On Samuel R. Delaney's "The Jewel-Hinged Jaw"
Also, I left Twitter.
Hello friends!
Earlier this month, my mom and I went to see the traveling Broadway production of SIX at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia.
Have y’all seen it? It’s a super fun, high-energy show. Thematically, it’s very much about girl power, about women reclaiming their narratives from oppressive patriarchal structures, rah rah rah. Which is great. But while watching it, I couldn’t stop thinking about, of all things, the divorce novel Fleishman Is in Trouble.
Toward the end of the novel, the narrator, Libby, muses:
When Rachel and I were little girls, we had been promised by a liberated society that had almost ratified the Equal Rights Amendment that we could do anything we wanted. We were told that we could be successful, that there was something particular and unique about us and that we could achieve anything – the last vestiges of girls being taught they were special mingled with the first ripples of second-wave feminism. All that time, even as a sixth-grader, I remembered thinking that it seemed weird that teachers and parents were just allowed to say that, and that they’d say it in front of the boys and the boys didn’t seem to mind. Even back then I knew that the boys tolerated it because it was so clear that it wasn’t true. It was like those T-shirts all my daughter’s friends were wearing to school now, the ones that said THE FUTURE IS FEMALE in big block letters. How they march around in broad daylight in shirts like that. But the only reason it’s tolerated is that everyone knows it’s just a lie we tell to girls to make their marginalization bearable. They know that eventually the girls will be punished for their futures, so they let them wear their dumb message shirts now.
Do you think they’d let us stage a show like SIX if it were true??
Anyway, I also deleted Twitter. I couldn’t take it anymore. You have thirty days after deactivating your account to reactivate it before it disappears, so who knows, maybe I’ll go back, but God, I hope not. I just didn’t feel like I was getting anything out of it, you know? Discoverability was terrible, both for me and for the people whose stuff I wanted to see. Twitter wouldn’t share my newsletter links. Going on Twitter had long since stopped being a pleasurable experience anyway. And Lord, did I hate that doge icon.
I’ve been on Twitter since 2013. I think I originally joined because I thought it would serve a professional purpose. I wanted to meet other writers, get eyeballs on my published fiction, etc. And in retrospect, on that front, I don’t think Twitter has ever done anything for me. Anyone I’ve ever met, I met in real life; anything I’ve ever published, I published through the the slush pile. I think I spent a long time feeling afraid to leave Twitter because I thought that leaving Twitter would close doors. But now I think that maybe all those doors were ghosts, never really open in the first place.
So! I am now on Instagram and here. Mostly here. And I am gonna try really hard not to let some other social media platform slither into that vacuum.
News
I know a lot of these news items repeat from month to month, but I’ve got two new ones for you:
My essay “‘Selfish or Annoying’: Etiquette and Gender in Oops! A Manners Guide for Girls” will be published in An American Girl Anthology (University Press of Mississippi)! I’m really excited about this. I haven’t written an academic essay since grad school, or sold one ever, and I’m eager to stretch those muscles again. I have literally no idea when this will be out. I’m assuming 2024, but who knows.
In July, I’m teaching a free one-hour Blue Stoop workshop on flash fiction forms. Register here.
Plus, the evergreen items:
My horror-leaning Shakespearean sonnet, “Ophelia After Her Distress,” will be published in Shakespeare Unleashed in July 2023.
My essay “Nostalgia, but Make It Stressful: Fantasy Game as Pressure Valve” will be published in the British Fantasy Society Journal’s Special Issue on Fantasy and Gaming in autumn 2023.
My essay “‘You Have to Cook It In Your Own House’: One Family’s Pork and Sauerkraut Ritual” will be published in Heritage Local in 2023.
And if you missed the poems and essay that were published in March in Blood and Spades: Poets of the Dark Side, you can still read them here.
Subscribe to get notified when these come out:
Samuel R. Delaney’s The Jewel-Hinged Jaw
First of all, this book is currently $2.99 on ebook. No one paid me to say that.
