Syllabus Times Square Red Times Square Blue Delaney
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(especially July 31 or September 25)
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#westcoast4life
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Life is sort of a fleeting encounter, no?
A paean to gay cruising and other fleeting, random moments of intimacy that the city enables. At times Delany strikes an elegiac tone, which may be a bit premature. I don't think flaneuring is completely dead.
Man, New York sounds fucking lame. According to Mr. Delany, gentrification has gotten so bad you can't even masturbate in public anymore. Dear goodreads, come to San Francisco for a good time.(especially July 31 or September 25)
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#westcoast4life
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Life is sort of a fleeting encounter, no?
A paean to gay cruising and other fleeting, random moments of intimacy that the city enables. At times Delany strikes an elegiac tone, which may be a bit premature. I don't think flaneuring is completely dead. Cities are still very exciting places, with that element of living collage and the vast reservoir of strangers one will never exhaust.
It may be true, though, that between gentrification and digital culture the self is growing ever less porous and more monadic (it may seem pretentious to bring Leibniz into this, but goddamn it I have the right; especially since Delany won't shut up about Lacan). It's probably true that most people just aren't open to having a meaningful exchange with a stranger on the street. I've always had a habit of talking to myself as I walk. I realize that in San Francisco this is accepted as normal, and not because of any great tolerance for eccentric behavior, but simply because here it's assumed that everyone is constantly plugged into their smart phone, and if they're talking it's in order to arrange a business transaction or plan some other very important aspect of their life.
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I absolutely loved the honesty of the first half. Delany, a gay black academic and writer, spent over 30 years frequenting both the straight and gay porn theatres around Times Square, and is frank and unapologetic about this fact, detailing
This is a book of two halves - the first half , a memoir style account of Delany's experiences in Times Square, specifically the porn theatres, pre gentrification, the second half, an argument against this gentrification, happening at the time of his writing.I absolutely loved the honesty of the first half. Delany, a gay black academic and writer, spent over 30 years frequenting both the straight and gay porn theatres around Times Square, and is frank and unapologetic about this fact, detailing activity, both that he observed and participated in, in the years before they were closed down under what he claims wasn't the shadow of AIDS, but the desire of successive city administrations to pander to big business. Yes, on many occasions the writing is explicit - but in addition to this frankness, Delany creates a valuable social document of the time, also telling the stories of some of the men he got to know over the years while part of that scene, long gone now thanks to the Disneyfication of the area.
As for the second half, while Delany may be earnest in his reasoning against the closing of the theatres that he loved, and the clearing up of the sex trade from the area in the late 90s, and includes arguments from several different angles, after having read the first section, it just didn't connect with me - the ship has long ago sailed, and to be honest, I just read it with the desire of getting through the book.
Overall? 5 stars for the first section, 1 star for the second. I'm really glad I purchased the book - I really can't remember where I heard about it in the first place - and on the strength of the first section, I look forward to reading his memoir, The Motion Of Light In Water: Sex And Science Fiction Writing In The East Village, another book that I hadn't heard of before this one, but one that is right up my street.
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Not only that, but the second essay- not so interesting in itself for its rambling seemingly too high-brow nature given the topic under discussion (gentrification of public sex locales as a less-than-subtle form of class war/censorship- hang on, that sounds quite interesting- maybe I'm wrong...)- demonstrates the wealth of information and concepts at Delany's fingertips. Delany is the kinda guy I wanna be (non-judgmental, curious and voracious- I will never bone anyone in a theatre) and he possesses an intellect I aspire towards. It's both oddly impassioned and measured given that Delany is essentially terribly sad because he can't j/o the mentally ill anymore.
Still, it's very hard to deny that this and Delany's other masterful works are those of an inimitable one-of-a-kind writer/guy- and better than all those other writer geniuses, there's no envy here!!
A great companion to Delany's fiction, giving a lot of insight into the autobiographical components of works such as Hogg (most likely a combo of people Delany knows in real life) and Dhalgren (the extreme divide between those of the NYC subculture and the rest of the city's inhabitants, such that they effectively lived in their own city)
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yeah..... no.
read for uni || my fav part of this is when the dude was like, "porn is sexist, but it gives men a safe space and a sense of belonging, and that is far more important"yeah..... no.
