Hats off to Hunicke

Hats off to Hunicke for her blog Gewgaw, where Robin Hunicke writes about life and computer gaming, on which she's writing a thesis over there in the Windy City. At Gewgaw, you can find her rogues gallery of women in geek advertising. (But Robin, isn’t that what we see you doing?)

From Gewgaw I see she's reading Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren. Wow, haven't seen that title for a decade or two. (At time of writing, out of stock in Amazon.co.uk, but available from Amazon in the US.) Used to be an avid Delany fan up to about 1978 and the Neveryona books and his romance with semiotics. (I gather Umberto Eco took over my job as Admirer-in-Chief.)

But Dhalgren is a life-changing book. I remember a friend of mine in Australia introducing me as “the man who introduced him to Dhalgren.”

Reading Delany's early work introduced me to that of his ex-wife, Marilyn Hacker, no longer obscure. In the early 70s she used to run a stall in the Chelsea Book Fair round the corner from where I was working. I still buy all her books, though it's the early work I keep by heart.

It is a privilege to learn a language
a journey into the immediate

That, and Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons, a real-time journal in poems, mostly sonnets, of a six-month affair, from attraction to desertion. Hacker is a modern master of the sonnet form, blending its strict form with colloquial speech. In a class she gave in London a few years ago she recounted the origins of the sonnet in twelfth-century Sicily as a vehicle for personal and intimate reflection. It is only by some perverse twist of the educational curriculum that the sonnet has come to be widely associated with formal speech.