Harlan Ellison 1934-2018
Jun. 28th, 2018 05:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretI met Harlan Ellison once, at the Union Square Forbidden Planet. He was doing a kickoff signing for the release of his fabled screenplay adaptation of Asimov's I, Robot. Which, for the record, is fascinating and probably unfilmable, and even if it were filmable, Ellison claims it was never filmed because he told a studio executive asking about it that he had the intellect of an asparagus.
Ellison was perched at the counter and the line weaved throughout the store and out the door. And I don't know if you've ever been to the Union Square Forbidden Planet, but it's a big store. There was a significant line, is my point, especially for a writer who hadn't written anything important in twenty years. And next to Ellison was a minder from the store, who kept urging him to be faster and spend less time with the people on line.
Because Ellison was having a real, substantial conversation with everyone on line. Not about his books, just about his life or their life, whatever people wanted to talk about. He lectured the guy in front of me about how if he wanted to be a writer, he should go to trade school and become a plumber to have a reliable source of income. For about ten minutes. I mentioned that I had a paper to write on Descartes and he went off for me on the beauty of Cartesian logic for a couple minutes. The line took forever to move, but nobody on it was complaining; Ellison was too entertaining and too gracious. And anytime his minder from the store complained, he went full-on Ellison asshole toward him.
It was one of the most generous performances I've ever seen a celebrity direct to his fans, and it has stuck with me.
There's no question that Harlan Ellison was a terrible person, a habitual sexual assaulter, on top of just being routinely mean to people he held power over in arbitrary unjustifiable ways. His grope of Connie Willis at Worldcon, a couple years after I met him, still stands out as one of the most brazen sexual assaults in SFF fandom history, and that's saying something. And at the time, everyone in fandom said "Why are you surprised? It's Harlan." I was a baby in fandom at the time, and nothing about it was surprising to me, I'd already heard all the stories. You can't write a memoriam for Harlan Ellison without acknowledging what a repulsive human being he was. You can't write a memoriam for Harlan Ellison without saying that he was a predator that the community harbored without anywhere near sufficient censure.
And yet it somehow seems to fail to be enough to just say that he was a predator and leave it at that. I dunno. Dangerous Visions doesn't matter less because he was a predator. "Repent, Harlequin" and "I Have No Mouth" don't matter less because he was a predator.
I long for a way to acknowledge the influence Harlan Ellison had on me and on the world I inhabit, and to acknowledge that that influence must be for the worse as well as for the better.
Ellison was perched at the counter and the line weaved throughout the store and out the door. And I don't know if you've ever been to the Union Square Forbidden Planet, but it's a big store. There was a significant line, is my point, especially for a writer who hadn't written anything important in twenty years. And next to Ellison was a minder from the store, who kept urging him to be faster and spend less time with the people on line.
Because Ellison was having a real, substantial conversation with everyone on line. Not about his books, just about his life or their life, whatever people wanted to talk about. He lectured the guy in front of me about how if he wanted to be a writer, he should go to trade school and become a plumber to have a reliable source of income. For about ten minutes. I mentioned that I had a paper to write on Descartes and he went off for me on the beauty of Cartesian logic for a couple minutes. The line took forever to move, but nobody on it was complaining; Ellison was too entertaining and too gracious. And anytime his minder from the store complained, he went full-on Ellison asshole toward him.
It was one of the most generous performances I've ever seen a celebrity direct to his fans, and it has stuck with me.
There's no question that Harlan Ellison was a terrible person, a habitual sexual assaulter, on top of just being routinely mean to people he held power over in arbitrary unjustifiable ways. His grope of Connie Willis at Worldcon, a couple years after I met him, still stands out as one of the most brazen sexual assaults in SFF fandom history, and that's saying something. And at the time, everyone in fandom said "Why are you surprised? It's Harlan." I was a baby in fandom at the time, and nothing about it was surprising to me, I'd already heard all the stories. You can't write a memoriam for Harlan Ellison without acknowledging what a repulsive human being he was. You can't write a memoriam for Harlan Ellison without saying that he was a predator that the community harbored without anywhere near sufficient censure.
And yet it somehow seems to fail to be enough to just say that he was a predator and leave it at that. I dunno. Dangerous Visions doesn't matter less because he was a predator. "Repent, Harlequin" and "I Have No Mouth" don't matter less because he was a predator.
I long for a way to acknowledge the influence Harlan Ellison had on me and on the world I inhabit, and to acknowledge that that influence must be for the worse as well as for the better.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-06-28 10:23 pm (UTC)I wish there to be a time in the future when we don't have to grapple with the creators of works we love doing or having done terrible things.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-06-28 10:32 pm (UTC)Yeah, that'd be nice.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-06-29 02:45 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-06-29 01:24 pm (UTC)I have discovered some place inside me where two things can be true: that someone did something bad, and that someone did something good. Importantly, I can have these two views without the need to balance them ("the good outweighs the bad, so we can still be friends"), because balance is so often erasure ("with all the good he's done, why dwell on the bad?").
The tricky thing with Harlan Ellison is that we are not asked to reconcile his greatness as a writer with his meanness as a person. We are asked to reconcile his frequent extraordinary meanness as a person with his just as frequent extraordinary kindness.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-06-29 05:30 pm (UTC)