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Never Meet Your Heroes, Even Posthumously
When I was a kid, I discovered Harlan Ellison on Sci-Fi Buzz during his Harlan Ellison's Watching segments. They were my favorite segments, and I was crushed when an episode didn't have one. I would have been about 10 years old at this time. Luckily enough, they are all still available on Harlan's youtube. This one in particular I remember, being a comic card collector in middle school, along with most of the boys in my boy scout troop.
For me at that age, there was a lot to look up to in Harlan. He was witty, funny, charismatic, and never gave up on his childhood passions. More over he seems important and respected, his awards always preceding his name. I thought he was simply the best as a young nerdling. But I never read his stories. I can't even remember wanting to. Maybe I wasn't there yet, in terms of reading level. I honestly have no memory of what I was reading at that age. I do recall that by the time I was a freshman in highschool, I had read ample Ray Bradbury collections, and had been dabbling in Iain M Banks. For whatever reason I never circled back to Harlan until much later, picking up a ebook copy of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream and being blown away by every story in it, especially Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes.
Over the last month, I've been working through The Essential Ellison: A 35 Year Retrospective. It's completely changed my view of the man, and not for the better. The tome really lays bare how autobiographical much of Ellison's short stories are. The barely disguised self loathing, the tireless hatred he feels for all of humanity, but seemingly goys above all others, and the immaturity disguised as worldliness. Qualities I admired as a child watching him on Sci-Fi Buzz I'm profoundly glad I did not grow up to emulate as an adult.
The facts are Harlan's father died when he was very young, he was constantly in and out of trouble, he ran away from home, he worked a smattering of tough sounding blue collar jobs, he spent 2 years in the army, he was expelled from college, he was married 5 times, divorced 4, and he had no children.
Through his fiction, you further learn that he was, imagines, or romanticizes, being the only jewish boy in a small Ohio town relentless victimized by it's shitty irredeemable goy population. He loathes goys, and it rears it's head in story after story after story. He hates their dumb kids, their dumb churches, their dumb music, their dumb bowling leagues, you name it, he hates it. And he hates that they're all bigger and stronger than him at 5'3". Does he really feel this way, deep down? Who's to say. But after 1000 pages, probably 500 of which riffed on that theme, I'm left with the impression some part of him must. Often cloaked in humor, or the virtue of the civil rights movement of his day. But in his fiction, he seems less interested in the humanity of Southern Blacks, and more interested in the inhumanity of the goy.
He returns to his childhood repeatedly in his fiction, and how much better things were then, when radio plays lit his imagination on fire and his father was still alive. This is a strain of stunted growth I too suffer from, as my grumpy rants about video games will attest. I find ample share of compatriots in this regard. But something about Harlan's inability to take on the masculine burden of supporting and raising a stable family casts a darker tint to his nostalgia.
Harlan Ellison's entire public persona was a fraud. Or at least, in many of his writings, his fear that he was a fraud came through. Stories about a 4 times divorced celebrity manufacturing a shameful charismatic and funny public persona to hide how much he hated everyone. Stories about a shameless womanizer who has worked all sorts of rough and tumble blue collar jobs... but only for a few weeks so he could say he did. In reality he (I mean his character of course) has soft hands only barely acquainted with manual labor. Which reminds you Harlan the author never draws on all the odd jobs he claims to have had in his fiction, beyond name dropping them. Lastly, multiple stories where a four times divorced main character convinces his first wife to get an abortion she doesn't want, resulting in her emotional destruction which he treats as a personal offense to himself.
Are all these details that sound curiously autobiographical true? Or angles Harlan plays up for want of something to do when seated at his typewriter? At this point, with enough dots connected, I suspect the worst.
After making it through The Essential Ellison, I'm hurt. Hurt that someone I looked up to so much as a kid was in reality a hateful, developmentally stunted man. And I mean emotionally, not physically, though I suppose there was that too. A man who for 35 years picked his wounds in public, on the page. He kept them fresh, knowing it's what put food on the table. I feel sorry for him, but I also sincerely wish I hadn't known all that. Ah well.
You built an image out of the man outside of the thing he is widely known for and then are surprised to find out that your image of the man doesn't match?
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Anyone who has even tangentially heard of I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream or any of its many, many derivative works could tell exactly who he is. Harlan Ellison is a viciously angry, frequently bitter to the point of actively poisoning his readers, incredibly gifted writer.
