{"id":17278,"date":"2018-06-28T17:55:35","date_gmt":"2018-06-29T00:55:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/?p=17278"},"modified":"2018-06-29T12:17:54","modified_gmt":"2018-06-29T19:17:54","slug":"more-on-ellison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2018\/06\/28\/more-on-ellison\/","title":{"rendered":"More on Ellison"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>Some thoughts and notes about Harlan Ellison, in no particular order, on the occasion of his death.<\/p>\r\n<p>Content warning: I\u2019m going to say some positive things about him as well as some critical things; if either of those will distress you, then you may not want to read this post right now.<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n  <li>He was capable of being, imo, an astonishingly good writer.<\/li>\r\n  <li>He also did some very good things.<\/li>\r\n  <li>He also behaved very badly.<\/li>\r\n  <li>I know he went by \u201cHarlan,\u201d but I have a hard time calling him that; it feels too intimate to me. (I feel similarly about referring by first name to nearly anyone I don\u2019t know.)<\/li>\r\n  <li>I don\u2019t remember when I first encountered his work; almost certainly among my father\u2019s sf paperbacks, which I read many of as a kid. (Possibly the first of his stories that I read was \u201cPretty Maggie Moneyeyes,\u201d which I loved at the time.)<\/li>\r\n  <li>I continued to think of him as a young upstart trying to take the sf world by storm well into the 1980s, by which time he was in his fifties.<\/li>\r\n  <li>He sure was prolific. According to the ISFDB, he had <a href=\"http:\/\/www.isfdb.org\/cgi-bin\/ea.cgi?25\">45 stories published in 1957<\/a>\u2014and that was near the beginning of his career, when he was in his early 20s. And I\u2019m not sure whether that list includes the non-sf stories he wrote.<\/li>\r\n  <li>The first time I saw him in person was at I-CON, at SUNY Stony Brook, in the late 1980s. I was struck by his charisma and his entertaining way of speaking; that was when I discovered the idea of attending all the panels that a given panelist is on, regardless of topic. The main thing I remember is that he railed against the movie <cite>Robocop<\/cite>, on the grounds that it took human life too lightly. On the topic of how easily human lives can be ended in real life, he passionately declared, \u201cWe\u2019re all just baggies of blood!\u201d I don\u2019t know why he reacted so strongly to that one specific movie, as opposed to all the other movies out there in which people are killed casually and bloodily.<\/li>\r\n  <li>The only time I ever spoke with him was in the late \u201980s, when I acquired his home phone number somehow\u2014possibly from a Philadelphia-area writer who had a copy of the SFWA Directory\u2014and called him to invite him to speak at Swarthmore. He told me, gently, that this was his home phone and that I should have called his office phone, during business hours. He asked if I was scared, and I admitted I was (I was very aware of his reputation), and he told me not to be, and that the call would go better if I wasn\u2019t. He told me his rates for speaking (I want to say $4,000?), and said that was in addition to first-class airfare for him and his wife, Susan. I thanked him and got off the phone; he was way out of our price range.<\/li>\r\n  <li>I heard stories about his nastiness to writing-workshop students when they did things he disliked. I also heard stories about his generosity and kindness to some new writers.<\/li>\r\n  <li>Why am I writing all this, when I couldn\u2019t bring myself to write much of anything coherent about the death of my favorite writer, Ursula K. Le&nbsp;Guin? I think because her death was harder on me. I\u2019ve loved a lot of Ellison\u2019s work, but his work never had as strong an effect on me as much of Le&nbsp;Guin\u2019s did.<\/li>\r\n  <li>As noted in my <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2018\/06\/28\/ellisons-angry-candy-introduction\/\">previous post<\/a>, I read the introduction to, and stories in, <cite>Angry Candy<\/cite> at a time when I needed it, a time when I felt like there was a lot of death going on around me. I found it powerful and cathartic, especially the introduction and \u201cPaladin of the Lost Hour\u201d\u00a0and \u201cThe Function of Dream Sleep.\u201d I think I read the introduction aloud at a story reading.<\/li>\r\n  <li>At some convention, probably around 1994, I heard him speak about one of his stories having been selected for one of the big annual literary anthologies, <cite>Best American Short Stories<\/cite> or something. (It looks like the story may\u2019ve been \u201cThe Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore.\u201d) He seemed thrilled that the story had been selected\u2014mainstream literary recognition! at last!\u2014but he also talked about having been called by a young woman associated with the anthology, who talked to him as if he were a new writer at the start of his career, and he told her off for not knowing that he\u2019d been winning awards since probably before she was born.