Re: Reading Phallos (& . . .)

At 2:26 AM +0000 6/20/06, bllsln wrote:
>There's no accounting for taste. Given the fact the *Phallos* is a
>synopsis, I find the characters remarkably well drawn, and the
>situations extremely vivid. For me, it's a story that gets richer and
>richer as it moves on, so that I find the last third the most
>interesting (not to mention moving), and the first third the least.
>But without the first third, the last wouldn't mean anything at all .
>. . so it all works together. I think Phallos does, in the novel, the
>kind of "alienation" that the German Playwrite Bertold Brecht wanted
>to achieve in the theater--and, for this reader, achieves it very
>effectively.

I never saw Phallos as a synopsis, or as a sign of a failure of nerve 
on Delany's part to write the pornographic novel critically analyzed 
in this slim volume's pages (any more than Stanislaw Lem's "One Human 
Minute" represented a failure of nerve to write the three fictive 
novels he reviews there). It was an extension of the notion of the 
phallos to the book itself, a tangible representation of the old saw 
that there is no greater book than the one you have not yet started 
to read. I loved it (much as I loved Lem's One Human Minute" for 
wanting to read this book, for hoping I would stumble across it 
someday.

And, of course, as a fan of Delany's work, it made me think, time and 
again, of "Voyage Orestes!"--exclamation point and all.


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