"Harlan Ellison - The Essential Ellison - A 50 Year Retrospec" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

Prolegemenon:
MILLENIAL MUSING
It is nine days till the true advent of the real Millennium as I sit here writing this preface to the 50 years’
doorstop that encapsulates the “essentiality” of me, Harlan, writer. Now much less left of my allotted span
of capering and jackanapery than what I had in my pockets when I sat down to write the first of many
entries in this volume. It has been one helluva trip; and I am sanguine that I’m right where I’m supposed
to be: no fall-back excuses as to luck or chance or “breaks” or cabals out to get me. I’m 100% responsible
for me, and for this place in which I find me, 1:46 PM, Friday 22 December, year 2000.
Last Sunday, Susan and I went to Leonard Maltin’s fiftieth birthday surprise party. Where I met
Dickie Jones, who was the voice of Pinocchio in the 1940 Disney film. What a cool thing to happen. (See
what I mean about a helluva trip?) And at one point, Leonard was introducing me to some people and he
said,
“It’s remarkable for Harlan to have been so pleasant for so many hours without snarling at
anyone.”
He didn’t mean anything by the remark, but I suddenly felt a frisson of hurt. The remark made me
feel badly. Others, many others, over the years, have made similar remarks. As if to say that I am some
sort of feral creature not given to composed social congress. An acknowledged Nasty Person.
And there are those who have nothing better to do with their mingy little lives than to beat their
conversational meat on the internet who extemporize endlessly wondering why I have such a mean streak.
THE ESSENTIAL ELLISON 5


If, in fact I have such a mean streak. A recent posting about my working with director David Twohy on a
feature film version of my Demon With a Glass Hand brought forth a small hyenapack of dullards who
had never met me, yet felt it incumbent on themselves to point out that I’m (in their choice of words)
“Arrogant.” To which I would respond in the words of the late great Oscar Levant: “I’m no more humble
than my enormous talents require.”
I was raised polite by my mother and father, but I confess to a very low bullshit threshold for
careless cruelty, rudeness, arrant stupidity, evidence of meanspiritedness, obscurantism and doltish
acceptance of sophomoric beliefs (such as UFOs, crop circles, remembered instances of child abuse
elicited under hypnosis, most uses of God as an explanation for having caught a good pass and running
BO-yards upfield for a touchdown, yeti sightings, the chihuahua in the microwave, the internet as the icon
of a new paradigm shift in human activity, and the suggestion that George W. Bush is anything but an
empty suit galvanically mobile via prayers from the Religious Right).
I suppose if I’m brusque, if I’m abrupt if I growl and suffer fools not at all it is because, if you
poke a sharp stick through the cage of the funny animal for six days, on the seventh day that funny animal
is likely to bend apart the bars, leap out of the cage, rip off your left arm, and use it up your ass to make a
Schmucksicle of you.
And so, and quite properly, the affronted reader who has read and swallowed whole the postings
of my far-acknowledged “arrogance” will quite properly, demand to know by what right I lay claim to the
metaphor of stick-pokened animal. What the affronted reader will demand, produces in you this
psychotic, sniveling, self-serving and undocumented belief that The World is Out To Get you? Proof, we
demand, a little proof here!
Well, geezus, folks, even Dr. Richard Kimble had real enemies. Cut me some slack here,
whaddaya think?
Okay, so here’s a bone for you.
I was having a phone conversation the other day with Bob Silverberg, he up in Oakland, just back
from Turkey, and I in Los Angeles, just back from the bathroom; and I told him about something that had
just come to my attention that had transpired ‘way back in 1956, that I had known nothing about till a