The Point Podcast
The Point Podcast
Selected Essays | Carina del Valle Schorske on Samuel Delany
On this episode of “Selected Essays,” Carina del Valle Schorske joins us to discuss Samuel Delany's 1996 essay “Times Square Blue” and her 2019 essay “The Ladder Up: A Restless History of Washington Heights,” which was published in the Virginia Quarterly Review.
(For more on Delany, check out this recent profile in the New Yorker by Julian Lucas.)
Hey everyone, welcome to selected essays, a podcast series from the Point Magazine about essays you should read, but probably haven't. Each episode we'll be talking with writers about an essay that's influenced one of their own. My name is Jess Swoboda and I'm here with my co host, Zach fine.
Zach Fine:Hey everyone. Today we have Carina del Valle Schorske on the podcast. We talk with Carina about Samuel Delany's 1996 essay "Times Square Blue" and her essay, "The
Ladder Up:a restless history of Washington Heights," which was published in 2019 in the Virginia Quarterly Review. Carina is a writer and translator who's written for The Believer, The Cut, The Point and elsewhere. She won a National Magazine Award last year for a cover story in The New York Times Magazine about grief and dancing during the pandemic. Her debut collection the other island is forthcoming from Riverhead Books.
Jessica Swoboda:We hope you'll enjoy this episode and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you have questions, comments or anything else, send an email to Selected Essays at thepointmag.com. We'd love to hear from you.
Zach Fine:Hey, Carina, thanks for joining us today.
Carina del Valle Schorske:My pleasure. I love this podcast so far.
Zach Fine:Can you tell us why you selected this essay and a little bit about Delany as a writer?
Carina del Valle Schorske:Absolutely. Well, I was really trying to think about the assignment of the deep cut, like not necessarily having to be like the deepest of deep cuts, but like, what are essays that not enough people are reading. And I thought of Delany immediately, partly because it's one of those books that falls in the cracks between, like, essay and book. Um, and in that sense, it reminds me sort of of like, what in Latin America, they're called cronicas, like, you know, reported stories in the world that often take the form of like an extended essay, the idea that like, you know, you can write something that's a 90 or 100 pages. And that it will be like a literary genre that at the same time, like is an essay or like, often an act of reporting. So I love that about it. But it's also one of the essays that like most surprised me with how much it moved me when I first read it, because it is about cruising the porn theaters in Times Square, a lifetime, about fifty years of cruising the porn theaters, something that I have never done and indeed fall outside of the circle of people who would do it, almost exclusively men. But despite that, like distance from the content, I felt really close to the way he—the kind of like cosmopolitan humanity of like, his vision, in terms of like his love of the world and like love of people like comes through in a really like vivid and soulful way. And the story and also like it's matched with a kind of like, clear political occasion and critique, which is like the occasion of the, like, urban renewal of Times Square under Giuliani. So like the kind of pairing of that, like sort of humanism, like with that, like both unexpected content and like the political argument was really exciting to me. And I yeah, I just think like Delany is a little bit of a cult figure and a lot of people who know who are exposed to his work love him. But maybe not enough people are so yeah, Delany, Samuel R, Delany chip, as he's often known
Jessica Swoboda:as a nickname just throwing that in there.
Carina del Valle Schorske:Apparently, he also just fully made it up. Like he went to summer camp one year and he was like, everyone at home calls me Chip. Just like it made it a thing. So we love the self-invention. But um, he grew up in Harlem in like the, I guess, the '50s. He's like, he's 81 now. So I guess he's about...he was born in the 40s I guess because he's about 10 years older than my mother. And he grew up in Harlem and kind of bourgeois black family that ran a funeral home. And he has written about it at some length. He like writes, as in this essay, a lot of memoir in addition to what he's primarily known for, which is he's primarily known as a science fiction writer and a fantasy writer. And like, he's written a bunch of books, I'm not even sure how many but like, the majority are like science fiction or fantasy novels. And that's how I was introduced to his work. I was literally assigned a fantasy novel of his by a professor when I was an undergraduate at Yale named Hazel Carby, a really iconic feminist scholar, and the class was called The Fiction of Imminent and Imaginary Futures. And it was mostly a black sci-fi class, but not exclusively, like we also read David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas, we read Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, and other texts like that. And we read one of the Lanius fantasy novels that was kind of like it was extremely vivid and it was a really like philosophically sophisticated novel about the origin of language. But like in the set in this other world, and right away like I just felt like it was a charismatic and idiosyncratic brain. But I wasn't assigned Time Square read Time Square blue, and I can't remember who recommended it to me. But um, that was kind of like, my moment of really falling in love with Delany was discovering his nonfiction. And I also really love his long memoir called The Motion of Light in Water, which is about his like, open marriage with Marilyn Hacker with the great poet Marilyn Hacker in the West Village of the like 50s and 60s, or I guess, the 60s. So he definitely has like a whole other wing of his writing that memoir and criticism and sometimes the like memoir and criticism, like are so intellectually serious, they get taken up as scholarship, and kind of like queer studies and Black Studies. Domains. Yeah.
