In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

5 exotexts 1. auctorial interfaces: A Biographical Note. Currently on my shelves are eight books written (two pseudonymously), and one edited (in collaboration with author Charles Naylor), by Thomas M. Disch. This exhausts none of the categories they posit: there exist more story collections and novels, more anthologies, a volume of poetry. oddly, none of the Disch books i now own bears even the vaguest biographical paragraph; not one indicates even a place or year of birth. it intrigues me, then, to curry over the personal information about Disch i carry without check or referent. What ontological assumptions do i entertain about the author of “Angouleme”? Who is Tom Disch for his critic? A personal friend of some dozen years, a science fiction writer with numerous literary commitments outside the field (e.g., he is the author of an extraordinarily elegant libretto for a short opera by Greg Sandow, based on The Fall of the House of Usher; from time to time he has edited a mimeographed literary magazine, Just Friends); he is two years my senior, but though i was born in 1942, i don’t recall if his actual birth pans out at ’40 or ’39; he has family in Minnesota; i once met a brother of his in Canada, the weekend our three astronauts first landed on the moon; my wife, Marilyn Hacker, once went to the theater with a sister of his in New York. i think of Disch as a big and delicate man; a leopard claws up one of his forearms, a dragon writhes up the other, and an eagle unfurls across his chest—from a round of London and Antwerp tattoo emporia, some time in the Sixties (he has modeled, in the Seventies, open shirted for Gentlemen’s Quarterly). Somewhere in his past is an incomplete history degree from New York University (he was the first person to suggest i read Braudel); also, the obligatory stint in advertising. He possesses a raconteur’s talent that coaxes us back to an arcadia where conversation is art, and he carries the label “genius” from a social circle i have always thought discerning and sensitive—if 186 the american shore they are the tiniest bit too lavish in their praise, have they ever given so much of it of just this sort to any other of their members? Places i know he has lived? Mexico, where his first novel, The Genocides , was written. My vision of that period comes from a sixteen-page article editor Terry Carr put together from Disch’s personal letters for his fanzine Lighthouse—twelve years later the manila edges of my single copy flake; the dark blue print pales on the yellowish paper; the cover stock is thinner than the interior pages. . . . For some months he lived in Spain, where hepatitis deviled the composition of his mordantly satiric Echo Round His Bones. The hepatitis no doubt lent much of the atomica of disease that, transformed by fictive creation, became some of the more pointed and poignant passages in the text of the superb Camp Concentration—that text begun in Austria and completed in London; there is a brief (two-week?) period in ireland about which i have a vague memory of a letter to someone not me in which i think he said he had gone there in order to escape London’s distractions. He has lived in London , and Surrey, and New York, and Rome, and istanbul, and lives in London again as i write. About the months in istanbul: there i am a link in a nebulously causal chain. That chain suggests much about s-f writers and their particular interface with their profession, with their texts: in 1965, while in New York, i read for the first time, in its Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction two-part serialization, Roger Zelazny’s lush and luxuriant And Call Me Conrad, a science fiction novel that takes place largely in a future devolved Greece. Somehow, from the portrayal of the isle of Kos and the city of Athens, i assumed Zelazny had lived awhile in that landscape. The novel (joining with an August dawn, years before, on the roof of an apartment building at the dead end of east Fifth Street, where i talked to a barefoot redhead named Tony Cowan, who had, days before, returned from two years in Crete) decided me to spend what became more than half of the winter/spring of ’65/’66 in the Cyclades...

Share