Discussion of the man and his work.

Beyond the Pale

"I have utter contempt for white people"

Love you too Frank. Yes, we're responsible for the destruction of western civilization. Every one of us hates brown people, and find ways to keep them down.

You've caught us.

BTW - Very constructive approach if I might say so.

Kenneth, that was a bit of a bugfuck view you just spewed, but I will leave it at that since Harlan needs his sleep and it also gives our Susan a gift, a fair woman who had to get paper cuts and tape burns from wrapping those gifts to you greedy gusses who I love so.

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Harlan, that was pretty dead on. We see the world a bit different, but me likes.

Allah, Jesus, they really do weep for this world.

I have utter contempt for white people, since they are the scourge of the planet and evolutionary mistakes. Yea, my people are the real enemy. Other groups just crib off their criminal cheat sheets. A shame.

I am happy, I just don't smile all the time like Cindy. That girl needs help.

---------

Cindy, I'm tellin the pastor on you. Such a tart tongue.

Love ya gal.

That back issue we should be able to get.
--
I rarely buy script books (who doesn't prefer actual scripts) but with TWO introductions (at least one of them now quite long) you are putting me in a difficult spot. Is Frakes involved? I can see him providing footnotes. "Not surprisingly, Harlan Ellison refused to take directions in this scene. Someone had just told him I learned to direct on Star Trek, and he was fuming."
--
The NY Times has a full article on Alan Moore's latest projects
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/books/27moore.html

Good news
Great news that Harlan has returned. My withdrawal symtoms were reaching critical mass.

Should I have failed to mention it......
Welcome back, Harlan! The place just wasn't the same without ya!

Susan, I received the remainder of my The Great Ellison Book Purge order. Thank you very much! Check will be mailed ASAP.

David

He's back!
Well, Harlan, when you return, you RETURN! Nice to have you back, baby.

FRANK CHURCH ASKED ME ...
"Harlan, do you think I'm anti-Semitic?"

Straight, no bullshit, Frank; here's your answer. People will take from it what they will. I respond straight, no bullshit.

Do I think you're anti-Semitic?

My instincts, and reading you strictly off your postings over a substantial period of time, is that no, you're not anti-Semitic.

But the truth of it, Frank kiddo, is that I really don't give a fuck, one way or the other.

Look, Frank, I think there is as strong a sub-current of anti-Semitism, even fanatical AryanNaziBigotKike-Bashing in this fair nation of ours, as ever was. I don't think most people, basically decent people, also are anti-Negro, anti-Immigrant, anti-anything but whatever they fancy their "chosen people" group to be. I think that undercurrent exists--Glenn Beck lives--but it ain't Politically Correct to say "he tried to Jew me down" in mixed company.

I think it is impossible, realistically, to be an American and NOT have those subcutaneous, noxious prejudices. As Tielhard de Jardin said, "We struggle daily to ascend to the light."

I'm no better or different from the rest of you. I racially profile, I urban-legend too many of the opprobria, I am no more pure in deed or attitude than the kindest-hearted of you, and it's you'n'me in the same canoe, Frank.

That said, I tell you straight that I like the cut of your jib, and I do not for an instant believe that you would let some Faginlike hook-nosed yarmulke-wearing jewboy drown if you could grab him and get him into the canoe with you. I assert that I'm not talking about THIS jewboy. Some OTHER jewboy. I do not perceive you, via my gut's radiograms to my brain, as a Jew-Hater, AKA, anti-Semite.

And THAT said, I think you DO HAVE blindingly concretized problems with Zionism, Israel, the pro-Israel liaisons of this country, and trail-drifts from that position to a good many specific day-to-day outrages by, and to, Israel. I share those concerns.

Look, shweetheart, you asked me.

You've heard my stance on all this many times. I think they're ALL bugfuck, every nation or wannabe nation in that daisy-chain.
I think the kindly and generous Jehovah and Allah sit up there just shaking their heads and weeping at the cheap animosities that make this possibly-bearable world a flaming hell of "true believers" shouting death at one another.

Ugh.

I'm sermonizing. Don't get me started. You asked a simple question, and in answering, or TRYING to answer, simply and without permitting any drift for the inevitable internet lack of tonality & nuance, I have drifted and lost nuance.

You ask me a direct question: do I think you're an anti-Semite, or anti-Semitic, or however exactly you put it, and my answer is this:

I don't give a shit, Frank. I liked your sidewise persona when first you came on, and others wanted to rend you. I lobbied for forbearance because you were being you. It made me smile.