I give him a lot of slack because anyone filled with such seething, frothing rage is the exact opposite of the people who write soft pap dripping with apathy these days. His fiction has a lot of this as a result: he raged against what he saw as the dying of the light. The works he's become most famous for are alarm bells, warnings, bitter screeds, portraits of existential evil and beasts naked shivering in the dark.
And yes, he was also writing lurid scifi for subsistence, so churning out large volumes of work and acting out as a shock jock to get attention and eyeballs on his work would feed back into it.
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Yes. And no. I loved the writing of Harlan Ellison, and he was responsible for one of the best ever Star Trek stories in all the series, "The City on the Edge of Forever", as well as some classic Outer Limits episodes.
But towards the end of his life, he beclowned himself, notably at the 2006 Hugos where he groped Connie Willis.
All through his career, he had (and cultivated) a reputation of being a grade-A pain in the ass, someone awkward to work with, someone who was a troublemaker - but who was worth it because he was just that damn good. And indeed, if you take the title of the Dangerous Visions anthologies, that's exactly what he thought science fiction could and should do, shake up the conventional pieties, show a different version of reality. He really, truly believed in the 60s and the counter-culture as "this is going to change everything". Of course, in the end, a lot of things stayed exactly the same despite it all. (And the delays, delays, and yet more delays and problems with the Dangerous Visions anthologies were also an example of classic Ellison).
On the other hand... we have to separate the artist and the art. This is a guy who could be a total dick, and yet then he writes a story that smacks you in the chops with its humanity. Sometimes he's screaming in justified outrage, in righteous anger, about a real wrong that should be redressed.
Yeah. And then he goes and writes a story like Croatoan which does not go where you expect it to go (he should be writing a slam-dunk pro-choice fable here, shouldn't he? but it's not. It's very differently not).
Ellison was someone who suffered in life, and who took advantage of that as an excuse for being an asshole. I was very angry with him in his later years. And then a while back I read a very sympathetic piece (possibly the foreword to the final Dangerous Visions that he edited after Ellison's death) by J.M. Straczynski about his friendship with Ellison and how he (probably, likely, definitely) had undiagnosed/untreated mental illness for a long time, and how he was declining physically and mentally in his later years and that explained a lot about Ellison for me and won back some of the sympathy he'd lost. This comes from an article about Straczynski and Ellison:
I don't understand how this makes him more likable or sympathetic. I find it odd that people treat mental illnesses as something separate from a person that isn't reflective of the "real" them. But this isn't like some parasite was controlling his brain, his mental illnesses, if they existed, were just as intrinsic to who he was as his good qualities. I don't see how this is different from me saying "I'm really a nice guy I'm just suffering from untreated assholeism"
Because while it doesn't excuse everything, it does explain behaviour. I was angry about it because I thought he was just being an asshole, just pushing to get away with things because he thought he was that special and entitled. Finding out that his brain was busted helped explain "okay, sometimes he genuinely couldn't help it/didn't realise what he was doing".
Genuine mental illness, like physical illness, does have an effect on you that no amount of willpower or grit or 'just decide to do better' will shift. Of course some people will use that as an excuse. But if you have a problem, and don't realise it's a problem, and don't get treatment for it because you're not aware of treatment, then it gets as much latitude as "I never knew I was diabetic and that's why I was always fainting and lacking energy because I wasn't eating correctly" would get someone.
If it's okay to take insulin to treat the problem, it's okay to take antidepressants. It's not about 'the real you', it's about 'this is you when you are healthy and this is you when you are not'.
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And indeed, most working class people treat 'being crazy' as a major character flaw akin to being cruel or lazy or greedy or whatever, while having some sympathy for those who are stupid or disabled. What goes into what bucket of 'how your mind works and you can't help it vs you need to fix that' varies from viewpoint to viewpoint and the progressive view that having a mental illness is an excuse for whatever awful thing and makes you sympathetic in the same way as a disabled person is is not only not universal, it is in this redneck's perspective actively harmful- people with the sorts of minor mental illnesses that could be treated if they'd take some damn responsibility are discouraged from doing so, instead they just harm others, even if minorly, with impunity.
Seriously lots of these 'mentally ill' people just need to go to church and call their mom.
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With bi-polar though for example, being on medication can literally turn you into a different person. My exes mother had bipolar and on medication she was a sweet Christian lady who baked cakes and wouldn't hurt a fly. Off it she was a foul mouthed, paranoid who lacked impulse control and used to beat her kids with metal coat hangers.
