The Motion of Light in Water

It’s not surprising that you can’t check Samuel R. Delany’s memoir The Motion of Light in Water from the New York or Brooklyn public libraries. The subtitle, after all, is “Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957-1965.” It practically says, “Steal me.” But it’s worth making the trip to the Schomburg Center to read it on the premises, or to get your own copy online. I’ve been reading a lot of memoirs over the last couple of years, and this is one of the best.

If your main exposure to Delany came—as mine did—from the documentary The Polymath, you may have been left with the impression that Delany’s life has been completely dominated by anonymous sex, with the writing of a few books shoehorned in.

It’s true that the man has had an extraordinary amount of sex. In fact, despite being (primarily) gay, he has probably had more sex with women than most straight men have. But reading The Motion of Light in Water makes it clear that he cares about people more than sex—he recalls some of his many men in great detail years later, including their clothes and hair and hands (Delany is attracted to nail-biters) and the occasional slighting remarks that wounded him. And he cares about writing perhaps most of all.

Here and there in the book (sections 10, 38.11, 65.6, and 85, if you’re writing a paper), Delany uses the theme of light in water to express the difficulty of capturing all these aspects of existence. This is from section 65.6.

Consider two accounts of a life.

They seem as if they take place on different planets.

Yet the narrator, through all that surrounds them both, insists the parallel columns write of one person—even more, insists that the gap between them, the split, the flickering correlations between, as evanescent as light-shot water, as insubstantial as moonstruck cloud, are really all that constitutes the subject: not the content, if you will, but the relationships that can be drawn out of that content, and which finally that content can be analyzed down into.

Delany has been not only a writer but an actor and singer. One of the more amusing anecdotes in the book describes the night when Delany nearly ended up headlining a double bill with the then-unknown Bob Dylan. When the “breathless young man, in a denim jacket and on the fleshy side,” rushed in and seated himself onstage, Delany’s friend Billy, the club manager, explained he would have to wait his turn. A disagreement ensued.

“...well, then, don’t come back!” Billy said, at last, a little loudly, a little flustered.

And with his case, Dylan rushed out the door as breathlessly as he’d come in.

Shaking his head, Billy put his hands on his hips, looked at us, and really said, “Bob Dylan! Who does he think he is ...?”

Creating the High Line

The first book I read this year was High Line by Joshua David and Robert Hammond, the two young men who founded Friends of the High Line and led the effort to save the elevated rail line and transform it into one of the city’s most popular parks.

I walk the High Line, in whole or or in part, nearly every weekday morning, when I share it with only a few joggers and some gardeners in their green Friends of the High Line jackets. Like many people—as the authors note—I imagined that all that really had to be done was to clean out the trash, put down the concrete-plank walkway and a few benches, and tidy up the shrubs and wildflowers that were already growing there.

Not at all. As the book reveals, to turn the High Line into a park, it first had to be scraped down to the concrete so that its drainage system could be repaired. The railroad tracks themselves were painted with yellow numbers, removed, and eventually reinstalled in their original positions.

It cost $16.4 million just to strip all the lead paint from the structure and repaint it. It was repainted in a color deliberately chosen to look as if it had been there forever: a shade of black with subtle tinge of green that you can buy from Sherwin-Williams using the code number SW6994.

And all this work and expense came after a long and hard-fought political battle to keep the High Line from being demolished. That two gay guys with no particular access to money or power accomplished this feat makes for an inspiring story that starts the year on the right note.

Trailer Park Restaurant

The Trailer Park restaurant on 23rd Street has carved out an interesting brand for itself. The appeal of burgers, Philly steaks, beer, and margaritas is clear enough, but why the trailer park theme? What’s the attraction of poverty and pink flamingos?

There are a few possibilities. You would expect the Trailer Park restaurant to be cheap and unpretentious. No need to dress up, or even refrain from burping.

The lady next to the sign, with her cutoffs, tattoo, and baseball cap, offers another not-so-subliminal signal, suggesting that a trailer park is where you might find young, unemployed women with time on their hands and few inhibitions. (There are actually two women reclining on either side of the sign, in an inadvertent—I would guess—parody of the tomb of the Medici in Florence.)

Get close enough and you can see that the clothes have actually been painted onto a naked mannequin, producing an effectively trashy look.

The joys of the sullen

Seeing this message every morning on the way to the High Line eventually made me curious enough to look up the Brooklyn-based artist Elbow-Toe and to follow his Twitter feed. 

Impact Car Park

Dear Impact Car Park:

Do you really think you picked the best name for your business?