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The sexual deviant finds various underground communities. You've heard their legends, the sex dungeon under your local pizza place, the back
Like an eternally lingering childhood memory where you were nothing more than a spectator, Times Square Blue's effect on me was so formative for adulthood in a way I still cannot pin down. A literary Objet petit a, Delany explores an explicit sexuality that was averse to commodification, a margin that couldn't fix itself on any page without taking it over.The sexual deviant finds various underground communities. You've heard their legends, the sex dungeon under your local pizza place, the back rooms of your favorite video store, the movie theater that your parents always told you to stay away from. Times Square has gone from intimidating and esoteric in its poverty and homegrown culture to the locus of the horrible, abysmal aesthetic of the global capitalist. There is a Starbucks where Delany and his ensemble of merry masturbators once gathered. The only puddles gathering on the floor now are of venti iced soy mochaccinos, spilled by tourists that were too busy looking through their smart phone pictures of the new years ball (its much smaller than they thought, go figure) they just took outside to notice that the lid wasn't secured on their drink. But don't worry, our modern Thales will demand another one for free.
Don't get me wrong though, Delany is not the cynic here. Nor is he a sentimentalist, as another reviewer noted. What Delany is trying to do is Marcusian in its scope, finding a new way of interpolating sexuality and constructing blue prints for a new city based on the radically alterior communities that were birthed into the underbelly of cities and towns, like the human unconscious manifests itself from discarded thoughts and desires. Here we take the situationist project further, in a direction less laughable and without the malaise of political futility. Because, like Socrates at the Symposium, the city that Delany has in mind has not a foundation in the political, but one of eros.
Level music: Albert Ayler - Angels, Live in Greenwich Village
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That said, it was a well-written set of essays from a viewpoint I hadn't considered.
chip i love u!! so happy i get to read u in new york
ty for writing the kind of theory i want to write and telling of your experience alongside marx because those things matter to one another
ty for theorizing the way relationships function in a city in a way that combines focus on discourse, architecture, public spaces, infrastructure, and superstructure.
the argument that life is enriched for all parties when cross class contact happens freely and often in public spaces is well made. emotion a 4.5
chip i love u!! so happy i get to read u in new york
ty for writing the kind of theory i want to write and telling of your experience alongside marx because those things matter to one another
the argument that life is enriched for all parties when cross class contact happens freely and often in public spaces is well made. emotion and analysis carry it through. ...more
The second portion provides a theoretical account of the memoir-ish first person. This kind of book is probably what more academic books should aspire to be: both rigorous but subjectively located.
Strangely enough, I've had to return to this book after I had read it in the first graduate course I ever took. It's more amazing to me this time around after having "been around the block" in academia for over a decade at this point.The second portion provides a theoretical account of the memoir-ish first person. This kind of book is probably what more academic books should aspire to be: both rigorous but subjectively located.
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I loved it. Then I hated it. Then I loved it. And again hated it. It is an imperfect project but oh so powerful. I'd venture that it is impossible to be indifferent to this book.
He shows me a world I wouldn't otherwise know and shows me a part of myself I am not sure I want to know. So kudos to Delany for this forced immersion into his dail
I find myself speechless in trying to review this book. It is about the nature of desire and the relationship between desire and the urban political economy.I loved it. Then I hated it. Then I loved it. And again hated it. It is an imperfect project but oh so powerful. I'd venture that it is impossible to be indifferent to this book.
He shows me a world I wouldn't otherwise know and shows me a part of myself I am not sure I want to know. So kudos to Delany for this forced immersion into his daily life and theoretical world. I could not put it down and read it in one sitting.
For me the most powerful part of the book is his discussion of the social creation of sexual scarcity. This notion fits well with contemporary work on the social creation of economic scarcity. His ideas here are as radical as Monique Wittig's essay "One is not born a woman." But they unsettle something in me that wants to resist him with full force. If offered a cup of coffee with him, I think I would linger on the decision for some moments.
I often cannot abide the tone of his theoretical forays -- which strike me as weak and deliberately unsystematic. Nor am I convinced that he is a honest narrator. But he is pushing deep, deep buttons in the soft and vicious underbelly of modernity.
A more provocative book I don't think I have read.
I know I am going to read this again. Perhaps then I will have a proper review. Until then....good luck with it.
