I am a fan of Samuel “Chip” Delaney’s non-fiction works. My bet is that I’d really enjoy his fiction, but I haven’t read much of it. The first book of his that I thoroughly read and enjoyed was his autobiography The Motion of Light in Water which covers his life up until 1988.
This book, Of Solids and Surds, covers his writing life in its entirety and includes a fair bit of biographical material which happened after The Motion of Light in Water.
§18. The work I like to do is most easily done with paper and pencil first, yet eventually we learn how to do a fair amount of it with typewriter and paper, and then keyboard and screen; but at each step, we have to learn to do more with the keyboard that involves leaving signs on the screen of where, in a very small, complicated circuit, we have left the signals that tell us where the text is now lodged.
§25. “…I resolved to be a lot more stable; I was living with my daughter; my life would cease to be interesting and, perhaps, my work would become more interesting. This was the situation I lived in for the next forty years…”
§30. “… There is a period of history between your father’s twentieth year and your own twentieth year that you will never fully understand from a historical perspective.”
§50. “When I write, I am as much the person who makes the mistake as I am the one who corrects it when I rewrite… Writing above a certain level requires, however, that you gin some understanding of both, not only within your “self” but in the world.”
Published: Feb 10, 2024
Last Modified: Jul 11, 2024
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