Jessica Swoboda:Carina, I wonder if we can turn to the opening passage, if I can ask you to read it aloud for us.
Carina del Valle Schorske:Yes. We already talked about prior to this call whether it would make sense for me to read this paragraph or whether it's too it's transgressive to take on the voices here, but I think it's really important that the essay begins this way. And I'm excited to talk about why. Okay, Times Square Blue, October 1996."The great epochs of our life are when we win the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us nature. Against the subway kiosk around the corner on 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue. Ben still sets up his shoeshine stand, his bottles of polish and cans of stain, his brushes and clogs. Ben's come on as much what it was when I first noticed him in the late 70s. For every third or fourth woman in the passing bustle with or without a boyfriend, it's a they're beautiful or Hi sweetheart. There's never an obscenity or mention of a bodily part other than perhaps that's nice or having you or something. But the hailing is clear, and the inflection is drenched enough in both sensuality and sexuality to startle practically anyone, especially the white women with even a bit of naivete left. Are the men with them who are really Ben's mark, though anyone in leather shoes will do? Who does? Who could this black guy think he's talking to like that? For when surprised woman or boyfriend turns the head lifts or the eyes look up then. So faintly and within the beat shifts his tone from pander to preacher. You're a truly fine woman and it's a pleasure to see you pass on the street. I'm so glad there's women like you out today. Or Sir, you have a beautiful woman there. You're a lucky man. Respect her and treat her well. Now people smile men and women maybe one in five the women in groups are the single ones doesn't smile. But it's harmless even charming isn't it? Isn't in his shorts and his sunglasses for Indian Summer. He's just this old black shoe shine man who makes enough shining shoes so that pretty much annually he and his wife can fly over to spend the Christmas holidays with her family in Germany. If the women smile, see, then the men gotta get their shoes shined to show that they're good sports and that they go along with it. And to put me back in my place just a little. It's a game we play. That's all. I got friends from all over the world that I made out here. People come back here every year, just to take their picture with me."
Zach Fine:That's great. Thank you. So why does Delany begin the essay there?
Carina del Valle Schorske:Well, I think he really wants to take you from sort of an outsider's perspective of Times Square to an insider's perspective of Times Square. And he, you know, fixes his gaze on a figure on the street that we're all pretty familiar with, even if he's not a shoeshine man, like we're used to watching men, or being the object of men calling out to women, and all of the relations of like gender and class and race that that snaps into focus in the city. And like, you know, passing moment between two people. But by the end of the paragraph, we are directly quoting the man doing the cat calling. And you realize that we're going to be seeing things like from his perspective, and probably from possibly from, like the perspective of many people, because we know that the essay isn't going to be just about him. And so I think that's one reason I also think, you know, he's showing all the different kinds of hustles that characterize urban life. And he's showing that like, even from like within this kind of like, all the different needs and desires that come together in a moment like that, like, including economic needs, and whatever, like there still is this kind of electric current of like, the possibility of human connection, that is evidenced by the fact that like, Samuel Delany, the narrator, is having the kind of relationship with this guy, he passes on the corner, such that he's interviewing him for this essay, you know, and then the next paragraph like goes on to like, further interpret, you know, Ben's routine. And he kind of ends the contemplation of that first kind of few paragraphs by saying, what bothers me and Ben's routine is where the boundary sets. Ben didn't put it there. But does his witty and always slightly disorienting performance help erase it? Or does that performance and describe it more deeply, deeply? Honestly, I can't tell perhaps it does some of both. Let's go around the corner. He he then like uses the kind of situation with Ben to pose these much larger questions that are going to come up throughout the essay in terms of like, what are the boundaries that society puts between us and others? Can those boundaries be crossed? Does playing into those performances, you know, inscribe the boundaries more deeply or not. And then I love that he says, perhaps it does some of both, let's go around the corner. Because this is also an essay of fleeting observations and of the kind of fleetingness that's inherent to like urban contact. And so he was like, moves on from Ben, who returns briefly at the end, but he moves on from Ben, because he has to, there are a lot of other people he's going to talk about, and a lot of other things we're going to see together like on this journey.