Samuel R. Delaney is, like so many of the people I talk about here, a science fiction writer. Unlike, e.g., Algis Budrys, he’s not dead, but he began publishing SF in the sixties and so is a contemporary, I think, of Budrys, as well as of Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, Joanna Russ, Ursula K. Le Guin and the like.
I read The Jewel-Hinged Jaw because the instructors at Viable Paradise wouldn’t stop talking about it. “Everyone should read Chip Delaney’s The Jewel-Hinged Jaw,” they all said, multiple times, and I’ll tell you in a moment whether I agree. To be clear, I don’t call Samuel R. Delaney Chip! I actually did meet him once, at PhilCon, but I hadn’t read The Jewel-Hinged Jaw yet and so we didn’t have anything to talk about.
Here’s the thing about The Jewel-Hinged Jaw. I do strongly recommend it, but to my surprise – maybe I just missed the memo – this is not a craft book. This is a book of literary criticism, specifically about contemporary science fiction and the language models that define it. Two contextualizing essays, the “Prefaces” and “Midcentury,” are very helpful for situating the text, but I, for one, have not read any of the books Delaney discusses (the only Le Guin I’ve ever managed to plow through is “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”! Sue me!), and so even though I was able to absorb Delaney’s meaning, his statements and ideas, I was never able to pin them to the appropriate works. Unless you’ve read a lot of golden-age science fiction, I don’t think you will, either.
Again: This is not a craft book. It is heady, it is discursive, it is piercingly analytical. You can learn a lot about craft by reading it, and I suggest you do so, particularly if you find yourself bored by conventional craft resources and by your own practice. But that does not appear to be its intended purpose.
There are, however, two craft-centric essays. They are two of the first four essays in the book, after the “Prefaces.”
“About 5,570 Words” is about the mechanics of how words and sentences convey information, and is absolutely the single essay I would most recommend if you were only going to pick one.
“Thickening the Plot” is about the relationship between the act of envisioning a scene and the act of putting it down on the page, and the choices, both conscious and unconscious, involved therein.
Between these are two essays about science fiction criticism specifically. Then we have a cluster of essays examining specific science-fictional works: one comparing Thomas Disch and Roger Zelazny, one on Joanna Russ, another on Disch, and one on Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. These are broken up by an essay on sexism, which is very excellent but seems to me to be misplaced; and then we conclude with a semi-autobiographical essay, and then two appendices: the aforementioned “Midcentury,” which is about the rise of theory, and “Letter to a Critic,” on the nuts and bolts of the sci-fi literary scene in 1972.
Interestingly, even though the two craft essays are the ones that I would most recommend – only because they’re the ones that most blatantly treat the subjects I deal with in this newsletter – the most edifying passage for me, as a writer, came from the essay “To Read The Dispossessed”:
In so conventionalized a discourse as fiction (and science fiction has almost all the conventions of mundane fiction as well as a panoply of its own), we have the choice of saying precisely what we want to say (which requires a massively clear vision and intense analytical energy), or saying what everyone else has said (which is what happens either when vision fades, analysis errs, or energy fails). There is no middle ground. The concert of the three – vision, analysis, and energy – at work within the field of a given language is what we recognize as language skill/talent/craft. But the cliché, at almost any level, always signals one of the three’s failure; the cliché indicates this because language is as structurally stable as it is: indeed, the cliché—at almost any level save the ironic—is the stability of language asserting itself without referent.
I like this because it resonates with how the practice of writing works for me, and also because it works as a troubleshooting mechanism. If I’m feeling like a piece of my own writing isn’t doing what I want, is it because my vision of what that thing is is not clear enough? Is it because I am not effectively arguing for the thing I want to be arguing for – either because I haven’t clearly identified that thing, again an instance of vision, or because the argument itself is sloppy or lazy? Or is it because, for some reason, my skills have simply proven not to be up to the task?
These are useful questions for me to ask myself, and they might be useful questions for you to ask yourself, too.