Meanwhile here are some passages (Julie pushed me here):
Page 89-90, from the first essay:
The encounters you remember are, of course, the men who were a little different, a little strange, the odder denizens of the Venus, this particular cock, that particular smile. Yes, they include the walking wounded, like Rannit. But most of the guys I had at the Capri, day in and day out, year after year (the professional medical companion whose wife had lupus: "So she knows I come here. I think she prefers that to me going with other women -- not that I go into details about it with her"; fat, friendly, uncut Puerto Rican Tony, a Saturday morning regular down at hte Variety for give years; the tree service worker there with his uncle, "'Cause he knew about this place -- and we both like guys"; the tall, rather elegant black man at the Cari who never seemed to do much int he line of sex, but who always lingered standing at the back of the aisle, sometimes chatting with the clutch of black queens who commandeered the seats at the back-left of the orchestra, and who always had some bit of gossip for me when I came in, who always whispered, "stay healthy, now," when I left. Perhaps because of some forgotten bit of conversation I'd overheard him in, years ago, I'd always call him "Eddy," until one day, he looked at me curiously and smiled. "Why do you call me 'Eddie'? That's not my name. I don't mind. But why you always call me that? -- though he wouldn't tell me what his name was when I apologized. "No, you just go on with Eddie. Maybe it's something sexual with you--no problem. Really, its alright." The big, pear-shaped diabetic who always wore dress slacks and a white shirt: "When I got the diabetes, they said I wasn't going to be interested in sex no more. But you and me, we been seeing each other in here, how many years now?" The social worker taking night classes, whose papers I would correct, first in the light of the flickering screen, then, two years later, over the phone: "I'm an exhibitionist, man. I know it. Till I found this place, I used to get in trouble. But I can come in here, stand in the middle of the aisle, facing everybody, jerk off -- and maybe a couple of guys call out, 'Hey, there! Sit down!' That's all. And most of you guys tell me you even get off on it. That's all I am looking for, man") though they tended to be more working-class than not, were pretty much like you, pretty much like me.
From the second essay, page 185-6:
What homosexuality and prostitution represented for my uncle was the untrammeled pursuit of pleasure; and the untrammeled pursuit of pleasure was the opposite of social responsibility...In the words of Bruce Benderson, writing in the Lambda Book Report 12, "The true Eden where all desires are satisfied is red, not green. It is a blood bath of instincts, a gaping maw of orality, and a basin of gushing bodily fluids." Too many had seen "nice ordinary American boys" let loose in some tiny French or German or Italian town where, with the failure of the social contract, there was no longer any law-- and there has seen all too much of that red "Eden"....
The clear and obvious answer) especially to a Catholic Repulican army officer and judge) was that pleasure must be socially doled out in minuscule amounts, tied by rigorous contracts to responsibility. Good people were those who accepted this contractual system. Anyone who rebelled was a prostitute or perversion was working, whether knowingly or not, to unleash precisely those red Edenic forces of desire that could only topple society, destroy all responsibility, and produce a nation of without families, without soldiers, without workers -- indeed, a chaos that itself was no state, for clearly no such space of social turbulence could maintain any but the most feudal state apparatus.
page 187: In order to dismantle such a discourse we must begin with the realization that desire is never "outside all social constraint." Desire may be outside one set of constraints or another; but social constraints are what engender desire; and one way or another, even at its most apparently catastrophic, they contour desire's expression.
page 196-7: Gay urban society early on learned how to overcome the sexual scarcity problem, in a population field where, if anything, scarcity could easily have been greater. Suppose heterosexual society took a lesson from gay society and addressed the problem not through antisex superstructural modifications but through pro-sex infrastructural ones.
Consider a public sex institution, not like the Show World Center that Ben so decries, set up and organized for men, but a rather large number of hostels in many neighborhoods thought the urban are, privately owned and competing to provide the best services, all of which catered to women, renting not by the day but by the hour, where women could bring their sexual partners for a brief one-, two-, three-, four-hour tryst. Such hostels would be equipped with a good security system, surveillance, alarms, and bouncers (as well as birth control material) available for emergency problems....
Some people recognize that in many cities prostitutes (and gay men) have had access to institutions now closer to, now further from, just this model for hundreds of years. In a sense, the only change I am suggesting is to move such institutions from the barely known and secret, from the discourse of the illicit, into the widely known, well-publicized, and generally advertised rhetoric of bourgeois elegance and convenience, promoting them as a sexual service for all women, single, married, gay, or society matron.
Such a social system might actually put a dent in the system of artificial heterosexual scarcity. With the wide establishment and use of such hostels, I can't guarantee that all wolf whistles or catcalls...will fall away from our streets; but I can guarantee that their meaning and their hostile tenor...will change radically, precisely as it becomes common knowledge among straight males that, in this town, you now have a statistically much greater chance of getting laid with a newly met woman (because even if she doesn't want to bond her life to yours forever but just thinks you have a cute butt, a nice smile, and something about you reminds her of a Will Smith or Al Borland or John Goodman, she has somewhere to take you), and that the best way to exploit this situation is probably not to antagonize random women on the street.
From the population problem to the lewd street comment, there are many reasons to promote public heterosexual sex on the model public gay sex has followed for years and, in one form or another, likely to continue to follow. But if we are going to do such a thing, it is only sensible to put its control in the hands of women and set it up for their use and convenience from the start.
