The
current generation sees Harlan Ellison as a curmudgeon who was always
bad-mouthing their favorite franchise products. The don’t get why
an old guy like me, who was coming of age in the early Nineteen
Seventies, thinks he’s such a big deal. After all, they’ve been
programmed to hate their favorite writers for not keeping all their
favorite series coming at them fast and furious, as if it were possible
to die from not enough of the right kind of entertainment.
It
was different for me waythehell back then. Harlan was young too. He
seemed to be possessed of limitless energy, like a superhero. To be in the same
room with him, even a gigantic ballroom, nearly blasted you off your feet. His
lectures had the intensity of rock concerts.
He
seemed more like a rock star than a writer.
I
started reading him at an age when most millennials were reading
Harry Potter.
His
name kept coming up in the science fiction magazines I was reading.
Then I found The
Beast That Shouted Love At the Heart of the World
on
the sci-fi shelf of my local public library. “Along the Scenic
Route” -- “Shattered Like A Glass Goblin” -- “A Boy and His
Dog” !!! Made Ray Bradbury look like an old fogey. Then when I
found Dangerous
Visions!
And what happened when I snuck those books onto the campus of Edgewood
High School in West Covina, California, and slipped them in front of
the eyes of unsuspecting teenage girls . . .
I
realized that being a writer could be more than my adolescent mind
dared imagine.
It wasn’t just science fiction/speculative fiction/what we
called the New Wave after the French filmmakers and before postpunk
pop. Harlan was so hip, and cool that he was everywhere. All kinds of
magazines, comic books, Star
Trek,
The
Outer Limits,
talk shows . . . He was a manifestation of the counterculture, our
revolution while the war in Vietnam blazed, kids showed up to class
stoned.
I
started buying the L.A.
Free Press
(George’s
Liquor Store, my main connection to literature and culture back then,
started carrying it) when I found out about his Glass Teat columns
that deconstructed our electronic environment. The books collecting
them are one of the best, play-by-play accounts of the times--history
teachers take note. And what happened when I showed those
to
the girls at school . . .
And to be listening when he went on KPFK’s Hour
25
and
took Pacifica Radio's concept to glorious, obscenity-studded extremes!
He
helped me go crazy in those days. I dared to be a rebellious,
surrealist cartoonist confusing and scaring people in the high school
newspaper. I dived into self-learning how to express myself through
writing, because teachers never knew what I was talking about.
Thank
you, Harlan. For broadening my horizons. For amping up my guts to
explore that deranged world that seemed to be collapsing around me.
I
may have still become a writer if I never encountered you. Maybe I
would have even been more commercially successful. But I wouldn’t
have gotten away with the magnificent shit that I’ve committed.
And
that
is
what it’s really all about.
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