I'm a Jew, and both of us know that, and I still swing full-reach when some asshole uses the equivalent of "Well, you know how THOSE people are..." within my hearing. None of that, my tic-detector advises me, has anything to do with whether you object to Jews or not, son. I truly couldn't get a thistle more unseated by your secret, or subcutaneous, or alleged prejudices. When you go on at length about that day's outrage, I sigh and think, damn...I wish Frank were happier.

I like you; I smile at the way you see the world; I have no true
idea if you're anti-Semitic, or nigger-baiting, or latino-negative, or anything else. So far your opinions have been submitted in a clearly-obsessed but not punishable way and, since I am a Jew by birth and am pleased at whatever part of that pleases me, we both know I'm a stiff-naked Jewish Atheist, and I think Allah or Jehovah or Buddha or Hanuman, or Whichever Is In Charge, ought to just slap ALLA them tunnel-visioned, possibly meanspirited muthuhfuggahs upside they headbones.

Short of a longer reply than this s.i.m.p.l.e. response, you need not bore me with the "yeah, buts" or suchlike. Just take yes&no&I dunno as answer, and let me get some sleep.

Yr. Pal, Harlan

JAN / EU

Is it at all possible for you to obtain for us that Polish packaging of "The Discarded" tv adaptation? Josh will be coming over tomorrow or Friday, to read the first 12,000 words of "Riding the Rails in Atlantis" -- my part of our dual intros to the book of THE DISCARDED -- and I wouldn't mind mentioning your alert as a footnote.

Instant remuneration, as per usual.

Hopefully, Yr. Pal, Harlan

REPLY TO MAT MACKENZIE


Thank you...yes, of course, you silly goose, I know that THE ONION (as is the case with virtually every other published periodical in the world since the beginning of the 20th Century) sells back issues. I'm old, not senile. But it was a good and kindly-meant halloo, and so I smile down at you from a Solomonic Height, and assure you that the first place I went for the July 1st issues I want...was THE ONION 800-number to obtain said incunabula.

Guess what, tootsie? Sold out. Nada available.

But you're sweet to suggest it. Oh, and thank your mother for the chicken soup.

Yr. Pal, Harlan

Well HELL yes!
Glad as fuck that you are back, Boss.

Sorry for the gutter speak-- but my delight
at your return overrode the governor between
my brain and my fingers.

It's so good to see you.

:)
ohhhh ---- I promised to give up the smiley faces
if you came back. I can't help but smile.
Welcome home, Harlan.
: /
yer old pal,
Cindy

The Anti-Semitic Question
“Do you think I am anti-Semitic?” Frank Church asks Harlan Ellison.

He knows that by posing that question here he in effect asks all of us our opinion on the matter, so here is my non-answer.

Frank, you spend an inordinate amount of time on this website discussing how abominably the Israelis treat the Palestinians.

No doubt you are correct about this. However, should Tel Aviv ever take its boot off the Palestinians’ necks, the latter would immediately rise up and do the same, and probably worse, to the Israelis. (I have no doubt that the Israelis regard the slow-motion destruction of Zimbabwe’s once-dominant white minority as an instructive example.)

The second smartest thing I ever heard anybody say about that arid clusterfuck we call the Middle East was Harlan Ellison’s call to build a 26-mile-high wall around the place and check in every ten years or so to see if the inhabitants had at last come to their senses.

But the very smartest thing of all was what a Palestinian grocer whose shop is just down the street once said to me: “Palestinians gotta live. Israelis gotta live. Everybody gotta make a deal.”

You, alas, have failed to display similar perspicacity. Although you have no conceivable chance of influencing the outcome in even the minutest way, you nonetheless continue to take sides in a distant conflict bound to continue for decades, maybe centuries, even though your meaningless stance sways absolutely nobody, angers some, and bores the hell out of the rest. Best of luck with that.

As for myself, I like what Tolkien’s Treebeard the Ent said when asked which side he was on: “I am not altogether on anybody’s side, because nobody is altogether on my side.”

Kristian,

I think that was a really well-articulated "rant"; you laid out the anatomy.

While on the subject of product-dominance, this country is strengthening the prospect of Republicans actually re-claiming the House, DESPITE all the landscape laid bare by the last 10 years!

If this happens, we will see so many regulatory measures repealed that the COKE bottle will become a chalice. Dumb voters - again, opening the door to policies detrimental to their own interests - will see trusts wipe out what little remains of competition, along with wages that meet the cost of living, and more jobs outsourced overseas. The Constitution will be bendayed in plastic. Without regulatory oversight, popularizing any product will be a cinch, regardless of the possible health hazards.

This deviates from your own point, but it's biggest concern of my own right now. That's MY rant, and I don't mind blaring it out!