Jessica Swoboda:So though, he talks about a lot of different things, and a lot of different people, it's still is a very insular essay, we moved between a few porn houses in a very limited geographical space corner, a 42nd street and Eighth Avenue, and between a couple of bars. So why is the essay a good forum for this type of zoomed in analysis? And what do we both lose and gain with this type of focus?
Carina del Valle Schorske:Yeah, those are great questions. Definitely, I mean, I think the idea with the essay, like part of what makes an essay an essay is that like, you're going to read it in one sitting, you know, and I don't think that everybody reads essays in one sitting and certainly not this one. But there is a way that the essay, like keeps you wants to keep you inside of it for the duration, if that makes sense. And like that, and also that it's, you know, a slightly smaller scale. So again, like the, the scale of the block, like that feeling of like being sort of held by something that like, won't let you go until you leave it sort of, um, that's one of the I guess that's like the connection, I would think of what the form, but I haven't really thought about like what we lose, because like, the essay's abundance, kind of like doesn't I don't feel like any kind of like lack when I when I read an essay like this, but I guess what we gain is, first of all, like the kind of multi vocality that you get in this essay, like, so many people are quoted, so many, like, connections are explored. So many profiles are sketched. And I don't think that you get to have like that kind of like a, you know, panoply, diversity, whatever. Like, if you're also asking the reader to keep track of changes and location changes, and like, you know, thematic focus or whatever. So, yeah, and like, that's sort of like the theaters themselves, I guess, in the sense that the, like, small space ends up containing or surfacing like, a huge variety of kinds of people. Um, I guess, like, what we lose, I mean, maybe this is like the, the moment to confess that like, this is like, essay one and a two essay book. That's like how it was published. That's not how the...each essay necessarily originated. But like, that's how they were shaped. And in the second essay, which I'm not sure if you read but what that's not what we're discussing today, but the second essay that's that it's paired with is sort of like a much more like academic, sociological and like, politically polemical, kind of like argument about the kinds of contact we have in urban spaces, and like the relationship of that to policy and whatever. And also, you typically trying to imagine what it would mean to be able to have cruising for women. It's itself a very interesting essay. But I guess that is one answer that Delany might give to, like, what are the limits of this focus? Like, he ended up kind of like segregating that material? From the storytelling of the essay? Like I said, I would prefer to discuss you know, but I don't really think I don't like I find Times Square Red, the other essay, fascinating. And I like it, but I don't return to it with the same frequency, nor do I feel I need it. Like, I feel that in many ways, like Times Square Blue already makes the arguments that are like made more explicit in the second essay. So I guess maybe I think that like, it's it's a more there are more gains than losses. Even then, Delany thinks, but
Zach Fine:How do you think about genre with this essay, in particular? You just mentioned the other one was more in the realm of kind of sociology. And while I was reading this one, I was thinking about oral history, but also with the use of photography, something about its kind of documentary function. And I'm wondering how you think about genre with this one?
Carina del Valle Schorske:Totally. And like, part of what I find so thrilling about this essay is that I think it's like, you know, very genre queer or whatever like that it resists being categorized by genre. I said like at the top that like I do, like think of it as a kind of cronica that it has more in common to me with like these long essays that are published as like Lucy's in Latin America, by creative writers that have a lot more kind of free flow or literary writers that have like more free flow with the journalism than like, was common in the U.S. Maybe it's getting more common now. But I think like in the it's kind of similar amalgam of you know, reporting and like personal essay and like, yeah, kind of like documentary experiment. Like[....] even though it's like not the the images have captions and stuff like that. But the use of image, definitely, like, is more kind of, like poetic and suggestive than, like, strictly illustrative I find, um, but I also like in terms of genre, I love that like, reporting conventions that he violates, I mean, it's also it's very much like, you know, it's a kind of like Gonzo journalism, except that it's like his life, you know, like, his life is Gonzo, so
Zach Fine:And what are some of those conventions that he violates?
