Harlan Ellison - C or D?

My first writer-idol and so obviously hugely important to me; I think he can be very good, but would be better if he were a little less melodramatic, less impressed with himself. This may have more to do with how one leaves one's early idols behind than with his work, though. Search anything that makes use of Yiddish/faux-Yiddish, esp. "I'm Looking for Kadak" and "Prince Myshkin, and Hold the Relish."

Hm. Now I see I haven't enough Ellison in long enough to comment beyond this.

Destroy? The aggro-enthusiastic-melodramtic attitude.

any "opinion" harlan ellison has ever offered on comics has been either just plain empty headed or opportunisitic bullshit to aid his friends

His anger can be bot he best and worst aspects of his writing. when channeled well as in "Driving in the Spikes" his essay on anger and revenge it is hilarious, beautifully detailed and evocative and it succeeds. Other times it can drive his piece off the tracks.

I'd agree that aside from a few stories his greater skill is in nonfiction pieces.

Just for putting Dangerous Visions together he'd deserve classic status but his writing also gives him that.

as you can see I've read a lot of Ellison, but I rarely feel the need to read him anymore: the attitude seeps into his writing more and more as he gets older, and a little of that goes a long way.

Has anyone seen, or will anyone see. Wait.... Does anyone know where I can get a hold of the Documentary "Dreams with Sharp Teeth"? or do you know if it will be released? I am floundering here, because I have been at work all day. What a confusing post....

i thought this dude was the coolest motherfucker on the planet when i was like 11

and namedropped him constantly

haha yeah likewise

He's no Clark Ashton Smith or Fritz Leiber, that's for sure.

But still obviously classic.

his imagination is astonishing. bradbury-sized! not talking about writing talent, just the ability to come up with crazy crazy ideas for decades. i don't know how those guys did it.

Documentary is great. No idea about release, though.

i thought this dude was the coolest motherfucker on the planet when i was like 11

-- and what, Friday, January 11, 2008 6:28 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Link

and namedropped him constantly

-- and what, Friday, January 11, 2008 6:28 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Link

this is kind of eerie, 11-12 is when I was fully writing him fanmail (see upthread)

and was pretty much exactly as you describe yourself at the same age

I loved Strange Wine, then liked Deathbird Stories...by the 3rd or 4th collection of stories, I wasn't as interested in the fiction, and pretty tired of the ego behind the fiction. "Yeah, I'm an asshole, but you'll always know where you stand with me." Yeah, but...you're an asshole.

I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream (the videogame) is classic.

john, can you explain the ending of "jeffty is five" to me? i never was sure i "got" what had happened.

Sure, I remember it clearly. I guess I should say "spoiler alert" here for those who haven't read the story and think they might. The deal was, the dude who's hanging out with the permanently lost-in-the-golden-age-of-radio Jeffty puts Jeffty in for a bath and Jeffty is listening to the radio. The shows that're on the radio whenever Jeffty's present are one of the time signals in the story - old shows play and are great and take the narrator out of the not-as-good-as-the-past world he otherwise lives in. So while Jeffty's bathing, the guy is out in his living room, doing I forget what. But the light "dims, and dims, and flickrs" - this is your indicator that the radio has fallen into the bathtub and Jeffty has been electrocuted, thereby severing the narrator's connection to his romanticized past.

This is from memory, it's been nearly thirty years since I last read the letter I got from H.E. explaining that - and here I quote - the details of the ending sometimes elude "the more slovenly reader." Yes, really. I was 12.

12 is the ideal gateway age for science fiction.

I got "Dangerous Visions" vol 1 for Christmas.

I bet he'd just LOVE his obit leading with his lone Star Trek episode lol

xpost About the only honest reaction. As I said in the other thread, he made sure Octavia E Butler got the boost she needed; I will be forever grateful for that.

