinarily wasteful. I hope this awareness keeps growing.

In France the working classes weren’t even expected to marry with full church ceremonies until 1875, four years after the Paris Commune—when the first laws facilitating church weddings for the working classes came in!

In John Gay’s The Beggars Opera (1765), from 110 years before the Commune, in England, when the first possibilities for working class marriage are being considered, the bone of contention is that Polly Peachum wants to marry Macheath. Polly’s parents are not married. And while Mr. Peachum thinks it would be a fine idea because then his grandchildren would not be bastards the way his daughter, Polly, is, and many of the better off artisans are trying out the new socio-legal arrangement, Polly’s mother thinks it’s a terrible idea, because then all a legal wife’s assets are entailed to her husband. That is just not a good plan in a social milieu where women are regularly abandoned and betrayed—especially by shiftless hustlers such as Macheath.

Finally, why is life pleasant enough so that most people really do want to live it for a long time? What is the basis of pleasure which is the positive measure (after the negative measure of freedom from pain, hunger, ill health, and discomfort) for general compassion—that is to say, the yearning to relieve the suffering of others. Shockingly enough, I suspect masturbation is the one truly self-administered and self-regulated pleasure central to well over half the world’s positive pleasure—along with its attendant fantasies. (Since masturbation is such a large part of people’s lives—and has been since primates’ arms reached their current length—I really believe that the reason it has been all but repressed from political and even most public discourse is that the moment it is politicized as a positive pleasure men and women have a right to, it redefines the relationship of individual to the group from the bottom up in a way we might never recover from; today, we might not even recognize what some of those new discursive definitions of humanity could look like.) Then comes sex with other people. The pleasure of sociality, work, accomplishment, and others talking and socializing with people probably comes next. Finally the pleasures of nature fall in there—which range over those of children, small animals, greenery, good food, fine weather, beautiful landscapes, and flowers. Somewhere in there is, I’m sure, art itself—music, dancing, singing, painting, sculpture, literature, architecture, as well as history and philosophy (even though the last, as Benjamin points out, has no muse). The pleasures of love are really quite wonderful—though I suspect they are rather a luxury and require a certain level of socioeconomic stability to be anything other than a mode of suffering. But certainly I feel privileged to have had thirty years of them with my daughter and fourteen with my current partner, as well as a briefer stint, now and again, with various friends, with some of whom I had sexual relationships and with some of whom I never even considered it. How these pleasures finally map out in terms of which are more or less important to us, is, I’m sure, different for each individual. But most of us will recognize the basic areas. In short, pleasures are everything the poet celebrates, directly or indirectly.

As to the characters’ leave-it-alone attitude toward Big Sambo’s relationship with children, Hogg is a historical novel after all. Specifically, it’s pre-Stonewall. As is still largely the case—and it was even more so thirty-five years back, when Hogg was written—you don’t interfere with how people raise their children. Honey-Pie is a deeply depressive and wounded kid. I’m almost certain she doesn’t attend school. I doubt she has any friends her own age. Add to it that her out-of-work father uses her as a sexual plaything, and I think that’s a truly bleak existence. There’s nothing there I’m endorsing. But the fact is, at the time, the Rufuses and Reds of the world had to protect the Sambos from the otherwise well-intentioned eyes of the Harrys and the Monas in order to protect their own practices.

Today, Rufus and Red would probably have a support group with monthly meetings and trips to play with other S&M; groups in near-by cities, with whom they kept in regular on-line contact—at least I’d like to think so. They might even put out some considerable effort to get both Big Sambo and Honey-Pie some serious counseling. Failing that, they might well call the police. Certainly I wouldn’t fault them if they did, even as I would prefer them to start with the former before resorting to the latter—for the child’s sake.

As far back as the middle 1950s, I first heard, on television, a noted child psychiatrist, a Dr. Schimmel, explain to the public that, in his considerable experience, in the vast majority of actual cases, however harmful sexual relations were with children, the way the police and other social institutions brought those relations to an end was far more painful and emotionally scarring to the child than the relations themselves. There was no way for the child to read his or her subsequent removal from home and other family members, the subsequent incarceration in an institution, the new lack of freedom of motion and general harshness of how, from then on, he or she was dealt with, as anything other than punishment for what she or he had done, no matter how little he or she was actually to blame. Despite the sentimentalities of post-primetime TV (when the controversial programs are aired), rarely can you prevent a child from eventually saying: “I would have been better off if I’d kept my mouth shut or at least if I’d managed to get away and no-one had ever known.” You can dismiss this as “silly childishness” if you like, but that contravenes the entire subjective set of measures by which one acts to bring the situation to an end in the first place. One of the terrible things about our society, even today, is that, in five out of six cases, the molester who threatens the child, “If you tell anyone what we’re doing, they will do awful things to you!” is usually, in the long run if not in the short, right. And that was far more the case a quarter of a century ago.