Which was the "real" her? The difference between a mental illness and just being an asshole, is an asshole can choose to not be so. With a mental illness you can't.
This should really be “With a mental illness, it is much more challenging not to.” I don’t give a lot of sympathy to people who use excuses like BPD or autism or whatever else to be a jerk.
Some people are dramatically helped by medication (see using Ritalin to make it easier to have executive function with AHDH) - the consequences of not having executive function should not be inflicted on others. If you struggle to remember to (for example) bring both children to school, then put a note on the doorknob, or the coffee machine, or wherever else you will definitely look. Too often, I see people who claim (for example) that they have to make a mess for their partner to clean up, but somehow the negative consequences of their actions never seem to land on themselves.
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All of this below is somewhat moot in the sense that I'm not convinced that Ellison had Bipolar.
Disturbances in cognition exist on a spectrum from "this is not recognized pathology and is just my personality structure" (like a preference for scrambled eggs, a love of baseball, or being an asshole to your girlfriend because you are insecure about your small dick) to "this is purely something with an organic cause and blaming the person for their behavior is asinine" (a classic example benign example is a granny who is violent in the hospital because she's delirious and thinks she's is in a Nazi camp because of a UTI, a classic scarier example is someone who engages in a mass shooting because they have a golf ball sized tumor pressing on a few key structures in their brain).
Cases of the former are much more legitimate to blame (whatever that means) if love of eggs cause problems. Realistically insecurity about the small dick requires some sort of sex therapy or something if the person wants to stop hurting others and have a bit better of an experience of life.
Murder granny gets put in restraints and we treat her UTI and then everyone goes about their business and forgives her afterwards.
When it comes to things in the middle of those two extremes (that is, classic mental illness) we have a similar range. On one end you have personality disorders, like borderline personality disorder. These are in truth diseases of personality construction and really tease at what a "disease" is. It's easy to not feel bad for them (although I encourage you to) and this is true to the point where people don't want to give the diagnosis because of stigma (they give bipolar instead, relevance to Ellison?).
At the other end is one of: schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, and bipolar disorder. You could debate which one and they are certainly interesting and have interesting impacts on how much sympathy and guilt we should feel (what do you mean a symptom of the disease is that he doesn't think he has a disease and that's why he doesn't take medication and then ends up hurting people?),
True Bipolar 1 with psychotic features is the most stark here. Again I doubt Ellison had this but this the most sympathy you can have. This is a person with a monster inside them that comes up abruptly and severely because they run a 5k and their metabolism of their lithium changes.
They go from total normal nice person to a violent felon who doesn't sleep, spends their entire family's money and does X,Y, and Z ends up in jail with HIV and then gets started on medication and then goes completely back to normal.
Some people do things that put them at higher rate of an episode, but many people commit no mistakes and still lose.
Living with that should increase sympathy, no?
Most people aren't as stark as the straw patient above, but that is what it can be like.
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To be fair, you’re describing about 75 percent of the major 20th century authors here. The personal dysfunction (Raymond Chandler, Ernest Hemingway, James Ellroy, David Foster Wallace), the string of failed careers with writing chosen less as a calling and more because it’s easier than working a real job (Bukowski notably, but most of them), the constant seething racial and personal axe-grinding (Phillip Roth, James Baldwin, James Ellroy). Sci-fi writers back then tended to be more functional and less of an emotional garbage fire, which is probably why this was such a surprise to you. To be fair I think it’s a big part of the reason their writing is actually interesting. Riley Sager has a stable home life and is emotionally well adjusted and unfortunately you can clearly see that on every dreary page of fish-wrap.
This is why so many successful authors were on drugs- they got to be mentally ill when they needed to be, to help them write. But individuals who are capable of writing a novel are not stopped from managing their own lives in a semifunctional manner by a little crack.
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Agreed, you can see a similar dynamic with Comedians as well.
The greats all seem to have (or had) some deep well of trauma or crazy that they would draw from.
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I’ve been a colossal fan of Jeopardy! (a long-running American trivia game show, for those unfamiliar) for most of my life. My enthusiasm for the show skyrocketed during Ken Jennings’ historic 74-game winning streak in 2004. A geeky, witty, self-deprecating guy, Jennings’ prodigious knowledge was matched by his appealing personality, making him a TV phenomenon and boosting the popularity of the show.