**FAR more importantly, however...Frank is a HEINOUS anti-Semite!!

Laurie,

"If someone, like Palin, gets a lot of news coverage, they assume she must be worth something."

Very true, but we can blame advertising for this. It used to be that a product was marketed with claims of how good it was at doing whatever it is that it did, which slowly progressed into "9 out of 10 ***Insert Authority Figures Here*** prefer Brand X because..." where they would finish the endorsement by talking about the quality of the product, albeit more briefly than before. Eventually, the message was distilled even further towards what we have today: This product is the best because the most people like it!

It's a hideous, circular sort of logic that folks choose to accept rather than wrestle with the cognitive dissonance nibbling away at the back of their minds. It's the old "how to get experience without a job / how to get a job without experience" nugget, and it works in advertising:

How does a new product get to be popular, when popularity alone is what sells the product? People know it's all smoke and mirrors and that popularity is manufactured by advertisers, but they're willing to buy into the sham because it's easier to let someone else sort the wheat from the chaff than it is for consumers to do their own exhaustive research and come to informed conclusions. People know they're being exploited and manipulated, but they willingly buy into it because it's just easier than fighting.

Even when anti-popularity segments of the population begin to come together and grow into a larger body resistant to manipulation, the advertising industry simply adapts and tilts the message - and the contrarians buy into it. The Coca-Cola Company, for instance, used Sprite to run a great anti-marketing campaign a few years back that successfully exploited people with a desire to believe they're unique and above advertising. With the slogan "Image is nothing. Thirst is everything." Sprite managed to use marketing to convince enormous swaths of people that marketing is bad, and that drinking Sprite was the only antidote - and they sold a lot of soda along the way.

Enter the Internet, where the quality and visibility of anything and everything is determined completely by popularity: This page has the Most Hits, this article is the Most Viewed, this video has the Most Comments, etc... People surfing around the Net like to believe themselves far above simple marketing, even as they willingly allow their browsing habits to be entirely dictated by popularity, right down to the search results they get back from Google. The most popular pages go on top while the less popular sites get squashed to the bottom. And, in a bizarre inversion of logic, it's usually the smart stuff that gets hidden in the dark and dirty corners of the net, while simple pap easily digested by the plodding minds of jellyheads and shoelickers rises to the surface.

Slowly, we work our way down the ladder to the bottom, where quality is determined entirely by popularity, which is gained by mining the lowest common denominator. Eventually, the King of the World is the guy with the funniest nutshot on YouTube while the rest of us just scratch ourselves and wonder when we'll be famous, too.

....

Wow, I didn't actually mean to go into rant mode there. You have my apologies. I just kind of got going and forgot to stop.

-Kristian

Frank, as the Pharaoh's master road builder said to Pharaoh a few days after the Exodus when they were strolling round the pyramids one morning, "boy, this sure is some well-traveled ground, isn't it?"

No one thinks you're antisemitic, Frank. Don't worry about it.

Frank...
Frank, thanks for commenting. I agree with you about mediocrity being common and accepted. I am not so sure people actually love it; it's just that most people are not exposed to the good stuff much. It's kind of like people who have never tasted anything above the McDonald's level of cooking. Some people lack the experience and/or imagination to realize there is anything better. If someone, like Palin, gets a lot of news coverage, they assume she must be worth something.

And, I thought I might point out, even on this board where conspiracy theories are often debunked, it is extremely questionable whether more than two or three people at that Jonestown disaster ever drank any Koolaid laced with poison. The autopsies indicated gunshot wounds. I know it's become an iconic event and point of reference for situations in which people behave in stupid self destructive ways but most of it may have happened quite differently than the orginal, very sensational, news reports told us at first.

A serious question. Harlan, do you think I am anti-semitic?

Unca Harlan! Great to see ya again (manly hug)!

For those of us who are attending MadCon, could we maybe possibly choose a place to meet up? I'd love to put flesh on these wordy skeletons...and Harlan & Susan, if you'd like to join us, that would be ok, toooo...

Welcome back, Harlan. Thank you for being willing to share your thoughts, observations and jokes with this tiny little corner of the admittedly sometimes awful Internet.

Very much looking forward to seeing you again at MadCon in September (and for those of you in the Pav who are not attending, ya should; this is shaping up to be a helluva event, and will be Harlan's last Con appearance, according to him)

All the best,

Mark

Did anyone else notice Harlan has Oz and Kansas mixed up?
--
I thought some more about putting links here after the objections. The reality is that I'm the type who likes to share. I'm going to post fewer items and make extra sure they contain no hidden thorns. I'll no longer catch all the good American ones and hope other people have an eye on them too.

