I, too, shall pass...

I could not understand Delany's book. :-( On the plus side, I like "The Brother from Another Planet."

Nine out of ten theorists agree: Volition, while constitutive of humanity, leads immutably to anxiety (in the "doomed to freedom" sense), from which it follows that the subversion of volition is simultaneously utopian and dystopian in its socio-political impulse; it liberates us from the burden of assuming autonomous subject positions in the world, but in so doing, it undermines the very core of our being.

I found the conception of the Apocalypse in Samuel Delaney's Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand the most interesting part of the book. Delaney’s idea of how worlds end is so different from other books and from popular thought. For one thing, it is not really an Apocalypse, an end of days – life, and culture, goes on even after a world has been destroyed by that enigmatic thing, the Cultural Fugue. Secondly, the world does not end by asteroid collision, or by a trigger-happy country with too many nuclear warheads but by information, and by culture.

One of the strangest aspects I found in Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand was the difference between modern hunting and the ‘dragon hunting’ between pgs 239 and 257. At first, hunting in the deserts of Velm appears very similar to our human hunting; leaving for a wilderness area, using large ‘weapons’, receiving advice over territory or placement from an experienced hunter, and eventually finding and firing at the prey, taking something from the prey in the process. The first major difference here is the wanted result.

This week has been busy, what with several of my classes wrapping up things before break....so I'm going to pass on this weeks response.