Carina del Valle Schorske:Yeah, specifically, one is a favorite, which is early in the story. It's one of the first photographs. It's of two hustlers like. And he briefly kind of speaks to both describes them and in his description of the interaction...it says that he pays pays one of them $15 in order to sign release and like, get the photo. And like, I mean, where to even begin with like that not being allowed and like, you know, the context of like being a New York Times reporter or something, but it's like, he's so real for that. He's so real for that. I like I wonder what $15 Like, was a 1995. Like, I know, it sounded like a lot of money to me as a kid. So maybe that's like the answer. Um, but yeah, and then, of course, like, you know, the level of immersion. But it's more to me those little moments of like, the way he the way he like treats the people he's writing about who are also often his lovers like, as kind of like, the relation is so loose and is like, navigated like so intuitively and idiosyncratically and is not about at all like imposing an ethic from elsewhere. It's like the essence, the essay has its own, like, code, its own ethic. And it's kind of like thrilling to see somebody like, really unapologetic, unapologetically, like, invent their standard or their form as they go.
Jessica Swoboda:So I wonder if now's a good time to turn to the second passage, so we can get into the meat of the essay. We've been talking a lot about convention and form. Mm hmm. You want to take us there?
Carina del Valle Schorske:Yeah. Let me take you there, one second. Okay. Yes. Now, I am very much taking us into the meat of the essay, so to speak, once again, reading aloud from an essay that I never planned to read aloud from. Okay. "The encounters you remember are, of course, the men who were a little different, a little strange, the otter denizens of the Venus, this particular COC, that particular smile. Yes, they include the walking wounded, like ran it. But most of the guys I had at the capri day in and day out, year after year, the professional medical companion whose wife had lupus. So she doesn't want any sex at all right now. And guys, girls, it never bothered me. She knows I come here. I think she prefers that to me going with other women. Not that I go into the details about it with her. That friendly, uncut Puerto Rican Tony, a Saturday morning, regular down at the variety for five years, the tree service worker there with his uncle, because he knew about this place. And we both like guys, the tall, rather elegant black man at the capri who never seem to do much in the line of sex, but who always lingered standing at the back of the aisle, sometimes chatting with the clutch of black queens who commandeer the seats at the back left of the orchestra. And who always had some bit of gossip for me when I came in, who always whispered, stay healthy. Now, when I left, now, I'm cutting an extended description of his lover, Eddie, where the porn theater is romantic. Not at all. But because of the people who use them. They were human and functional, fulfilling needs that most of our society does not yet know how to acknowledge. The easy argument already in place to catch up these anecdotes is that social institutions such as the porn movies take up then a certain social excess, are even perhaps socially beneficial to some small part of it, a margin outside the margin. But that is the same argument that allows them to be dismissed and physically smashed and flattened. They are relevant only to that margin. No one else cares. Well, in a democracy, that is not an acceptable argument. People are not excess. It is the same argument that dismisses the needs of blacks, Jews, Hispanics, Asians, women, gays, the homeless, the poor, the worker, and all other margins that taken together, people like you, people like me, are the country's overwhelming majority. Those who socioeconomically are simply less powerful."
Zach Fine:It feels like there is kind of the kernel of the whole essay is in this last paragraph. And it would be great if you could unravel it for us just a little bit and try to give a sense of what Delany is arguing.