In case I didn't mention it at the time, The Discarded (TV) was packaged with a computer magazine in Poland in 2008. http://www.dodatkidogazet.pl/film/rid,5836,dd,odrzuceni.html

Correcting something I reported last week: The new Italian "Hot Blood" is culled from the first three American "Hot Bloods".

Erik, new DWST rip: http://www.xrel.to/movie/62113/Harlan-Ellison-Dreams-With-Sharp-Teeth.html
http://www.xrel.to/movie-nfo/219175/Harlan-Ellison-Dreams-With-Sharp-Teeth-2008-DOCU-NTSC-DVDR-MADE.html

Tim O'Reilly (of O'Reilly Media) has used a quote from Harlan in his keynote at Oscon 2010 (Open Source Convention) in Portland. It was this: !the bottom line of what I've rambled on about here... (is) to tell you that as night approaches we are all aliens, down here on this alien Earth. To tell you that not Christ nor man nor governments of men will save you. To tell you that writers about tomorrow must stop living in yesterday and work from their hearts and their guts and their courage to tell us about tomorrow, before all the tomorrows are stolen away from us. To tell you no one will come down from the mountain to save your lily-white hide or your black ass. God is within you. Save yourselves. "Otherwise, why would you have traveled all this way . . . just to be alone?"
O'Reilly thinks that (paraphrase) "the human condition is a social one and our technologies should help us build a response to oncoming crisis that's based in that humanity."
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/interview_with_tim_oreilly_on_privacy_global_crises.php

What Neil Gaiman is up to: "Just as the draft of Anansi Boys was handed in, the word came down from the powers behind Doctor Who that I was going to have to do another draft." (blog)

The Onion sells back issues.
Hello there--

I'm a regular lurker here and (I think) first-time poster. I've been reading Harlan Ellison since coming across (I think it was) Deathbird Stories in the library in, let's call it, the third grade, and have enjoyed the living crap out of hearing his voice here. So, from someone you've never met, even virtually: welcome back and I hope you're as happy about your return as the rest of us.

The Onion sells back issues, in case all the Blue Monkeys have already used their July 1 editions to line their cages. They do mention a two-week lead time. I've never used this service but it looks routine enough.

http://store.theonion.com/product/back-issue,350/

A possible welcome back gift for Harlan - Rare Duke Ellington
First, let me apologize.

I did what I could to welcome you back, so I apologize for the following:

The portraits that I did of both of you did not go as planned. I tried to have my assistants deliver them as carefully as possible, but the serving pans were still hot and SOMEone forgot their oven mitts. That'll teach me not to use lasagna as media, but believe you me, it did look like both of you when it came out of the oven. I was also able to explain to most of the neighbors that the resultant shrieks of pain were distant hot-rodders. The local constabulary took a dimmer view.

Do you know of a good ant/pigeon repellent? Let's call that an unrelated question.

The 3 meter-high blinking grail was supposed to read, "To the Writer of Night of Black Glass", but the G and the L in the last word got damaged in shipping. Please find some comfort, cold though it may be, that this will not look out of place considering one of the Valley's cottage industries, but I fear you may take this as a flippant swipe at a story that I greatly enjoyed. Such is not the case and if you unscrew the base, you can remove the 3 "D" cells, which will stop the blinking, but if any ships crash in San Pedro as a result, on your head be it.

All this to say that after trying to add some pizazz to your return (RETURN! I need to cancel the howdah rental AND phone the L.A. Zoo), I came across the least elaborate of my presents, which is this:

There was a local kiddie show in New York called, "Joya's Fun School" and later "Time For Joya", which started in 1970 and it was hosted by Joya Sherrill (who just passed away last month at the age of 85). She invited Duke Ellington to appear on her show and it turned out to be one of his last appearances on TV. The video is long gone, but the audio does exist, albeit not in the highest of fi, but there is good fi to be had. She sings, "My People" to Ellington's accompaniment and later Ellington playfully mangles the story of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" while playing a bit of "Ko-Ko" underneath.

If you are interested, I can send you a CD of this performance.

Jumbo? Jumbo NO!,
Brian Phillips

Harlan, on memory loss, I live by the mantra of not worrying if I've forgotten where I've misplaced my car keys, but I will take pause when I've forgotten what those keys are supposed to do! Nice having you around these parts again and thanks for the personalizations.

Just have to ask about THAT one!
Fuck the one a day rule, this is the exception I was made for.

EXACTLY when, and in what context, did the more than substantial girth and hefty consistency of my merrymaker come up?

And was Cindy involved in this conversation?

Not that she would know...

Just curious.

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