Longer Views

Footnotes

1

Lydia Fakundiny, The Art of the Essay (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991), p. xv.

2

Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (New York: Penguin Books, 1993). (Hereafter referred to as CE.)

3

Scott Russell Sanders, “The Singular First Person,” from Secrets of the Universe (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), p. 190.

4

Francis Bacon, “Of Studies,” from The Essays (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 209.

5

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), pp. 3–4.

6

Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1972), p. 15. (Hereafter referred to as M.)

7

Edward Hoagland, “That Gorgeous Great Novelist,” from Red Wolves and Black Bears (New York: Random House, 1976), p. 176.

8

Ursula K. Le Guin, “Introduction,” from The Norton Book of Science Fiction, ed. Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), p. 27.

9

Samuel R. Delany, “‘The Scorpion Garden’ Revisited,” from The Straits of Messina (Seattle: Serconia Press, 1989), p. 29.

10

Bensmaia, Reda, The Barthes Effect (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 92.

11

See my own “Subverted Equations: G. Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form and Samuel R. Delany’s Analytics of Attention,” in Ash of Stars, ed. Jim Sallis (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi) for a more detailed discussion of the problem of “primitive calculi” in Delany’s work.

12

Barthes, S/Z (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1974), pp. 5–6.

13

Delany, “The Rhetoric of Sex, the Discourse of Desire,” from Heterotopia, ed. Tobin Siebers (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 232. (Hereafter referred to as RS.)

14

Delany, Starboard Wine (Pleasantville, N.Y.: Dragon Press, 1984), p. 188. (Hereafter referred to as SW.)

15

Delany, The American Shore (Elizabethtown, N.Y.: Dragon Press, 1978), p. ii. (Hereafter referred to as AS.)

16

Delany, “Neither the First Word nor the Last on Structuralism, Post-structuralism, Semiotics, and Deconstruction for SF Readers: An Introduction” [Original title: “Neither the Beginning nor the End…”], The New York Review of Science Fiction, Number Six (February 1989), p. 1. (Hereafter referred to as NFW.)

17

Stephen Tyler, The Unspeakable (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), pp. 16–17.

18

Delany, Triton (New York: Bantam Books, 1976), p. 357. (Hereafter referred to as T.)

19

Delany, “Shadows,” p. 252 of this volume.

20

Delany, “Wagner/Artaud,” p. 20 of this volume. (Hereafter referred to as W/A.)

21

Jacques Lacan, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, from The Purloined Poe, ed. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), p. 53. (Hereafter referred to as PP.)

22

Delany, “Reading at Work, and Other Activities Frowned on by Authority: A Reading of Donna Haraway’s ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs,’” p. 104 of this volume. (Hereafter referred to as RW.)

23

Delany, “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,” from Flight from Nevèrÿon (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1994), p. 348.

24

“Aversion/Perversion/Diversion,” p. 141 of this volume. (Hereafter referred to as APD.)

25

Delany, The Motion of Light in Water (New York: Masquerade Books, 1993), p. 270.

26

Hal Foster, “Postmodernism: A Preface,” from The Anti-Aesthetic (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), p. xv.

27

Delany, “Shadow and Ash,” p. 149 of this volume. (Hereafter referred to as SA.)

28

Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 12.

29

Delany, “Atlantis Rose…,” p. 202 of this volume. (Hereafter referred to as AR.)

30

Ron Silliman, The New Sentence (New York: Roof Books, 1989), p. 30.

31

See O. B. Hardison, Jr.’s “Binding Proteus,” from Essays on the Essay (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1989), pp. 17–20, and the Translator’s Introduction to Montaigne’s Complete Essays (cited above), pp. xx — xliii for more detailed discussions of Montaigne’s “Apology.”

32

Susan Sontag, “Introduction,” from A Barthes Reader (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982), p. ix. (Hereafter referred to as BR.)

33

Kathryn Cramer points out that if three or four of the men (and, to be fair, the young woman herself) each had been willing to have a leg amputated at the hip, they might easily have compensated for the hundred-ten, hundred-twenty pounds involved. But this, she goes on to point out, would amount to symbolic castration and thus be far too distressing within the story's symbolic framework.

34

Herbert A. Leibowitz noted the recall of Ulysses’s “Floating Flower” in “Voyages II” in Hart Crane: An Introduction to the Poetry (Columbia University Press: New York, 1968, p. 100); but I learned of it only after this book was in production.

35

Crane also supplies his range of titles: Tennessee Williams’s play Summer and Smoke takes its title from Crane’s poem “Emblems of Conduct” (indeed from the only three lines in the poem Crane apparently did not take from Greenberg); the title for Agnes de Mille’s ballet Appalachian Spring comes from, appropriately enough, Crane’s “The Dance”; Jim Morrison of The Doors took the title of his song “Riders on the Storm" from Crane’s “Praise for an Urn”; and Harold Bloom’s study of romantic poetry, The Visionary Company, takes its title from Crane’s last poem, “The Broken Tower.”

36

Johnson’s sonnet, “The Age of Dream” (the second of a pair usually published together, about an all-but-abandoned church; the first is “The Church of Dream”), concludes with the sestet:

Gone now, the carvern work! Ruined, the golden shrine!

No more the glorious organs pour their voice divine;

No more rich frankincense drifts through the Holy Place:

Now from the broken tower, what solemn bell still tolls,

Mourning what piteous death? Answer, O saddened souls!

Who mourn the death of beauty and the death of grace.

37

John Oliver Simon, with whom I actually went to summer camp at Woodland.

38

Such translation into an artificial language may at first seem suspect. But is it really any more dubious than the translation Russell suggests in his theory of singular descriptions which so facilitates the untangling of Plato’s beard?

39

Metonymy is, of course, the rhetorical figure by which one thing is called with the name of another thing associated with it. The historian who writes, “At last, the crown was safe at Hampton,” is not concerned with the metallic tiara but the monarch who, from time to time, wore it. The dispatcher who reports to the truckboss, “Thirty drivers rolled in this weekend,” is basically communicating about the arrival of trucks those drivers drove and cargoes those trucks hauled. Metonymic is a slightly strained, adjectival construction to label such associational processes. Metonym is a wholly-coined, nominative one, shored by a wholly spurious (etymologically speaking) resemblance to “synonymy/synonym” and “antinomy/antinym.” Still, it avoids confusion. In a text practically opaque with precision, it distinguishes “metonymy”-the-thing-associated (“crown,” “driver”) from “metonymy”-the-process-of-association (crown to monarch; driver to cargo). The orthodox way of referring to both is with the single term.

40

The épistçmé is the structure of knowledge read from the epistemological textus when it is sliced through (usually with the help of several texts) at a given cultural moment.

41

The important point here, of course, is that nonverbal material must already be considered as language, if not as part of language.

42

This is another invocation of the idea, out of favor for so long, of “morphophonemes.” The theoretical question of course is do they differ (or how do they differ) from “sememes.”

43

Welsh (and Homeric Greek) divide the spectrum (both as to colors and intensity) quite differently from English.