Carina del Valle Schorske:Yeah, totally. I mean, it's kind of goes back to your question about like, focusing like so insistently on one space like that really gives him the room to open up that space and kind of show us it also goes back to what I said at the beginning. Like I would not have thought when I read this essay at me be 24 or something that this was a subject matter that was relevant to me. And like, I'm like a sympathetic reader, you know, there are like a lot of kind of points of connection. I do feel with Delany. But I think he's banking on the fact that most readers and it's true that most readers will not have been part of this community that he's just describing. But the way he opens up it up to us makes it completely recognizable to us. And in the sense of kind of just the particularity of the relationships, kind of the texture of the interactions. So that like, he really does show you how, like, you know, the minority of the minority, like, ignore it at your own peril. Like I saw the Lorraine Hansberry poll on The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window recently on Broadway. And there's a line in it where one of the characters says"everyone's his own hipster." And I like I'm thinking of that in relation to this essay in the sense that like, we all have, our porn theaters our cruising the porn theaters in the sense of like, we all have some like element of our lives, that's absolutely essential that takes place in the margin of a margin. And that, like, he's kind of reminding you that, like those margins added up to altogether are not the margins, you know, and that, and also just like, issuing a really important political warning, which is just like that, you know, what is it that he's that sorry, one second. Oh, sorry, that like the this idea that, like he's making this really important political argument that sort of like, the temptation to like view, like the idea that you could like, by kind of considering the needs of any given margin of the margins is like, a way of kind of like, saying, like, well, maybe there's like, a certain social good to be like entertaining this social excess, like, maybe it absorbs something that like, needs to be absorbed. But he's saying like, no, like, you need to remember that, like, whatever that thing is, is actually at the center, like in a democracy, that is not an acceptable argument, like no, no human being is excess. So he kind of steers you in to that kind of maybe perhaps, like more familiar argument, like via, like, a route that you maybe resisted at the beginning. And also a route to that, like, makes that argument the like, the very marginality of it makes that argument, like, feel all the more powerful by the time you get to it. And also, I mean, that passage, like in the way he just juxtaposes kind of just the succession and details of human details with the like theorizing that he gets to at the end, it's like, like, just the love for like, remembering all these differences, like, you know, like, the, the love that of obser. That like, observation, like is love, like time spent with people is love. And like he's completely unsentimental about it. And unromantic, as he says in that passage, but like, that doesn't make it like any less love than any other kind of encounter. Yeah.
Jessica Swoboda:I was really surprised to learn in the preface that, in the initial version of this essay, he had no descriptions of what went on in the courthouse. And I was thinking, What in the world with this sad without the descriptions of these porn? What goes on in these porn theaters? And what would it be without it? And is this good sex writing?
Carina del Valle Schorske:Totally, yes. Great questions. I know we're like we're I part of the reason I like wanted to write about, or not write about, this talk about this essay with you is because I've been thinking a lot about what is good sex writing recently. And like, you know, trying to go there myself for the first time. So I think Sorry, what was your first question again? Besides is this good sex writing? Oh, what would it be without it right? It wouldn't to me, no, I don't I don't care I-I don't want to see it without the sex writing. What's amazing is in the preface, it I think it is worth saying that like this first essay grew out of something, a small excerpt he published without magazine first and then the second essay was delivered as like an academic keynote, which like, other like iconic essays have been delivered that way, like the uses of anger by Audre Lorde was like an academic conference paper like delivered as a lecture. So there's that but with the first one I mean, I I love the detail that detail that it wasn't there at first, especially because it was a woman editor who asked him for
Jessica Swoboda:I think two women editors told him this on two different occasions, I think? Yeah.
Carina del Valle Schorske:I like I really think there was like, there was a like, kind of shadow Life to Time Square Red Times Square Blue, which is like the shadow question of the place of women. And the way he engages it, I find really interesting and like, kind of satisfying. One is like that, you know, he basically credits these women editors for being the ones who like were expressing their real curiosity about this and it like it goes along with, I don't know, I mean, I feel like why did the women why was it women editors that wanted that I feel like, at least speaking for myself, like I want to see, I feel like it's in my interest to hear every kind of sex described. Like somehow, like, even if it's not the kind of sex that I have, like, as this is definitionally. Like, I feel like the without narratives like this, the like, vision of sex that we're left in left with is like, so like heterosexual and like misogynistic, and also just kind of like, unelaborated like, abbreviated and like illiterate, as, like so many, like in terms of like that, that a lot of the sex, ideas about sex we're exposed to are abbreviated and illiterate, like in terms of like, vis-a-vis, like, what a woman's experience of sex might be. And I think that's actually true for everybody like that. We're all alienated by like, the kind of dominant visions of sex that were narratives of sex that we're given, but like maybe, possibly like as women or and certainly as queer people, like, any other description is going to be like a form of liberation from like the hold that those like, dominant narratives have on us. So maybe that's what the women were hungry for. I think also just like the sheer curiosity curiosity of like spaces that like where we're not my friend, when at the end, it's also a little bit of a violation of the of the unwritten rules of the porn theater too like, why would you just bring your like, female friend to watch but like, but the rule of the porn theaters is basically like, first do no harm and like otherwise, like, do whatever you achieve consent to do, you know, like, you can sit a few you can tell somebody to sit, just sit a few seats away from you while you masturbate, and they can look or you can like, give a stranger head, or you could be like, Chip Delany is like curious, like, Latina friend, like sitting a few rows back and being like, like, this is what I observe. And I think he's interested in bringing in, like, the women's perspective. And the second essay, like takes up the really like, I think, like, exciting and difficult question of like, can you imagine a scenario where like, women could have a similar experience, not that every person wants to have the kind of experience that he describes at the foreign theaters, but like, yeah. Actually, my younger sister through my dad has an essay called "Cruising for Dikes" that like partly takes up the question of this essay, but I think, yeah, it would be this would be nothing without without the sex scenes, I mean, not nothing. He has great ideas, but like, that's such so much the gift of like, what he gives us with this
Zach Fine:We asked you to choose an essay of yours to talk about alongside the ladies. And you chose an essay called "The
Ladder Up:A Restless History of Washington Heights, which was published in Virginia Quarterly review in 2019. Can you tell us why you chose that essay and what it's about?