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here's a sizzlin quote: "My tertiary thesis, to which now and again we shall return, is that, while the establishment and utilization of those institutions always involve specific social practices, the effects of my primary and secondary theses are regularly perceived at the level of discourse. Therefore, it is only by a constant renovation of the concept of discourse that society can maintain the most conscientious and informed field for both the establishment of such institutions and practices and, by extension, the necessary critique of those institutions and practices—a critique necessary if new institutions of any efficacy are to develop. At this level, in its largely stabilizing/destabilizing role, superstructure (and superstructure at its most oppositional) can impinge on infrastructure." F R I C K
this also is another reason to finish reading Death and Life in Great American Cities bc basically he quotes Jane every other section? though he has some sweet critiques so it's not all just an echo. I assume that at the end of her book Jacobs also has her concrete suggestions, and I also assume that these suggestions don't include the women-centered public sex houses that Delany suggests (partly, as he admits, bc it just isn't something she could've discussed openly / bookily in the 1950s) and then separately there's also his insistence that community != contact which he kind of just sticks in there as a footnote though so idk.
and finally whats up with the fifth star well !!! u know i cant resist when a book's form does somethin wild to further its fundamental argument !!! what "makes" this book five stars ha! probably it's the way he enacts interpellation! like literal althusser interpellation!!! I honestly didn't even have a firm grasp on this term before i read this!!! whoops sorry!!!! but like!!! zamn! how did ya do that man and can u teach me :/
-0.01 stars because I dont understand which part is red and which part is blue
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I loved this one. A collection of two essays by Delany, both about the transformation of Times Square from the notorious sexual pit of legend to the now current family friendly version. The first essay is Delany's first hand account of the goings on in the porn theaters he frequented and it is a truly wonderous thing to behold. My experience of Time Square is rooted and framed through horror movie, "Grindhouse" history, full of tales of terror were one could be killed a
Read for Stoya's bookclub.I loved this one. A collection of two essays by Delany, both about the transformation of Times Square from the notorious sexual pit of legend to the now current family friendly version. The first essay is Delany's first hand account of the goings on in the porn theaters he frequented and it is a truly wonderous thing to behold. My experience of Time Square is rooted and framed through horror movie, "Grindhouse" history, full of tales of terror were one could be killed at any moment. While Delany doesn't paint a picture of the scene as a super safe idyllic, you had to know how to navigate this world, he does show that for the gay scene it was a open scene where one could relatively safely explore sexually and connect with others and how valuable such a space was to everyone's emotional health, and by extension, the city as a whole.. The second essay gets into the more academic/philosophical aspects of city life, and the danger of transforming society (tearing down and rebuilding real estate) to gain a control as opposed to society transforming the neighborhoods into a friendly, connected society.
On their own they are both memorable and thought provoking. Taken together they are a hell of a one-two punch. highly recommended.
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TSR (the second half of the book) is far more academic in nature and can come off as a little dry if you're not interested in the intersection of art, academia, and queerness. Chip focuses on the trying to understand the difference between contacts, networking, connections and how those play out in our personal and professional development.
If the book were only Times Square Blue, it would have gotten a full five stars from me. I connected more with that half of the book and I can understand why it comes first.
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the only quibble personally was his emphasis on the importance of sexual desire and interaction (which he is well within his right to emphasize given his personal/intellectual interests) — i just wonder what a differently-focused version of this piece would look like.
other than that, brilliant.
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Delany attended the Dalton School and the Bronx High School of Science, during which he was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun, the Louis August Jonas Foundation's international summer scholarship program. Delany and poet Marilyn Hacker met in high school, and were married in 1961. Their marriage lasted nineteen years. They had a daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany (b. 1974), who spent a decade working in theater in New York City.
Delany was a published science fiction author by the age of 20. He published nine well-regarded science fiction novels between 1962 and 1968, as well as several prize-winning short stories (collected in Driftglass [1971] and more recently in Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories [2002]). His eleventh and most popular novel, Dhalgren, was published in 1975. His main literary project through the late 1970s and 1980s was the Return to Nevèrÿon series, the overall title of the four volumes and also the title of the fourth and final book.
Delany has published several autobiographical/semi-autobiographical accounts of his life as a black, gay, and highly dyslexic writer, including his Hugo award winning autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water.
Since 1988, Delany has been a professor at several universities. This includes eleven years as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a year and a half as an English professor at the University at Buffalo. He then moved to the English Department of Temple University in 2001, where he has been teaching since. He has had several visiting guest professorships before and during these same years. He has also published several books of criticism, interviews, and essays. In one of his non-fiction books, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), he draws on personal experience to examine the relationship between the effort to redevelop Times Square and the public sex lives of working-class men, gay and straight, in New York City.
In 2007, Delany was the subject of a documentary film, The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman. The film debuted on April 25 at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival.
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