Shoat Rumblin: His Sensations and Ideas

by Samuel R. Delany

Shoat Rumblin (a.k.a., “Rugs,” when in Jail, and “Mr. Big Man-#2” when he is hired as a hustler for a gay business weekend on a yacht off the Biloxi Coast) has been looking for love in all the wrong places, in his travels by thumb around the country, which includes a 1970’s pornographic movie house in New York the Columbia. There Shoat meets and moves in with a young man, Adrian Rome, who spends two+ years trying to capture and chronicle Shoat’s life up until their meeting, both at home with his truck-driving father, Buck, and on the road throughout the country, in a book written about and with Shoat.

540 pages, Paperback

Published June 15, 2020

About the author

Samuel Ray Delany, also known as "Chip," is an award-winning American science fiction author. He was born to a prominent black family on April 1, 1942, and raised in Harlem. His mother, Margaret Carey Boyd Delany, was a library clerk in the New York Public Library system. His father, Samuel Ray Delany, Senior, ran a successful Harlem undertaking establishment, Levy & Delany Funeral Home, on 7th Avenue, between 1938 and his death in 1960. The family lived in the top two floors of the three-story private house between five- and six-story Harlem apartment buildings. Delany's aunts were Sadie and Bessie Delany; Delany used some of their adventures as the basis for the adventures of his characters Elsie and Corry in the opening novella Atlantis: Model 1924 in his book of largely autobiographical stories Atlantis: Three Tales.

Delany attended the Dalton School and the Bronx High School of Science, during which he was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun, the Louis August Jonas Foundation's international summer scholarship program. Delany and poet Marilyn Hacker met in high school, and were married in 1961. Their marriage lasted nineteen years. They had a daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany (b. 1974), who spent a decade working in theater in New York City.

Delany was a published science fiction author by the age of 20. He published nine well-regarded science fiction novels between 1962 and 1968, as well as several prize-winning short stories (collected in Driftglass [1971] and more recently in Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories [2002]). His eleventh and most popular novel, Dhalgren, was published in 1975. His main literary project through the late 1970s and 1980s was the Return to Nevèrÿon series, the overall title of the four volumes and also the title of the fourth and final book.

Delany has published several autobiographical/semi-autobiographical accounts of his life as a black, gay, and highly dyslexic writer, including his Hugo award winning autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water.

Since 1988, Delany has been a professor at several universities. This includes eleven years as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a year and a half as an English professor at the University at Buffalo. He then moved to the English Department of Temple University in 2001, where he has been teaching since. He has had several visiting guest professorships before and during these same years. He has also published several books of criticism, interviews, and essays. In one of his non-fiction books, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), he draws on personal experience to examine the relationship between the effort to redevelop Times Square and the public sex lives of working-class men, gay and straight, in New York City.

In 2007, Delany was the subject of a documentary film, The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman. The film debuted on April 25 at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival.

Reviews

[Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a toughy.

I've been a huge Delany fan since - well, almost fifty years now. I have followed his career through science fiction, swords'n'sorcery, literary criticism, queer theory, social criticism, philosophy, theory, autobiography, comics, and, yes, porn. I will read just about anything he chooses to write.

Most of his porn novels have bothered me at some level; they generally involve people doing things I find horrendous. I _nearly_ gave up on Delany's porn after _Hogg_, the story of a professional rapist(!), told from the point of view of a boy he picks up and, yes, molests. That was pretty bad. His next porn book, _The Mad Man_ ,was, to me, simply anerotic, but interesting on other levels.

His later book, _Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders_ was so damn good, and such a beautiful relationship story, that I enjoyed it _despite_ some practices that, for me, were just disgustipating (as Popeye would say). I described it, at the time, as "somebody else's porn".

So now there's this. I don't know what to make of it. But it certainly isn't _my_ porn! In fact - if it weren't by Delany, I wouldn't have finished it. (Probably wouldn't have even picked it up.)

