Zet de SF-auteur Samuel R. Delany ons een "significantly updated Spinoza" voor?

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Dit boek heb ik niet gelezen, maar ik maak graag een blog over wat ik
erover tegenkwam, want via de hoofdpersoon, Eric Jeffers, blijkt Spinoza
uitgebreid aan de orde te komen in


Samuel R. Delany, Through the
Valley of the Nest of Spiders
. Magnus Books, 2012


Samuel R. Delany woont in New York City, doceert aan de Temple
University en schreef meerdere boeken waarvoor hij de William Whitehead
Memorial Award ontving voor zijn levenslange bijdrage aan de lesbian and gay
literature.

De blurb van Through the
Valley of the Nest of Spiders
maakt haarscherp duidelijk dat het boek —explicit,
poetic, philosophical, and, yes, shocking—propels readers into a gay sexual
culture unknown to most urban gay men and women, a network of rural gay
relations—with the twist that this one is supported by the homophile Kyle
Foundation, started in the early 1980s by a black multi-millionaire, Robert
Kyle III, to improve the lives of black gay men. In 2007, days before his
seventeenth birthday, Eric Jeffers’ stepfather brings him to live with his
mother, who works as a waitress in the foundering tourist town of Diamond
Harbor on the Georgia coast. In the local truck stop restroom, on his first
day, Eric meets nineteen-year-old Morgan Haskell, as well as half a dozen other
gay men who live and work in the area. The boys become a couple, and for the
next twenty years labor as garbage men along the coast, sharing their lives and
their lovers, learning to negotiate a committed open relationship. For a decade
they manage a rural movie theater that shows pornographic films and encourages
gay activity among the audience. Finally, they become handymen for a burgeoning
lesbian art colony on nearby Gillead Island, as America moves twenty years,
forty years, sixty years into a future fascinating, glorious,
and — sometimes — terrifying. [
Amazon]