To repeat, in no way does citing such a contradiction mean that I approve of such child/adult relationships themselves. But counseling and gentler intervention is the direction that the world is going in—it just hadn’t arrived there, yet (as in only a few cases has it today), when I wrote the novel.

In the scenes on the docks, the narrator sees (with just a little nachtraglicheit) that the garbage men’s protection of Sambo is also fundamentally self-protective. Because of it, it also facilitates what he himself desires, so Rufus and Red get points in his book for it.

The novel presents the thinnest cross-section of everyone’s experience. The real test of the extremely delicate moral structure the book is trying to set up would be for the reader to come back to Crawhole after three weeks, after two months, or after a year, then see how things are going with them all.

Do you think the narrator will still be there, with Rufus and Red? Or will he have grown tired of their S&M; shenanigans and run off once more?

There is just the possibility—and I think the narrator, to the extent his fantasies ever run in this direction, probably would like it in theory—that Red and Rufus will provide him with exactly what he wants as well as whatever he needs that he himself has little way of knowing in any detail. (He is eleven!)

And, who knows, they might.

But if you, as reader, tell me that you feel it’s highly unlikely, I, as writer, am certainly not going to argue with you. I know what the world is like. I think it’s pretty unlikely too.

(cont.)

 

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Book

 Samuel Delany HOGG
Fiction Collective 2

‘Acclaimed winner of the William Whitehead Memorial Award for a lifetime’s contribution to gay and lesbian literature, Samuel R. Delany wrote Hogg three decades ago. Since then it has been one of America’s most famous ‘unpublishable’ novels. The subject matter of Hogg is our culture of sexual violence and degeneration. Delany explores his disturbing protagonist Hogg on his own turf–rape, pederasty, sexual excess–exposing an area of violence and sexual abuse from the inside. As such, it is a brave book.’ — FC2

 

Excerpt

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! I’m going to see if I can find some Bayblade in a store so I can really see it. My apartment doesn’t have a closet, which is quite strange now that I think about it, but I’ll just pull some books out of my bookshelves and fit those two in there somehow. You know, for when I feel like reading art books. Love forcing Viktor Orbán to legally change his name to Huff_my_Stuff, G. ** Bill, His pride was very moving, ha ha. Gifs > guns. Oh, huh, I just read a new Cristina Rivera Garza book myself, but it was her Selected Stories, so it must be a different new book of hers than the one you read. It’s in the ‘5 books … I loved’ post coming up this weekend, if you don’t know it. ** _Black_Acrylic, I remember that wives tales. What a strange term: ‘wives tale’. It must have an offensive origin. Awesome about your new flat! Two weeks! Is your Dundee stuff in storage? Will it be ‘easy’ to transfer. That’s so exciting, man! ** Misanthrope, I was just talking with someone the other day about how strange it is that people used to call you and you’d have no idea who was calling you until you picked up. And how you used to be able to lie and say you were calling from a different phone than the one you were calling from. I saw the ‘Jurassic World’ movie. It does not suck azz, it’s totally fun. It’s a blast. Anyone who says it sucks azz is a cynical bore IMO. Eek or potential eek about Kayla. I just had my first friend come down with Monkeypox! Holy crap! ** John Newton, Hi. I’m sorry about your friend. That’s really scary. I hope he’ll fully recover. After you’ve been vegetarian for a while the mere idea of putting meat in your mouth is really disgusting. You get used to very subtle smells and flavors. And eventually you can’t digest meat. The few times I’ve taken bites of things that accidentally had meat in them over the years, I got quite sick. Me thinks your friend was joshing. Or he’s rather indiscriminate perhaps. Alcohol tends to make me sluggish, which I personally don’t find too be a pleasurable state, although I know people who crave sluggishness. Thank you a lot about ‘TMS’. No, I don’t know ‘Shopping and Fucking’. Never heard of it. I’ll investigate. Thanks. Your parents were fine with you reading Burroughs at 13? Wow. ** Steve Erickson, Mm, there are a couple, I think. Most regular fast food chains offer a vegan something or other on their menu now. I’ll look for ‘Girls to the Front’. Well, so-called Queercore didn’t have a strong musical presence, so that’s probably why. When Pansy Division is your movement’s big name, you’re in trouble. ** Bernard, That’s weird ‘cos I just a saw a new post on FB by you showing you in the 5th arr. so I thought you were still here. Greetings across the waves. The JA celebration is sounding at least funnish now, so that’s good. Have tons of fun. Say hi to anybody from me who might like to get a hi from me. ** Robert, Indeed. I’m totally with you. Chicago, what a nice city. Why are you going there? That’s cool whatever the reason. ** Okay. I thought I would restore this spotlit ‘Hogg’ post, and I assume that decision is self-explanatory? See you tomorrow.