I have to admit--with some amount of shame--that I have such a library of articles on my computer that I can basically write short little papers of the kind that I have to this semester, based entirely on articles I already have on my computer. This isn’t to say that I’m not reading new articles, just that I collect them, and don’t read them immediately.
Part of my paper today, on linguistic relativism, involved--as my dearest friends will surely not be surprised--a brief reading of Samuel Delany’s science fiction novel Babel-17, which uses the Saphir-Whorf Hypothesis to great effect.
So in doing so I did a search of my computer and found a great interview with Delany that I downloaded, but didn’t read, 3.5 years ago for a paper I was writing on Delany then. I also, as happenstance, didn’t read the interview for another paper I was writing on Delany a year later. Alas. Anyway, I found the following quote, which I think is priceless. I hope you enjoy!
My life partner of nine years, Dennis, who, by his own admission has read only a single book cover to cover (Cavel’s Shogun, which he picked entirely on the criterion of size: When, after he met me, he decided he better read at least one, he figured he’d best make it a big one), walked through the living room just this morning, as I was talking on the phone with a long-time journalist friend, enthusing over some structurally serendipitous discovery I’d made in a recent reading of the incomplete draft of my current novel. Dennis gave a wonderfully generous laugh and declared: “You guys are crazy . . . !” before, with a grin, he left to meet a friend of his and go walking in the Sunday morning street fair out on Broadway.