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!
tycho garen 05 October 2007My 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.