Status Update

Gerhard is 72% done

I turned to Isaac Asimov (whom I’d met for the first time at the banquet the year before), sitting on the other side and now pulling me toward him. With a large smile, wholly saturated with evident self-irony, he leaned toward me to say: “You know, Chip, we only voted you those awards because you’re Negro … !” (This was 1968; the term “black” was not yet common parlance.)

— Jun 01, 2026 03:11PM

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Gerhard’s Previous Updates

Gerhard is 50% done

Is the ink itself, the sea itself, the Great Mind of God that carries the message? If not, then the message moves through the minds of men with all its terrors, with all its horrors, and I don’t know if we can bear that.

— Jun 01, 2026 02:35PM

Gerhard is 44% done

… If only I could free myself from hunger as easily as from desire! … I’ve seen Plato’s cups and tables, but not his cupness and his tableness! To yell about freedom from desire with your cock in your fist, is that enough to start a revolution? Perhaps not.

— Jun 01, 2026 11:43AM

Gerhard is 31% done

Some people think philosophers can’t know the passions. Ha! Might does not make right. Still, sometimes it even wins when on the side of compassion. And it gave me time to think: ‘One must speak the truth.’ Especially when there is nothing else one has to give.

— Jun 01, 2026 11:24AM

Gerhard is 22% done

Right now I hope only this journal will know. And probably even it will have to be studied and reread generously to reveal its secrets and separate chaff and grain, gold and grit—assuming there’s gold or grain to it at all.

— Jun 01, 2026 10:55AM

Gerhard is 10% done

What happens if there are no streets as such on which to greet each other … ? Is that a good enough reason to think that China and India, Africa and the Americas, whether at pole or equator, are simply uncivilized because they are different? Or that anyone from them, unto their greatest and most powerful rulers, is not worthy to clean up our shit?

— Jun 01, 2026 10:33AM

Gerhard is 52% done

Washing your 'smallclothes' and the 'water closet' are among the highest emblems of civilisation ... Could this be covert SF? Anything's possible with Delany.

— Feb 21, 2018 12:22PM

Gerhard is 20% done

Delany writing about Spinoza? How cool is that!

— Feb 20, 2018 11:24AM