Carina del Valle Schorske:Yes, I can. But first, I just briefly want to go back to answering. Jess's question about is this good sex writing? I just feel like it's important.
Zach Fine:Yeah, no it's crucial. It's crucial. Really is
Carina del Valle Schorske:Okay answer: is this good sex writing? Like, is this good sex writing? For me it is a resounding yes. This is good sex writing. But not because I find it arousing. I find it arousing in almost no moment. I feel like it's good sex writing because of its like specificity and capaciousness, like I feel like it has he overcomes the kind of like reserve and that we often like attribute to some kind of like aesthetic principle like, Oh, you shouldn't describe things too explicitly because like, then like the ineffable nature of sex, like it becomes vulgar or whatever. Um, but no, he violates that. And I think like, what makes that violation good is that like, it frees him to treat these sexual encounters like with the same kind of like curiosity, depth of research, like descriptive detail and stuff that you would bring to any other like, realm of like human experience, or like, you know, journalistic inquiry. And like, just the lack of space, we give ourselves to think through sex, he gives the sex like he just he gives it the space that it deserves to be considered seriously, and described in details. So I think like, that's definitely what makes it good. And also, like, it has some really fucking vivid images and characters. And just like,
Jessica Swoboda:You're not kidding, on that front, extremely vivid.
Carina del Valle Schorske:Yeah, you guys just got just a little tiny taste with it. That's a very vivid, there's like, see, you know, the semen arcing, like, on the backs of the, you know, seats in front of you some some some guy even made it to the screen, and the stain's still there a week later, the concrete floor, the outfit, the like many, many different kinds of dicks. Like I really have not like myself been exposed to like that variety. So like, I like knowing like, what's out there, you know? So, um, yeah, I think I think it's a total W.
Zach Fine:We asked you to choose an essay of yours talk about alongside Delany's, and you chose The Ladder Up: A Restless History of Washington Heights, which was published in the Virginia Quarterly review in 2019. Can you tell us why you chose that essay and what it's about?
Carina del Valle Schorske:Yes, um, so on the surface, it may seem to have little to do with Time Square Red, Times Square Blue, other than the fact that it is a social history of the apartment building where my grandmother lived for 65 years, and where my mother grew up in Washington Heights on 156, between Broadway and Amsterdam. And, you know, I, it obviously shares the kind of like geographic compression of Delany's essay, and it also takes place in New York City. And it also, they're actually also some weird, like, thematic, sort of like, not thematic, like, yeah, I guess, yeah, content connections that I hadn't thought about before I reread it in light of this essay today. But, for example, his mother, his mother is bed bound for eight years, like during the like time of Time Square Red, Times Square Blue, and there's this really moving moment when a guy who, you know, they've been like, sucking each other off for a couple years at the theaters, says he wants to come and visit his mother in the nursing home with with Jeff and he does so and it's a beautiful day that they have together. But there are other kinds of little connections like that. And another connection is Giuliani. And that, like the period of time, in which he's writing the essay, even though he's reflecting on several decades before, is the mid 90s. And some of his like, descriptions of like, New York City of the crack epidemic, and also of like, the kind of changes Giuliani brought to the city are kind of the same, one of the same historical periods and dynamics that I cover in this essay. Um, also, you know, when I was a kid, so like the mid 90s, what was it? What was Washington Heights, like, during that period when it was really the center of like, uh cocaine. The, the cocaine trade in New York City. So there was that and then like, I guess, finally, um, there's this, like, there's this passage in Times Square Blue, where he's saying that it's like, really important. This always sticks with me the line about it's really important to learn to find your manner of having sex sexy. And I like one of the things this essay taught me is like, kind of like, it's also important to like, find wherever you are, whatever kind of life you were born into and have, to find that worthy of writerly attention like, and that like no subject is like too niche or too small like, wherever you are is like good enough to like merit, the kind of like depth and complexity of like a serious literary engagement. And I think like, you know, oh, you're gonna write a whole long essay about like the porn theater in Times-- cruising these porn theaters of Times Square or like, you're gonna like write a whole essay about like, your grandmother's like nondescript building. Like, why? And I don't know, like what the answer is, but Times Square Red, Times Square Blue makes me feel like, I don't have to have one.
