Journal 7– 3/31

We finished discussing Starts in My Pockets and it was interesting to note how the novel ends with Marq and Rat being separated because they couldn’t be together if they wanted to avoid a cultural fuge. The novel itself was very interesting to read because it involves travel between various worlds and explores diverse cultures instilling in readers travel of mind and heart as well as body in a sense. I think Delany did a great job exploring cross-cultural and cross-racial themes depicting a novel were the ordinary seems abnormal for our society nowadays. He promotes relationships among different sexes, races, cultures, and uses symbolisms such as the family and the syng to defy what on Earth seems to continue to face social obstacles. Delany pictures the family as the group in our society that strongly objects the relationship among interspecies (in our case gays), and the syng as the group concerned not with gender or species but rather on people being able to achieve happiness with the person they decide to share their lives with. Likewise, as professor Drexler said, I think he did a very good job in making readers to accept the culture perceived in the planets he depicts. I think that by the end of the story readers no longer see this as weird, but rather can connect and understand the feelings Rat and Marq feel for each other.