RE: Ash of Stars

At 12:01 PM -0400 10/17/11, [email protected] wrote:
>Delany, like Wright, is a highly civilzed man, though not a
>product of the dire circumstances of the latter, so that, whatever he
>has experienced in the Unlicensed Zone, he wouldn't do well with real
>criminals. He's probably been around thugs, as I have, and hopefully
>he'd be smart enough to see them as the enemy.

Somehow, having read Heavenly Breakfast, and Time Square Red/Blue, I 
doubt "enemy" or "thugs" are the words he would choose for the people 
you characterize thus. I'm not saying he would embrace them as 
comrades in arms--that seems equally unlikely. The thugs and enemy of 
Times Square Red/Blue, such as they are, would be the financial and 
real estate speculators who robbed the Times Square area of its 
street life.

You have always seemed to proceed from an essentially binary 
conception of the world (and especially of types of people) that 
seems frankly at odds with the the sort of complexity that seems to 
energize Delany's work.  The circumstances of Hasler's death in "The 
Man Man" when finally revealed, make choosing clear "enemies" or 
"thugs" problematic at best.

And it's clear that the "thugs" of S"tars in My Pocket..." are the 
Thant family--not the inscrutible xlv or even the assassin on Marq's 
initial flight home. Indeed, Marq (and the book) see him as someone 
to whom one should give a wide berth, but not the "enemy."

At 12:01 PM -0400 10/17/11, [email protected] wrote:
>Real criminality is not remotely
>oppositional.

I think you also simplify a complex question here--one that Delany 
explores in "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" 
which suggests that most criminality (and by extension most art) is 
not oppositional in any effective sense. It neither tries nor 
succeeds in shaking up the social structures it weaves in and out of. 
Indeed: It depends on the stability of those structures. Disruptive 
criminality (and art) are intentionally (and sometimes effectively) 
oppositional. The criminals who want to game systems are different 
from those who want to destroy them. (This is how the Prohbition-era 
rum-runners, who depended on Prohibition to keep prices and profits 
high, are different from those who participated in the Underground 
Railway for slaves, though both were criminal.)

That is what Maud Hinkle is hinting at in "Time Considered..." And 
while Delany's later work seems to move away from that simple 
romantic view of the criminal, the changes are not so much to deny 
the observations there as to simply deromanticize the criminal and 
explore the ways in which criminality is in fact determined by the 
structures of non-criminal society and necessary to and interwoven 
with it. The smuggler in the Neveryon series is a criminal but 
necessary--the legitimate markets would not function without him. His 
role is determined, and the occasional prosecutions of smugglers are 
meant not to eliminate the practice but to keep it in check at the 
necessary level. Meanwhile Gorgik's disruptive criminality, once he 
starts freeing slaves, makes him the object of active pursuit, until 
the later Neveryon novels, when his role becomes integrated into and 
necessary to those structures.