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.

Favorite books of 2011

Below are some of my favorite books of those I read in 2011: some old, some new, omitting any that I’ve read before, and more or less in the order that I read them.

• The Best of Lucius Shepard
  
• Controlled Burn by Scott Wolven
• The Power Broker by Robert Caro
• If Not, Winter by Sappho, edited by Anne Carson
• Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable
• Zoo City by Lauren Beukes
• Sex and the River Styx by Edward Hoagland
• Open City by Teju Cole
• The Lost City of Z by David Grann
  
• One Day I Will Write About This Place by Binyavanga Wainaina
• Pity the Nation by Robert Fisk
• The Best Art You’ve Never Seen by Julian Spalding
• American Fantastic Tales, vol. I, edited by Peter Straub
• Return of the Osprey by David Gessner
• A Wider View of the Universe by Robert Kuhn McGregor
  
• Zone One by Colson Whitehead
• The Piano Shop on the Left Bank by Thad Carhart
• Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller: A Private Correspondence, edited by George Wickes

If you’re still in the mood for lists, here are more of mine.

• Favorite books of 2010
• Favorite books of the decade
• Books to return to

And here are some lists by others.

• Alexandra Fuller’s top 10 African memoirs (plus my own list)
• Top Ten favorite books by writers
• Cynthia Ozick’s list, discussed by Roger Ebert
• 25 Great Books by Legendary Scientists
• Books That Changed My Life

A Wider View of the Universe

Thoreau’s name has become so synonymous with “nature” that it’s easy to imagine he was always familiar with everything that flew, swam, burrowed, or grew in the general vicinity of Concord. The truth is otherwise. A Wider View of the Universe asks, “What did Thoreau know about nature, and when did he know it?”

Robert Kuhn McGregor argues convincingly that before his sojourn at Walden Pond, Thoreau’s knowledge of nature went not much further than the utilitarian know-how of the local farmers. Even the first draft of Walden itself had remarkably little in it about nature. Chapters such as “Brute Neighbors” and “Winter Animals” came only later. Yet when he discovered nature, he did it with a vengeance, and in the last decade of his short life he was a true authority.

Kuhn has delved into his subject far enough to know that when Thoreau refers to “clams” in the Concord River, he is referring to freshwater mussels. “Crow blackbirds” are grackles, and when Thoreau writes about seeing “lizards” swimming in a ditch, he meant newts. (Lizards, I noticed some time ago, are missing from the index of the 1906 edition of the Journal—perhaps to avoid drawing attention to an embarrassing slip.)

The best reference for Thoreau’s intellectual development remains Richardson’s Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, but Kuhn’s summary of what Thoreau was writing at different points in his life is a helpful contribution. And his chapter “The River” is an exceptional achievement.

Kuhn describes this chapter as “a compound descriptive analysis of a year in the life of the river during the 1850s, as derived from Henry Thoreau’s journals.” At first he seems to have done nothing more than to narrate an impressionistic description of the change of the seasons in Thoreau’s Concord.

Fast-flying migratory green-winged teal passed through in March, as did goldeneye ducks driven inland from the Atlantic Coast by heavy storms. Blue-winged teal flew past Concord a month later, resting briefly in marshes and shallow pools. Herring gulls visited briefly in March and April, feeding on newly hatched shellfish, fresh fish, and berries.

As you continue reading, though, you notice an impressive specificity in the description.

As the sun rose higher in the spring sky, plants responded to the increasing light. In the river shallows, common naiads appeared. Greenish sweetflag blossoms opened in marshy grounds along the shores, and meadow saxifrage bloomed on the higher banks. Not many varieties of flowers emerged that early, however. The greatest activity was among the river shrubs. In the shallow water, sweetgales bloomed. In marshy thickets, winterberries, black currants, leatherleafs, slender willows, and common elders came to life. On the banks, the buds of a variety of willows, alders, and maples began to expand.

But it is only in the notes at the end of the book that you comprehend the research and rigor that went into the easy flow of the chapter.

In organizing the material for this chapter, I have in some ways mirrored approaches undertaken by Thoreau himself. Working with the whole of the journals, I have abstracted his nature observations and organized them according to geographic location, particular habitat, species classifications, time of year, and so forth. The result was a series of phenological tables describing the typical behaviors of nature in the various Concord habitats as Thoreau found them. This material is far too voluminous to recreate in these pages, or even to reference. The pages of this chapter are a narrative presentation of the essence of this material; the reference notes reflect major (but not all) sources in the journals where information was derived.

Dark humor

In this season of family reunions and holiday sentiments, there are times when you need a dose of dark humor.

My brother Keith recently asked for recommendations of literature that is dark and funny. I came up with the list below, roughly arranged from funnier to darker. (The ratio of darkness to humor in some works, like Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust, is so high that I find them hard to enjoy.)

Funnier
How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young
Hokum, edited by Paul Beatty
The Ask by Sam Lipsyte
The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (and lots of other Vonnegut)
The Ginger Man by J.P. Donleavy
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
White Noise by Don DeLillo
Darker

More suggestions are welcome!