After returning to various Jeopardy! exhibition tournaments, cementing his legendary status, he got into the running as one of the potential candidates to replace the show’s iconic decades-long host, Alex Trebek, whose cancer diagnosis had been made public and who was nearing retirement. In 2021, Jennings was officially announced as the new official host of Jeopardy!. He has breathed new life into the show; while Trebek’s personality was aloof and almost enigmatic, Jennings is warm and jocular, frequently engaging in witty repartee with the contestants and helping to bring out their personalities. Jennings also clearly knows a lot of the answers to the questions without needing to read off the cards, allowing him to make more informed split-second judging decisions about the acceptability of contestants’ answers, and allowing him to make certain edifying clarifications and to add cool fun facts about some answers. In other words, he’s the perfect host for the show, the perfect ambassador for the brand, and the perfect steward to carry the show for decades to come.
His politics are also very obnoxiously woke. I try not to use that word very often, considering it over-used and under-defined, but I think it fairly encapsulates his public statements on politics, which can easily be found by perusing his Twitter and Bluesky accounts and, apparently, by listening to his various podcast appearances. He has the typical smug, sanctimonious approach of a guy who was the smartest person he knew for his entire youth, and who was used to winning every argument he came across due to pure cognitive processing power and verbal agility. Political dunks phrased as though they’re so self-evidently obvious that only a total dolt would fail to agree with them. A deep and abiding belief that “supporting” trans people, abolishing borders, and ending “mass incarceration” are the urgent moral responsibility of every good-thinking person.
This commitment to progressive politics has bled over into Jeopardy! itself; since Jennings took over hosting, there has been a palpable increase in the number of questions related to black writers and activists, and a Jennings has made several on-air comments (mild, but obvious to those who are attuned to them) which reveal his own politics. It’s especially disheartening to know that a man with his depth of knowledge and clearly impressive mental faculties isn’t able to see the nuance around these issues, despite the ease with which the internet allows people with even a modicum of curiosity to expose themselves to the best arguments from the other side.
Now, I do hope/plan to meet Jennings some day; I have auditioned for Jeopardy! before, making it past the initial testing phase but never getting the call. I plan to continue to audition yearly until I eventually make it on the show, where I’m confident I could make a decent showing of myself and even win some real money. It crushes me to know that someone who’s something of a minor hero of mine would, upon learning my politics, want absolutely nothing to do with me, and may even not want me to be able to appear on the show, one of my life’s dreams. I try to studiously avoid hearing anything about Jennings’ politics, not wanting to further tarnish my warm feelings toward him. My single biggest fear about being doxxed, even above the effect it’d likely have on my personal and professional relationships, is the fear that it could prevent me from having my chance to compete on the show; I try not to think about whether Jennings would want me disqualified.
Given the trajectory of many, many programs which don’t involve Mr. Jennings, it’s likely not his doing. Correlation, causation. Not that he has any reason to fight it, but if it makes you feel any better, you can probably blame faceless executives and market research.
There’s, uh, a few conclusions that you could take from that.
But I think the set of (knowledgeable & impressive faculties & nuanced opinion & wanting to talk about it & visible) is vanishingly small. Having a complicated, technical opinion on the Current Thing is inversely correlated with wanting to blast that opinion on social media. And with getting an audience when one does so. It’s probably worse when you’re competing for the attention of media executives with their own politics.
I don’t think that this is honestly much of a factor; my understanding is that Jennings has been very consistent and very vocal about his politics for many years before anyone was considering him for a major media role, and before those specific beliefs were fashionable. The guy genuinely is an old-guard Gen-X progressive, and I don’t see any evidence that he’s either played up or played down those opinions based on any mercenary career concerns. Nor do those politics appear to have had much bearing on his selection for the Jeopardy! hosting gig; he got the role because he was already an extremely well-known institution on the show, and because he genuinely earned it over a long period of time. That’d have been true whether or not his political commentary was frequent or sparse. (Although obviously his specific opinions didn’t actively harm him, which wouldn’t have been true if they’d been significantly right-of-center instead.)
Sorry, I meant that in the general case of media selection pressure, not for Ken in particular. It’s just another filter.
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I'm not sure how much of Ellison's writings are his own faults, rather than exaggerated versions of failures he's seen and done, but there's definitely a mix and I agree that it probably doesn't favor him -- the man did end up with a bipolar diagnosis late in his life, and it pretty clearly wasn't some badge-of-accomplishment diagnosis. And he definitely has some of that 'I talked to a taxi driver' rather than 'I did this enough to grok it' going on.
