“I saw you on my TV. You were looking right at me.” — “G’Day Melbourne,” The Leftovers, season 2, episode 4. Halfway through the second season of The Leftovers, Kevin drinks…
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After the Leftovers, Contemporaries Essays
After The Leftovers
There are two different kinds of leftovers, two different problems they represent. The first problem is long division, which teaches us to let the leftovers be. The leftovers of division…
After the Leftovers, Contemporaries Essays
“Nothing is Next”: After The Leftovers, After Extinction
In his introduction to the edited volume After Extinction, Richard Grusin questions the chronologically linear assumptions of extinctive thought: “Is extinction something that only happens belatedly, after there are already…
Contemporaries Essays, Samuel R. Delany's Improbable Communities
Improbable Communities: Post-precarity and the Politics of Sex in Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders
Samuel R. Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand appeared in 1984, the same year as William Gibson’s Neuromancer. While more people have likely read Gibson’s novel, Delany gives…
Contemporaries Essays, Samuel R. Delany's Improbable Communities
Dyslexical Sexcess, Photo-Textual Rhythms
“I’m promiscuously autobiographical.” – Samuel R. Delany1 “Improvisation, in whatever possible excess of representation that inheres in whatever probable deviance of form, always also operates as a kind of foreshadowing,…
Contemporaries Essays, Samuel R. Delany's Improbable Communities
“Filthy!”: an Introduction to Samuel Delany’s Late Paraliterary Style
In his 2005 essay “The Gamble,” Samuel R. Delany recounts a dinner conversation he had with a gay porn star named B.J., who told Delany that he contracted HIV from…
Contemporaries Essays, Samuel R. Delany's Improbable Communities
Phallos/Phallus: Queer Sex Magick
Author’s note #1: On the cover of Samuel R. Delany’s metafictional novella Phallos is a drawing of a winged Minotaur: head and tail of a bull, beclawed hands and foot,…
Contemporaries Essays, Samuel R. Delany's Improbable Communities
Delany’s Complex Singularity or, the Astonishing Whole
Twenty-five years ago, Lauren Berlant’s and Michael Warner’s essay “Sex in Public” traced how the privatization of sex devastated public sex cultures in New York City at the turn of…
Contemporaries Essays, Samuel R. Delany's Improbable Communities
Blueprints for a Red Sexual Revolution: Samuel Delany’s Sexual Commons
For Earl Jackson Jr. who introduced me to Samuel R. Delany’s brilliance. Willfully Confusing Sex and Revolution Early in my professional career, when I had just moved back from California…
Contemporaries Essays, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre at 50
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (TCM) has been widely recognized as a groundbreaking and politicized contribution to the horror canon and to the slasher subgenre in particular. This month, on its…