Harlan Ellison story

In a previous post I've mentioned Harlan Ellison.

Just came across a great story about him: 

I get emails about Ellison stories. I get personal questions about “Harlan stories.” A “Harlan story” isn’t a fiction; it’s the detailing of a personal encounter with the famously rambunctious author. Fans prize these as much as they do the actual work, which is sad. Though I do have a Harlan story, it is a minor one. A few years ago, a friend told me about a documentary she had seen, about Ellison. “He reminded me of you,” She said. “A lot.” She invited me over to watch her recording of Dreams With Sharp Teeth, directed and produced by Erik Nelson, and co-written by Ellison himself. I found it fawning and sentimental, and wrote a review on my blog. Someone (not me!) rushed the URL over to Ellison’s website, where he holds court on what’s essentially a Web 1.0 guestbook, and everyone started fuming. His fans-cum-epigones took grammar school-quality cheap shots against my surname — “Mamatas? Is it contagious?” — and my erstwhile career as term paper artist, which I once detailed on this site. Then Ellison himself left some notes. They were bombastic, and far more articulate than the comments from the fans. One read, in part, “Goodbye Bradbury. Goodbye Lieber [sic]. Goodbye Aeschylus. Goodbye Pliny the Elder…” and continued at length. By the time he got describing me as a “manque, a poetaster, a no-price for whom the internet is a last chance slave market where, for free, he can bleat to his shrunken little heart’s delight,” my wife Olivia, who had been reading along over my shoulder, said to me, “Wow, I see what you mean. He really is a great writer! No wonder you like him so much.”

You can read the full blog post here.

See also:

Eckhart Tolle, my pain body and me

Blogging as a writer

Pretentious horseshit that happens to be true #1

High-wire act

All books are not for all people

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