<\/li>\r\n  <li>At some convention where I saw him speak (possibly that same one in 1994 or so), my impression was that he looked tired, worn out. He looked and sounded to me like anger had been consuming him for decades. But he went on for another twenty years after that, so I may just have overinterpreted. (That may\u2019ve been shortly before he had a heart attack and heart surgery.)<\/li>\r\n  <li>I respect his work on the two <cite>Dangerous Visions<\/cite> books, and I\u2019m glad that he helped those stories see the light of day, most especially Delany\u2019s \u201cAye, and Gomorrah...\u201d and Russ\u2019s \u201cWhen It Changed.\u201d But Ellison handled the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Last_Dangerous_Visions\">never-published third book<\/a> badly.<\/li>\r\n  <li>He <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2009\/07\/26\/tempest-and-ellison\/\">behaved badly toward Tempest<\/a>. I was glad that he backed off and apologized, but I\u2019m sad that (I suspect) his behavior in that instance probably wasn\u2019t especially unusual, either for him or for plenty of other people. Hear a rumor that someone did something that you (without any context) consider bad; go off on them at length; mutual friends explain to you that you were uninformed; quasi-apologize. It\u2019s a bad habit to get into.<\/li>\r\n  <li>I was present at the Hugo ceremony in 2006 where he grabbed Connie Willis. I haven\u2019t spoken much about it publicly because I\u2019ve heard that Willis would rather it not be discussed, but I will say that in person, live, at least from where I was sitting in the audience, it looked like what he did was significantly worse than it looked in the video of the event.<\/li>\r\n  <li>I like <a href=\"https:\/\/thesmartset.com\/article01271401\/\">Nick\u2019s article about Ellison<\/a> from 2014.<\/li>\r\n  <li><p>At some point, after one or another of Ellison\u2019s high-profile misbehaviors, I saw a few bloggers say things like \u201cWell, I\u2019ve never heard of him, and he did this bad thing, so he can\u2019t be any good as a writer.\u201d I was flabbergasted; I didn\u2019t wade in because I didn\u2019t want to appear to be defending his behavior, but I consider him to have been a remarkably good writer. <em>And also<\/em> to have done bad things. It\u2019s quite possible for both of those things to be true at the same time.<\/p>\r\n<p>(In the years since then, I\u2019ve seen the same kind of reaction play out with other excellent writers who\u2019ve done unfortunate things; it always makes me sad to see those reactions. (In addition, of course, to my being sad about the writer\u2019s bad behavior.) I\u2019m not saying that an artist and their work are always separable; I have no problem with people saying \u201cI can\u2019t in good conscience read or support this author any more,\u201d and for that matter I have no problem with people saying \u201cthis writer\u2019s work just doesn\u2019t appeal to me.\u201d What bothers me is when people say \u201cI dislike what this author did; therefore, they must be a bad writer.\u201d)<\/p>\r\n<p>(Edited to add: In case this isn\u2019t clear from the rest of this post, it makes me similarly unhappy to see the converse argument: \u201cthis writer wrote great fiction, so they can\u2019t possibly have done anything bad.\u201d)<\/li>\r\n  <li>The last time I saw him was a few years ago at a convention. He was standing on a platform in the middle of a big room, surrounded on all sides by a sea of fans. He was holding forth in the inimitable Ellison fashion, but sounding to me meaner than I had personally seen him before. (Though I know from others\u2019 stories that this wasn\u2019t nearly as mean as he was capable of being.) I couldn\u2019t take it for more than a few minutes; I snuck out of the room. (Snuck, because I had already heard him say something unpleasant about someone else he\u2019d seen leaving the room.)<\/li>\r\n  <li>I\u2019m seeing some friends saying things like \u201cno one can deny he was a great writer\u201d and \u201cthe world will miss him.\u201d I\u2019m seeing other friends say that they honestly never liked his writing, or that he harassed them or viciously insulted them. So to those of you who are uncritically sad about his death: that\u2019s fine, you\u2019re allowed to be sad, but please don\u2019t assume that everyone shares your reactions.<\/li>\r\n  <li>To those who Ellison hurt, and who\u2019ve been distressed by seeing the outpourings of uncritical praise: you have my sympathies. I hope that this post hasn\u2019t added to your distress.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<p>What does all that add up to? I don\u2019t have a single answer. Ellison wrote some imo-amazing fiction (and probably some bad fiction\u2014certainly not everything he wrote was amazing); he did some good things; he also did some bad things. I admire his writing and respect the good work he did, even while I can\u2019t condone his many instances of bad behavior.<\/p>\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-17278","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\/17278","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=17278"}],"version-history":[{"count":34,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17312,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17278\/revisions\/17312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}