Tut, tut, and a little history

Josh Geller · 29 Jul 2003, 14:06 · from urth-v0307.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: Josh Geller <brunians at brunians.org>
Subject: Re: (urth) Tut, tut, and a little history
Date: 29 Jul 2003 07:06:05 -0700
Message-ID: <urth-v0307-3812 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0307/3812.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

On Mon, 2003-07-28 at 22:26, Alice K. Turner wrote:

> It seems to me that there is enirely too much ad hominen squabbling going=
 on
> here--if this list degenerates into Usenet, I, for one, will depart. Take=
 it
> to e-mail if you want to insult one another, especially wrt race or
> religion.

Yes. Well. I find it interesting that the only person here who *really*=20
has understood what I meant by my original, regrettable and regretted
remark has been Dan'l Danehy-Oakes himself, the target of my misdirected
barb, whose wife hales from this very district and in fact shares my
attitude towards people who disrespect mi barrio, esse? =20

> Or sexual preference. Which reminds me...

> Let me give you a little bit of sf history. Back in the 70s, an experimen=
tal
> time in all sorts of ways, there was a small group of ambitious young sf
> people living in New York. They had been influenced by the New Wave, of
> course, and wanted to bust out of genre. Two of them, Samuel Delaney and =
Tom
> Disch, were out-of-the-closet homosexuals, as was Baird Searles, a promin=
ent
> reviewer and bookseller. Crowley, a little younger than the others, was a
> good friend of Disch's. Spinrad and even Ben Bova{!!) were also around, b=
ut
> let's leave them out of it, except to note that Spinrad was also pushing =
the
> envelope wrt to explicit sexual writing. But I get ahead of myself.

Yes! Thank you!

I remember the time also. It was an exciting time. Thank you for writing
all of this historical stuff.

> Now about Delaney specifically. First, he is a very nice (by which I mean
> affable, amusing and generous), very intelligent man and a beloved teache=
r.

Yes, that is what I have been forgetting to mention. Chip Delany is one
of the sweetest people you could ever want to meet. I've met him, I
think, three times, and I can't imagine anyone meeting him and not
liking him. One of the only other people I have met who acts as nice=20
as he does as consistently is Gene Wolfe. If the two of them have ever
met, it would surprise me if they did not get along well with each
other, at least on a personal level. I'd like to thank the person who
criticized my lame perception that GW might think SRD was a better
writer than he: as soon as I read the criticism I realized how
bogus that idea is. Considering the sociocultural gap between the
two men, that person's remarks about Wolfe not getting Delany's=20
writings strike me as far more likely.

J.

___

--=20

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net