Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand Book

Two Stars? Are you kidding me? This is a book that has been re-issued by a University Press, that deals with complex issues like language, gender, sexuality....

I know, I know. But this book didn't do anything for me, if anything it just made me angry.

Well maybe that is because you are a white heterosexual male and you deserve to be made uncomfortable about the part you have played in the oppression of women and colonial peoples.

Yeah, I guess so. I guess I just don't see what the point of writing a book and using the term woman to cover everyone male or female. I know that it's 'enlightened' and takes into account the thoughtless way language is used in our day to day lives, but really? Doesn't using the term woman instead of man just reach the hegemonic end? Doesn't it just replace one misuse of language for another, and in the end take away the richness and precision of a word to make it a meaningless signifier? Why not just use the term person?

Because that is still sexist, the word son is in it.

Well the word man is in woman, this whole argument is interesting only in that people should be more aware of what they are saying.

You will admit that the Queer Theory just makes you uncomfortable right?

Yeah, I guess. Apparently in the future society will be set up in such a way that there will be designated places to go have anonymous sex while you are on your way to do something else. And apparently this is something more mature and good than say having self-control over ones appetites. The whimsical, lets have lots and lots of anonymous sex mixed with the 'post-modern' treatment being given to topics in this book sort of disgusts me, and this probably isn't Delany's fault. It's just too reminiscent of Focualt, and around the time Delany would have been writing about this 'liberated' society the little bald French fucker would be traveling the world knowing full-well that he had AIDS, how it was transmitted and having unprotected sex with as many people as he could in places where people went for anonymous fucking. One really doesn't have anything to do with the other, but both immature stances towards sex are both coming from the same basic post-structuralist / deconstruction of dominant paradigms and the writings / action are subversions of this dominant paradigm.

No one would find a grown adult who could not stop him or herself from consuming massive amounts of candy just because they couldn't control the appetite of their desires as being anything other than immature in the same way one would see Tom Hanks' character in Big as immature.

You are an idiot. What about the story though?

What story?

Did you even read this book?

Yes, I just didn't find much of interest in it. The sixty page prologue was kind of interesting. The remaining 310 pages was a lot of not much going on but lots of made up words and new cultures / customs being thrown around. I'm not that fascinated by world-building I guess, and weird words with too many constants that I can't even figure out how to pronounce in my head make me go all glassy eyed, and look sort of like the video artist that Michelle just posted a picture of on my profile. Actually this book was kind of like watching most video art, kind of painful, kind of boring, and kind of embarrassing at the half-baked intellectual pretensions of it all.