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You give us a tantrum and a know-it-all grin
Tonight I went to see Dreams with Sharp Teeth, Erik Nelson's documentary on Harlan Ellison, at the Brattle Theatre as part of the Independent Film Festival of Boston 2008. It was terrific.* Someone from the film festival came out beforehand to introduce it and explain that this was the documentary's New England premiere, unfortunately sans Harlan, so I was particularly glad I had talked my parents into it. What I cannot figure out is why the audience totaled at most twenty-five. Did the film already hit the con circuit, so no one in Boston fandom felt the need to attend? Has everyone simply heard enough of Harlan Ellison? Has no one heard of Harlan Ellison? How many documentaries can there be that interview Neil Gaiman, Robin Williams, and Ron Moore all on the same subject, anyway? I am genuinely puzzled. If nothing else, it was intensely quotable. And made me want to unpack and re-read several boxes of books.
Tomorrow, I hit up the BSO box office for tickets to Les Troyens. And get my pictures developed!
*Harlan Ellison was not one of my early, formative influences, like Peter S. Beagle or Jane Yolen or Patricia McKillip, but he is one of the most important to me. From about ninth grade until my first or second year of college, if asked to name my favorite writers, I would have started the list with Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury, and Theodore Sturgeon, whom I rediscovered more or less simultaneously and in pursuit of whom I scoured the used bookstores of Boston, New York, Gainesville, any English-speaking city I happened to find myself in, which is why I own near-complete collections of all three and some of the reason I need an apartment with library space. I did not have a writer's circle. In high school, I had one friend who wrote poems—many of which I still think are better than my own—and one friend who was writing up her loves and trials in the third person with all the names changed. No one was bouncing chapters of their novel off me. I read Ellison and Sturgeon and Bradbury (and later Cordwainer Smith, whose "The Ballad of Lost C'mell" would furnish my senior yearbook quote: like my last name, misspelled) and never worried that the short stories I was writing were some kind of lesser form, études for a novel. Yes, Fahrenheit 451; yes, Some of Your Blood; yes, Spider Kiss. But the substance of their work was short fiction. I had the shelvesful of collections to prove it. While I still hold Lloyd Alexander responsible for the fact that I sent my stories anywhere, it is not unfair to blame Ellison et al. for the thought that I might be able to make a living out of them.
Tomorrow, I hit up the BSO box office for tickets to Les Troyens. And get my pictures developed!
*Harlan Ellison was not one of my early, formative influences, like Peter S. Beagle or Jane Yolen or Patricia McKillip, but he is one of the most important to me. From about ninth grade until my first or second year of college, if asked to name my favorite writers, I would have started the list with Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury, and Theodore Sturgeon, whom I rediscovered more or less simultaneously and in pursuit of whom I scoured the used bookstores of Boston, New York, Gainesville, any English-speaking city I happened to find myself in, which is why I own near-complete collections of all three and some of the reason I need an apartment with library space. I did not have a writer's circle. In high school, I had one friend who wrote poems—many of which I still think are better than my own—and one friend who was writing up her loves and trials in the third person with all the names changed. No one was bouncing chapters of their novel off me. I read Ellison and Sturgeon and Bradbury (and later Cordwainer Smith, whose "The Ballad of Lost C'mell" would furnish my senior yearbook quote: like my last name, misspelled) and never worried that the short stories I was writing were some kind of lesser form, études for a novel. Yes, Fahrenheit 451; yes, Some of Your Blood; yes, Spider Kiss. But the substance of their work was short fiction. I had the shelvesful of collections to prove it. While I still hold Lloyd Alexander responsible for the fact that I sent my stories anywhere, it is not unfair to blame Ellison et al. for the thought that I might be able to make a living out of them.
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I never knew Lloyd Alexander personally! I wish I had; I wanted the chance to have told him how much his work mattered to me. But because he was one of the editors of Cricket Magazine, when I was ten and twelve, I sent them stories of mine. None were ever published, of course, but I still hold him responsible.
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Argh. I'm so sorry. I don't know if it's playing anywhere else!
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That is fair enough; I'm sure there's someone I feel that way about. Who are the others?
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Understood. He has not killed my ability to re-read those books of his I enjoyed before I knew anything about him (which means Pastwatch), but he has ensured that I have no interest in any of the rest.
any inclinations I ever had to read John C. Wright have been killed by reading his LJ.
Now I am going to have to read his livejournal. And I was two-thirds of the way through his Chaos trilogy, too.
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Okay. I really am never reading his third book.
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But John C. Wright is a riot. He thinks he's all Rational Man of Reason, but he descends into sweeping generalizations and insults at the drop of a hat.
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But I've come to realize just how easy it is to be misinterpreted online; people read very quickly and don't stop and think before they respond (not saying that he did this; just thinking that this is how it appears, when I read through threads in certain discussions). It means that for all intents and purposes they're not discussing anything, they're just practicing expressing their own views and honing their skills on creative insults and put downs.
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I guess the people who visit the journal have some responsibility to understand the tone, too, though--in your own journal, you should be able to talk the way you want, and if people don't like that or don't understand, then they can choose not to read it.
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I'm usually one of the first to jump up and join the haters' brigade when some author or another is a miserable person, but not Harlan. I can't bring myself to do it, because he's a genius, even if he is a dick.
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I have never felt that Harlan Ellison was inflicted on me; I suppose I wouldn't read him if I did. I found his work when I needed it to be there.
Yay, Hector icon.
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No idea about the picture yet; but the seats are second row, second balcony: I am not going to complain.
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It probably didn't help that the Somerville was showing Big Man Japan the same night as a part of the fest; although it's not technically an overlapping theme, it's a guilty-pleasure genre flick that might have taken away some folks who could have been in the Sharp Teeth audience.
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Unrelated to your presence at Dreams with Sharp Teeth, I hope you feel better!