Samuel R. Delany reads To the Fordham

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The Segue Reading Series, curated by Lonely Christopher and Rijard Bergeron, hosts readers on Saturday afternoons at the Zinc Bar in NYC. On December 18, they presented Samuel R. Delany, who read a short story called “To the Fordham”. Older writers have good audiences, though when you look around, many of the listeners are often as old as the writer. Samuel Delany’s crowd is younger than he is, spanning and spawning into the future long after him, a crowd that is more comfortably gender fluid too, thanks to him, than the generation he grew up in.

I have never been bored listening to Samuel Delany read. When my mind wanders, I am thinking about something he said. He makes me think. I have a friend who thinks Samuel R. Delany is the greatest writer who has ever lived. Not only is my friend well-read, but I’ve been hearing this from him over and over again since the early 1970’s. As I began to read Dhalgren, I thought, “In some fragmented future where the past was blown apart, if all that remains of Delany’s work are the opening paragraphs of Dhalgren, the future will see what my friend was talking about.

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“To the Fordham” was published in the Boston Review. It can be found on the link below:

http://bostonreview.net/arts-society/samuel-r-delany-fordham
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I read Times Square Red, Time Square Blue in March; it was the best book I read last year. I have Dhalgren on my Kindle and a hard copy of Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, a gift from my friend, the Samuel Delany fan. I’m not a science fiction reader, but come the new year, I plan to read them. “What are your favorite Delany books?” I asked my friend. The three below are the ones he mentioned, included with Wikipedia links to find out more about them.
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