Tbf, my gutcheck has some of the exaggeration in The Essential Ellison feels like self-loathing, even before I knew about the BPD... but it wouldn't, wouldn't it, whether because he actually had those flaws that bad or because he felt his minor failures were the end of the world. On the other hand, it's hard to tell how much of his hating was anti-anti-semitism rather than just being a hater in general -- the man famously loathed Star Wars and Spielberg in general, and had a number of non-Jewish cause celebres like van Vogt.
On the gripping hand, it's hard to tell how many of those cause celebres he really cared about, rather than just hating their enemies: From Alabamy With Hate is the best-known example, and particularly damning because its denouement revolves around a letter from a bigot who was 'bad as mud' but 'better' than racial minorities, without much consideration of what made Ellison good rather than just better than bigots, but it's pretty consistent everywhere from race to sexual behavior to the military to his stories to convention behavior. His enemies being idiots, or nazis, or chuds, or the teeming fandom masses, or normies, or whatever... might be better than racial resentment, but it's still not good.
I don't have a lot of room to criticize a hater for hating. I do have a lot of room to criticize a man that wrote at length about how science fiction and speculative fiction aren't the same thing, who can't do anything more himself.
On one hand, there is a point where you have to kill the buddha. Most heroes have feet of clay, few philosophers can commit to the bit to Diogenes level. Especially in media there's always going to be a temptation to present someone who's better than you can be, and whatever extent the mask molds the face, it's never going to be perfect and it can't change what's already happened. It's never pleasant to recognize the extent a writer's real positions are weaker than what they present, but Litany of Tarski -- but in turn neither does a philosophy of life become wrong merely because its proponents can't live up to it. Pratchett's view had its flaws and its failings, but wanting something that isn't true, or maybe even can't be true, because it's worth the progress toward it, is an acceptable tradeoff in my eyes.
On the other, I'm trying to write up an effortpost about cyberiatrogenic conditions (and, uh, come up with a better name than that), and one of the subleads is "the things we needed to hear, from the people who should have been there to say them", and how that's incredibly dangerous. Few heroes are carved full from in-situ marble, few philosophies can survive being used every day... except in this distant or fiction view, where every consideration comes through the camera lens, at most from wholly-artifical canned challenges built to reinforce the themes of a story. It's easy to forget that, or what it means. This is a way you'll be burned, and the stovetop hurts, and you'll be burned again. That's part and parcel of how heat works. Tech has let us forget that, for short periods and for induction cooktops, but that's an artifact of memory, not of the world.
Real people, whether Ellison or a childhood friend, will not be clones of you or homonculi of what you want or want to become. Real relationships mean friction. Pratchett's view had its flaws and its failings. Carrot Ironfoundersson (mostly) doesn't and can't. Beware what extent the latter has hacked your brain.
You have been awarded the hapax legomenon price for extraordinary achievements in rationalist brainwrangling.
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I feel like this would be different if Ellison had any sort of coherent views aside from being loud and angry. What did he stand for that could outlive him? Following along with the civil rights movement? Earning a few attaboys along the way? He mostly just spilled hate across countless pages.
Like I said below, I fell in love with the man's TV persona. And I greatly enjoyed many of his non-autobiographical stories. But undergoing this deep dive into the person has been a journey into the horror of the man. Where as I naively assumed before that the TV persona was the real Ellison because it was so much more impactful than Ellison on the page, and so I assumed written Ellison to be schtick, it turns out the TV Ellison was the schtick, and the written Ellison was the genuine article.
I can only describe it like this. There is a horror film coming out called "Cannibals Rape, Murder and Consume College Coeds 3". You watch all the press junkets and the actors seem very charming and likable. You know when you see the film you'll see some shocking stuff, but you know it's not real. There are no actual cannibals eating anyone.
Then 2 months later Italian authorities arrest the cast and crew because they did in fact rape, murder and consume one of the extras when they were filming in Sicily. Do you still separate the artist from the art? I mean, it was the most amazing cannibal film you've ever seen.
Possibly the only defining feature of Ellison's entire body of work is the hate. It used to exist in a box with suspension of disbelief applied. They were just words on a page. Now I have a sneaking suspicion that more likely than not, the hate was the realest part of him he ever put out there, and it's just sad. Not fun and edgy anymore.