Jessica Swoboda:Why don't you have to have one? I mean, you chose your grandmother's apartment for a reason?
Carina del Valle Schorske:No, it's true. But like, the a lot of the reasons are personal. It's because like, it's what I know, and what I have. And that's what I'm looking at. You know, I do think that like, the essay, like, part of what the essay teaches, the process of writing an essay teaches you is like, what that means, or why it matters and what it has to do with everything else. But I guess like his essay, and I think also mine are sort of about that kind of like question like, what, what does where I am and what I do in the most local and like kind of random sense, like have to do with all these larger forces I see like unfolding in the world, like, Can I turn like what I see from where I sit as like a kind of lab into a laboratory for understanding everything else? So I guess Yeah, and that's what I tried to do in the essay, it sort of looks at it looks at the history of Washington Heights as a neighborhood, in New York City, with a special focus on like, the historical period from like, my mother's birth in 1951 to, you know, the present, which is also kind of like, what, what Delany does, he goes kind of like, you know, 50 or 100 years back in terms of like a summary history. And then he like focuses in on kind of, like a period of witnessing of like, where he himself or in the case of my essay, me and my mother, like had a direct witnessing. So yeah, it really is about kind of like how the, whoever happens to be in the building, what the connections of those people are to larger events in history that took place close by so some everything from the assassination of Malcolm X, and the Audubon Ballroom to you know, kind of like the major the great migration of Puerto Ricans to New York City to, you know, uh different kind of like artistic moments that happened uptown. You know, Lena Horne and Paul Robeson living at the Triple Nickle so I think my essay is definitely more historical than his and less, I don't know less, sort of, like interview-based and stuff like that. I did do interviews for the story, but the relationship to the city that kind of like using the hyper personalism them as a broader to make broader arguments. Felt like a connection.
Zach Fine:When we were talking earlier, you were saying that Delany wasn't a huge influence for you in terms of style. But I'm curious about tone and how you compare the tone of his essay to yours because there are moments in his where there's something maybe vaguely kind of elegaic, but he is clear that he doesn't want to be nostalgic. And I'm curious with you, if you think of yours in similar terms or how it's different.
Carina del Valle Schorske:Do you think that my essay is nostalgic? I'm curious.
