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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