Yeah, that's pretty fair. I'd argue Ellison a few other bits going on (eg, themes of self-sacrifice, some of the hate including legitimate criticisms, a not-IFLS-style scienticism), but I've got of tolerance for well-aimed hate, and I can understand his public persona as a lot deeper a disappointment than Moore-style stuff.
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Kevin Spacey did this to both American Beauty and House of Cards for a lot of people pretty closely. So great analogy.
I haven’t read Ellison so I can’t really say, but it has consistently been true that among many artists of all types, suffering, restrictions and angst leads to great art (or at least, the reverse is true, conditioning on great art). The real question is, how often does art in general present actual worldviews rather than merely challenge them, or throw out fascinating ideas that we then grapple with and fill in ourselves? Quite often! I think that’s partially the point, that new ideas, perspectives, and filters can be intoxicating and intriguing. And honestly I view sci-fi writing as more art than science or engineering or something, despite the reputation and being more “cerebral” (not a bad thing). As visionary as art can often present, I think most art is actually overwhelmingly reactionary on both a personal and societal level. It’s just how art is. Once you see it you can’t unsee it, and it shows up everywhere.
So in that sense I do wonder if you put more expectations on his art than any art merits. At the same time I deeply sympathize and more specifically you might not be wrong (again never read him)
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So you mean to say, he was an artist!
The greater works are always autobiographical to some degree. In minor works, the author's own individuated personality is not strong enough to shine through ("every great philosophy hitherto has been a confession on the part of its author" [emphasis mine]).
Sometimes you won't always like the autobiographical content that is thus exposed. It won't always be admirable, it won't always speak to your own experience, etc. But you can still choose to adopt a more detached viewpoint and find what can be appreciated in it as a phenomenon for its own sake.
Of course this is not a natural and spontaneous attitude, but one that must be cultivated through diligent practice. I try to make a habit of doing mental exercises like, I imagine someone I admire, either because of their work or on a personal level or whatever, and I imagine: what if I discovered something absolutely horrifying about them? What if their own values actually turned out to be antithetical to everything I value? What if they hated free expression, what if they supported wireheading, etc. Or maybe there's something far worse than any of that, something that my conscious mind won't even let me access. And in this hypothetical I try to remind myself that, in spite of all that, there still has to be some kernel there that made me admire them in the first place, so my goal at that point would be to achieve an understanding of the phenomenon that is the person as a whole, rather than get bent out of shape about the individual things that we disagreed on.
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Your anecdote reminds me of how much H.P. Lovecraft was a xenophobic misanthrope.
But his stories wouldn't have been the same if he didn't have that deep fear and hatred.
Not justifying it. Just saying that its sometimes better to separate the art from the artist.
Lovecraft was pretty intense in his writing, but in person he was usually pretty kind to his friends and relations. Even those who belonged to racial groups that he otherwise didn’t care for, like his ex-wife Sonia Greene, who he remained on good terms with even after the divorce. And he was nice to cats.
TIL, thanks.
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The details of H.P. Lovecraft's life never bothered me. Probably because I never admired him as a human being or public persona the way I admired Harlan. So I can sit back and intellectually register that the existential dread he conjures up in so many of his stories just wouldn't hit the way it hits if the man wasn't constantly terrified of the mongrelization of his nation.
Also, well, my stance on what I believe to be the future of my nation is on record here. But it's enough to say I don't even necessarily find those stances to be offensive, and perhaps even somewhat prescient after the irrefutable evidence of the failures of multiculturalism we've all been subjected to in the countries or localities tipping white minority in the western world. But that's a separate topic.
No, my heart break with Ellison is from the fact that as a kid, I didn't love him for his work, but for his public persona. I came to his work much after the fact, and if anything, it's working backwards. I've rewatched several of those Harlan Ellison's Watching bits, and instantly fell in love with this witty outspoken firebrand telling it like it is. Then I go back to the fiction and my heart sinks at another autobiographicalish story venting his spleen about how much he hates me.
I mean, yeah. He could be funny and charming. My late father, who knew nothing about the guy, saw some of those on the Sci-Fi Channel (back when it was the Sci-Fi Channel and not Syfy or whatever they're calling it today), and he too loved them. Thought they were funny, thought they were witty, they made him laugh, and he liked Ellison.
So it goes, as another SF author said.
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