On one level, the writing is as amazingly beautiful as ever. Delany is, as the saying goes, incapable of writing a bad sentence. And he builds his fiction _from_ sentences.

On another, there is the loving story of a boy and his father, and the homeless man they take in; and the father's ex-wife, and her lover, who does some _terrible_ things to them and winds up in jail.

But the things the boy, and the father, and the homeless man do, together and with others...! Among other things, coprophagia, incest, urolagia, and something I con't even know if there's a name for (eating each other's snot).

I want to be clear: I am _not_ judging the characters. I am not judging Delany for writing these characters. If that's what he wants to write about, more power to him.

But I don't think I can follow him any farther down this particular path. No more Delanean porn for me; this is a step too far. I will still read anything _else_ he chooses to write and publish. (I've pre-ordered the book of essays due out later this year, and am waiting quite excitedly for it; Delany as an essayist is simply superb.)

[Edward Champion · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel reminded me of Erskine Caldwell's TOBACCO ROAD in the way that it conveyed extreme assumptions (in this case, Chip's scat-heavy pornutopic fantasy, perhaps best epitomized in the piss-soaked, shit-eating environs that are quotidian to Shoat) to raise specific points about what we assume about margnizalized people. In his essay "An Extravagance of Laughter," Ralph Ellison described the uncontrollable laughter he had when attending a theatrical adaptation of TOBACCO ROAD. And I suspect that the wild pornutopia in this book (and much of Chip's later work) serves as a similarly discomfiting catharsis. In the case of Shoat and the circle of seedy and marginalized people around him (even his family), it's quite the double-edged sword -- given that he is dictating his life story to a writer who is likely rearranging and embellishing. That Chip would use such a bold narrative device to raise interesting questions about queer identity -- and that he would be forced to self-publish this volume given the risk-averse corporate nature of the publishing industry -- says everything about how the unsettling empathy-driven stories we need to hear -- even when filtered through our own impressions -- won't easily arrive at our eyes and ears.

[Josie Boyce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Content warning

Should be the headline. The raunchiest sex and compelling characters elevate this scat nightmare into some kind of literature. It definitely tested my boundaries.

[Joe · Rating 2 out of 5]

Who knew the final novel we’d get from Samuel Delany (at least that’s what he says) would be...this, an early, failed version of Through The Valley of the Nest of Spiders. It’s both a disappointment and a relief and the end of an era for me. Disappointment: it’s not good! The novel takes the form of an interview of Shoat Rumblin (SR) by his lover Adrian Rome, tracing his childhood to teen years, anchored primarily by his sexual encounters, some of which SR reports as welcome, others as assaults. It’s a challenging read given that much of what is described is abuse (including incest) but not described as abuse by SR. The sexual abuse sucks to read and SR’s unexpected relationship to much of it forces the reader to pause. And there’s not much looking away. Perhaps fittingly, there’s no pockets of lyricism to the writing that marked Through the Valley. But, also, the prose is, generally, inert. And while Through the Valley adds the complications of its more challenging events happening within the context of a utopia and within the long span of its protagonist’s life, through which they can be revisited and reevaluated and fit within a larger pattern, allowing it to ask more questions about sex, society, and self, SR reads as determined to keep its scope tight to a small slice of life in a poor town in a single deteriorating house. Like I said, challenging. And a disappointing end to Delany’s career. Except. A note at the end lets us know that this was written before Through The Valley of the Nest of Spiders, between 1996 and 2002, partially in Buffalo. In a way, Delany redeems the work by transforming elements of it within TvotNoS, which I’ll consider Delany’s last novel, just to make myself happy. This begs the question: why bother self-publishing this? So end 6+ years of reading Delany

[Jaime · Rating 1 out of 5]

So, I actually started reading this crap about two days ago. This book is absolutely nonsense in all aspects. I can deal with the raunchy sex episodes, but it goes nowhere in the thick of the story he’s trying to convey. To me, it goes all over the place and is tiresome and frustrating writing.
AVOID AT ALL COST!!!!!