{"id":17275,"date":"2018-06-28T13:51:20","date_gmt":"2018-06-28T20:51:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/?p=17275"},"modified":"2018-06-28T13:52:09","modified_gmt":"2018-06-28T20:52:09","slug":"ellisons-angry-candy-introduction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2018\/06\/28\/ellisons-angry-candy-introduction\/","title":{"rendered":"Ellison\u2019s Angry Candy introduction"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

One of the first things I thought of on learning that Harlan Ellison died this morning was the introduction he wrote to his 1988 short-story collection Angry Candy<\/cite>.<\/p>\r\n

It\u2019s a powerful piece about the deaths of forty-plus people who he cared about and admired, over the course of a couple of years in the mid-1980s. It provided me with some needed catharsis when I first read it. As did the lovely and moving stories in the collection; I haven\u2019t read them in nearly thirty years, but at the time, I felt they were some of Ellison\u2019s best work.<\/p>\r\n

Here are a couple of excerpts from that introduction.<\/p>\r\n

First, his recollection of what he said at his friend Emily Austin\u2019s funeral:<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

It\u2019s not seemly to speak harshly at the funeral of someone you loved, and who\u2019s gone away, and you miss so much it squeezes your chest when you think about them. It\u2019s not right to make a big scene and cry about how it hurts when you ask that lost friend a question, and she\u2019s not there to answer, as if the wind took her answer away, and if you listen hard enough you can still hear her voice receding, getting thinner and smaller and more transparent. We\u2019re not supposed to do that. We\u2019re supposed to reassure one another, and say dumb things like, \u201cWell, she couldn\u2019t have suffered much.\u201d And I want<\/em> to say things like that, because ceremonies like this are for the living, and not the dead, because the dead are gone and can\u2019t hear what we say, and I can\u2019t even take any solace in that, because it isn\u2019t a new thought. And the truth of it is, I can\u2019t take any solace at all<\/em>, because Emily is dead. [\u2026] No one allows us to be angry. It isn\u2019t fitting, it isn\u2019t seemly. but that\u2019s how I feel. I\u2019m just pure and deeply angry that she\u2019s gone. [\u2026] And in the compassion that we try to show each other, we won\u2019t let ourselves be angry, won\u2019t let ourselves scream at the world that is now minus that special part.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

He goes on to quote what Norman Spinrad said at the same funeral: \u201cDon\u2019t expect justice. Emily being taken like this, is not fair. It is not just. She never deserved to die so soon. There is no justice inherent in the universe \u2026 except what we put there. All the justice that exists, is what we make.\u201d<\/p>\r\n

And toward the end of the introduction, Ellison writes:<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

I was a road kid who found a way to get off the road. I learned how to write. It was mostly time alone. But there have always been friends and lovers who brought me back to the understanding that when it is all written, there remains nothing more important than the lives you touch, and that touch you. You are not alone.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-death","category-writers"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17275"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17277,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17275\/revisions\/17277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}