Harlan Ellison stars in Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold” https://t.co/ewf6FDBwVV https://t.co/BhZ24AaFKC pic.twitter.com/iQXbht1Hxm

— Chris Barrus (@quartzcity) June 28, 2018

I read Deathbird Stories and Angry Candy and a few other collections of stories, but have almost no memory of any of them. Weird personal connection, though: Ellison dated my ex-stepmother (my dad's dead, and she and I don't talk) back in the Sixties. I met him at an in-store event when I was about 18 and mentioned this to him, thinking it was probably bullshit, but his eyes lit up and he said "Oh yeah, Peggy from Brooklyn! Tell her I say hi!"

haha i read that gay talese story for the first time a few weeks ago and burst out laughing when i got to harlan's unexpected cameo. few books would not be improved by harlan ellison showing up and trying to start a fight with the protagonist.

RIP, I saw the truculent bastard at a Trek convention when i was 13

without meaning to troll, i've never read any of his stuff and have merely had a vague but strong sense that he was a complete asshole. (and that response to the connie willis stuff doesn't make me think much of his writing, either).

so what was good about him?

he wrote some good stories, one pretty good tv episode, edited some decent collections, was a cheerleader for other (better) writers

he was def a complete asshole

Considered him a hero as I was graduated from comics to science fiction paperbacks. Had a ton of his books autographed, saw him do the "writing a short story in a bookstore in real time" schtick (the story was "On the Slab"), wrote to him to ask about the ending of "jeffty is five" and he wrote back on embossed letterhead and included a xeroxed, highlighted passage to show what I'd missed. I think he was very much a writer you grow out of; but the time I spent with him was time I desperately needed then and that did me a world of good as I grew into a writer myself, even if some of his key claims -- about the special status he afforded to writers, specifically; but, for him, this was corrective to the "writers are low-man boiler room workers who get kicked around" mentality he saw at work in the pulps & in Hollywood -- turned out to be things I have the exact opposite take on.

when I read his stuff now, it feels overwrought, unconfident sometimes; but when I read "Shattered! Like a Glass Goblin," the descriptions of the hallucinations still ring hard. And "Jeffty" will always resonate for me.

hard to overstate what he meant to me, once.

what was the story with the snot? i feel someone here will know this

As I said a few years back, Harlan Ellison and his wife were really nice to me the only time I met him. RIP.

A good obit from Cleveland (where Ellison was born).

Ellison occupied the fringe in just about every way imaginable, including talent, unless you include chutzpah as a talent. In that he was plentifully endowed.

nah, he had plenty of talent. which is not to say he always used it wisely or well. but it felt like a thrill, once, to discover someone who used language like that. i don't know where i'd recommend starting with him -- maybe just flip through "the essential ellison" if you can find it and see what grabs your interest. (it's a huge book -- when i picked it out for my, i think, 12th birthday it was definitely the biggest book i ever owned.) what sticks with me now isn't really the big stories so much as his smaller stuff: he wrote some sad, haunting stuff about his childhood -- his dad's death, running away to join the carnival, that sort of thing -- that makes me wish he'd written a book-length memoir.

did he write anything after about 1983? (not that I rate the stuff he wrote before that, either)

he wrote a lot about how he was great and other people were insufferable villains who deserved to be strangled with their own intestines, after 1983

That's what I thought. christopher priest's THE BOOK ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER about how Ellison never finished the last Dangerous Visions volume, bit kept insisting he was doing it, suing everybody who said he wasn't, and attacking authors withdrawing their stories from it after 15 years of waiting, was very entertaining.

Which is all online here under the original title THE LAST DEADLOSS VISIONS
http://web.archive.org/web/20000902203835/http://sf.www.lysator.liu.se/sf_archive/sf-texts/Ansible/Last_Deadloss_Visions,Chris_Priest

harlan ellison died? best thing he's done in decades!

this is one of those rare necrothreads where i see it pop up on sna and think "oh god, what did he do now", and "dying" turns out to be the least worst answer, which puts him in elite company (well, david brooks, mostly)

did he write anything after about 1983? (not that I rate the stuff he wrote before that, either)

The Watching comp of movie reviews was probably the last thing I read of this, but I would really like to have an audio archive of the two years he hosted Hour 25 on KPFK in '86-87

(his)

He written quite a number of short stories since 83.

Really loved some his energetic recorded readings and some of the stories about people he knew.