Zach Fine:No, no, no, I don't think so. I think the attention to kind of broader histories feels like it takes it away from the life of your family. So it feels like it's kind of always moving between different tones, but I'm, I'm I would be curious to know from your angle, kind of what
Carina del Valle Schorske:Definitely, I mean, they are both for sure. I guess this is like probably the most obvious connection which like I didn't state which is that they are both about spaces that are in the process of being lost forever. Um, because of like gentrification or urban renewal. So I do think that they're the like, elegaic, like the kind of the wish to claim as real and like, publicly mourn an experience that like, is being taken from you against your will. And like, definitely, I mean, I knew when I set out to write the essay that like my grandmother was dying like, I didn't know when, none of us knew when, but that was certain and that it would be really difficult to try to save our family's connection to that apartment. So we were would also be moving on from that apartment and that neighborhood. So I do think you can feel in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue the the kind of like wish to like produce a kind of like abundant loving record. Even though like the space itself, like I probably you know contained plenty of dissatisfaction and frustration probably like more in the case of the building on the porn theater. He seems pretty happy there but like that, you know, despite them being such imperfect places like the, like drive to testimony as a kind of like bulwark against loss, I definitely relate to that tone. I also think that there's a kind of like, like, dyonisian reveling in the like, super abundance of New York City. Like it's just abundance of strangeness like it's abundance of things to observe and like that kind of like way that it will always exceed your grasp that like so and so you'll never hear from again or so and so will have died in a terrible way or the most beautiful man you ever saw like, doesn't want you anymore will disappear. Just kind of that out of richness. I relate to that too. I think he like he has an almost sort of like empirical type of like humanism or kind of like clinical a little bit vibe that that's what I don't relate to as much in the tone like I find it charming in him but like, he's not that's what I meant by he's not really who I turned to for like that sentence level, like, the kind of lyricism that I'm like drawn to in my own writing. But I think it's like probably like a tonic for me. And also honestly, reading it out loud, like attuned me more to like his music than I like, feel when I just like read him not out loud. He, he's also like, He's a lovely writer, there's there's no denying it.
Jessica Swoboda:We've been talking a lot about singular focuses or narrow focuses. You, your grandmother's apartment, Delany and Horn houses are the few bars. And can you speak to what can be revealed about a culture when we pay attention to these particulars? What is helpful as a writer for homing in on these very particular settings when your objective is to reveal some ideological problem or to dismantle discourses?
Carina del Valle Schorske:Totally. Um, yeah, I think that we're really like, governed a lot of times, like, as thinkers and definitely as writers by like, trying to figure out what's important, like, so called important and that, like, you know, it's an attention economy, like, make sure you know, what you're like, trying to say, and, like, make sure you identify the right thing as important and stuff like that. But obviously, like our judgments about what's important are like, very conditioned by all these, like unconscious biases of many kinds. And, if you like restrict your vision in that way, like you're forced to look at things that you didn't think were important that first, like, you're just by the very restriction, you're going to see a lot more you're going to need to like look for more details in the like, within the frame. And I think that that like ends up calling your eye to things that you would like overlook if you were thinking oh, I can write about anything, you know, I can I can keep turning out to comparisons to you know, more famous things or whatever it may be like, and, um, yeah, so I think you're like your eyes starts automatically traveling to like, the more minor the more the things that don't fit in with your argument the you know, characters that don't seem Central and it was also I don't know, it was kind of like Yeah, I mean, the essay writing the Washington Heights as they like also for me was like, almost kind of a prosthetic for like, dealing emotionally with like the impending loss like I was like, okay, like how do I stay present like emotionally and mentally present, like through a process that like a large part of me wants to turn away from because it's very painful. Like, you know, watching my grandmother, like, become bed-bound and like, nonverbal like over the course of a decade. And like contending with all the kinds of like conflicting inheritances represented by that apartment, I'm giving myself the assignment met gave myself like both kind of like a little bit of emotional distance and also like, forced me to engage the details, you know, and I also learned a lot about the neighborhood that I didn't know before, like through reading and listening and having the conversations that the essay like provoked.
Jessica Swoboda:Well, thank you, Carina. It's been really great to talk to you about both your essay and Delany's Times Square Blue.
Carina del Valle Schorske:Thank you so much, Jess and Zach. It's been a pleasure. Did I turn you guys into Delany fans? Or how did that go?
Jessica Swoboda:No, I might the Times Square Red. Honestly. I'm curious. Oh,
Zach Fine:Yeah, I want to read some of the Sci Fi as well. I haven't read any of his fiction.
Carina del Valle Schorske:Well, you know, Return from the Baryon, Trouble on Triton. The Motion of Light and Water. They're all great.
Zach Fine:We'll have to bring you back to do a sci fi.
Carina del Valle Schorske:I'm not your girl, unfortunately.
Jessica Swoboda:But yeah, thank you again. It's great to talk and to finally like connect virtually so totally. Thanks, everyone for joining us for this episode of selected essays. We'd like to thank Joe Coleman for editing the podcast and Meg Duffy of Hand Habits we're contributing the original music. We hope you'll tune into our next episode, where we'll be talking with Ryan Ruby about Susan Sontag's essay,"Approaching Artaud." As always, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you have questions, comments or anything else, send an email to selected essays at the point mag.com. We'd love to hear from you. Until next time, listeners