And the fact that at signings he'd pay his fans to let him rip up his own books that he didn't like.

Has anyone ever noted various resemblances between HE and Jerry Lewis?

I am curious about his recent years because until the last few (in which his energy was gone) he always said he was busy. Maybe he was writing something he never finished. He instructed his wife to burn all his unfinished work when he dies and I'm sure she will.

Any of the obits mention him sleeping with Rita Hayworth? Something he talked about when he was fondly recalling the fullness of his youth.

Apparently he wrote a book about Jerry Lee Lewis which I had forgotten the existence of.

Mark Evanier obituarises:

I'm having real trouble writing this because I knew Harlan from 1969 on and was proud to be among his many, many friends…but in the last couple decades, I came to feel that the friendship was best served by maintaining distance.

Apparently he wrote a book about Jerry Lee Lewis which I had forgotten the existence of.

― Uncle Redd in the Zingtime (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, June 29, 2018 6:43 PM (thirty minutes ago)

"spider kiss," yeah, tho he doesn't use JLL's name. p good, if i recall.

Vandermeer, Doctorow and more
http://file770.com/harlan-ellison-tribute-roundup/

http://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2018/06/30/another-sadness-2/

Caitlin R Kiernan
https://greygirlbeast.livejournal.com/1393034.html

Thread

I fell hard for Harlan Ellison stories as a teenager. Not an uncommon thing. I scoured my high school library for anything with his name on it, then hunted places like Uncle Hugo's. If you wanted Ellison you had to learn a new love for used copies, yellowing pages, torn covers.

— Scott Lynch (@scottlynch78) June 29, 2018

Thread about Ellison mentioning his guy (Sandor?) he hired to frighten people

1) Well, shit.

Harlan Ellison died.

I guess I can finally tell the story about him actually planning to kill someone in a room full of fans at @DragonCon

Hard to believe he was alive when I tweeted this out yesterday. #HarlanEllison https://t.co/CDl4iQGUVd

— I Write Monsters (@IWriteMonsters) June 28, 2018

Wasn't aware he let so many writers stay at his house for so long.

honestly some of the latter-day "i have no mouth and i must scream" cash-ins were pretty good

there was a bbc radio adaptation starring david soul with ellison as the voice of AM that was nice

and the computer-game sequel was good too

i'll always remember him for the first thing of his i read, which was the introduction to us reprints of the early target novelizations. having had no prior experience of him i immediately concluded that this guy, whoever he was, was a complete fucking idiot.

which he probably was. then i read "adrift off the islets of langerhans" and concluded that this guy was obviously a genius. he was probably that too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr5NsTOXAyE

Well, I never had the privilege of sleeping on his sofa or had him offer me personal words of encouragement so I am still mostly tired of his shtick, sorry

Ok?

I mean, yeah, it’s made very little to me me in the last few decades whether HE was alive or not but I’m going to dragonslay haters in here sb away assholes

Yes, let’s treat HE with the same civility he would have... oh wait

Do something comparable and then hate

You mean like win more awards for genre fiction than any other living writer, like it says on the cover? Sorry, not quite up to the task, I’m afraid.

If I may, you seem a bit defensive, dude, a bit like ... hey wait

Ok please tell me why I should blah blah blah about recently dead guy to the point I should care about your fucking mediocre critique defensive defensive yeah fuck you

Fb me

This exchange seems v much in keeping with the spirit of Harlan.

If I can't get banned over HE's death then fuck you woke motherfuckers you don't know how to police your boundaries

Tipsy otm

I just think it's lol for people to diss people in an RIP thread and not expect war
Where did you grow up comfort child?

Reminds me of a certain scene in Dr. Strangelove

http://mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/rrr/files/styles/x_large/public/201801/Dr._Strangelove_-_The_War_Room.png

We can only blow up our dignity tho

Has this been discussed yet?

Maybe pick a better writer to get all sanctimonious about, PK

Omg @ that JLA issue

Xp

Do something comparable and then hate

― President Keyes

goddamn, why do i have to assault a woman first before i can hate on him, that seems like setting the bar a little high