George Orwell, Multi-tasking, Fairy Tales, Sherlock Holmes, Harlan Ellison, and other nifty stuff.
on May 22nd, 2009Harlan Ellison’s documentary Dreams with Sharp Teeth will air on the Sundance Channel Monday:
For more than 50 years, Harlan Ellison has been a singular voice in American literature. Too often marginalized as an author of genre fiction (Ellison prefers the term “speculative fiction”) or influential, award-winning scripts for “The Outer Limits” and “Star Trek,” Ellison sits for a revealing cinematic portrait in Erik Nelson’s entertaining documentary. The notoriously combative, motor-mouthed Ellison appears in clips spanning a quarter century. Also featuring Robin Williams, who describes his friend as “a skin graft on a leper.”
Hat tip to the deeply nifty SF Signal.
Have a preview:
Buy the dvd. I did. Can’t wait to see it.
1984: The masterpiece that killed George Orwell:
He was working at a feverish pace. Visitors to Barnhill recall the sound of his typewriter pounding away upstairs in his bedroom. Then, in November, tended by the faithful Avril, he collapsed with “inflammation of the lungs” and told Koestler that he was “very ill in bed”. Just before Christmas, in a letter to an Observer colleague, he broke the news he had always dreaded. Finally he had been diagnosed with TB.
Sherlock Holmes: man of logic and reason. His creator Arthur Conan Doyle fell for every spiritualist crackpot scam in the book:
He claimed to converse with the spirits of the dead. Virtually abandoning Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle churned out books on spiritualism and addressed vast audiences around the world on the subject. He proudly adopted the sobriquet “the St Paul of the New Dispensation”, ruffling some feathers along the way. In North America he clashed with Harry Houdini, an illusionist, who argued that all spiritualists’ “tricks” could be replicated by a competent magician.
In praise of the distractions of the internet. Print this one out. Read. Reread. Save it. Reread it again.
This doomsaying strikes me as silly for two reasons. First, conservative social critics have been blowing the apocalyptic bugle at every large-scale tech-driven social change since Socrates’ famous complaint about the memory-destroying properties of that newfangled technology called “writing.” (A complaint we remember, not incidentally, because it was written down.) And, more practically, the virtual horse has already left the digital barn. It’s too late to just retreat to a quieter time. Our jobs depend on connectivity. Our pleasure-cycles—no trivial matter—are increasingly tied to it. Information rains down faster and thicker every day, and there are plenty of non-moronic reasons for it to do so. The question, now, is how successfully we can adapt.
Isabel Paterson, the forgotten writer who gave Ayn Rand many of her ideas:
Her idea was simply to leave people alone to make their own investments, to earn profits and keep them, and to liquidate unprofitable enterprises. History backed her up. She remembered the nation’s relatively quick recovery from the economic crisis of her girlhood, the depression of the 1890s: “This country experienced bankruptcy in the nineties. Part of the loss was borne by foreign bondholders. That part of the situation is now reversed. It is a much worse bankruptcy. But that is all it is.” She knew that once the incompetent were permitted to go bankrupt, the competent could “pick up the pieces.”
An exploration of the history of fairy tales:
“It has been said so often that the folk invented and disseminated fairy tales that this assumption has become an unquestioned proposition,” Bottigheimer writes in the introduction to her most recent book, Fairy Tales: A New History (State University of New York Press, 2009). “It may therefore surprise readers that folk invention and transmission of fairy tales has no basis in verifiable fact. Literary analysis undermines it, literary history rejects it, social history repudiates it, and publishing history … contradicts it.”
Interesting stuff in the Fairy Tale link! Although I am of the camp that thinks Bottigheimer is off her rocker by completely dismissing oral tradition. She also seems excessively Euro-centric, what with overlooking “rise” stories in other cultures (no reference to Asian or African versions, I note – even though I believe both have versions of Cinderella type stories).
Me, I think there’s a mix, both of oral tradition and definite literary creation. Off the cuff, I would say that Odysseus’ adventures are the literary creation of Homer, while his version of the Trojan War itself is a literary distillation of an oral tradition. I believe that the story of Beowulf himself is a literary creation of the poet’s, and not based on any oral tradition about Beowulf. I make that deduction in part from the fact that the character of Beowulf appears nowhere else in the literary references of the period. But Robin Hood’s legend is built out of a long and varied oral tradition.
So, I’m a “both this and that” person.
Oh, and Harlan’s comments in that clip! Hee! Love it!
But I wonder, if the woman calling about the commentary had asked for a price quote from him, what would he have said? I’m guessing he might have actually been reasonable, if Warners had discussed the issue at all. Heh.
Thanks for the heads up on the documentary, Colleen. I had seen previews of it in the past but wasn’t sure if it was going to be a straight-to-dvd feature or not. I set my Tivo just to make sure in the event that I forget. Next paycheck I’ll snag the dvd perhaps.
If you’re going to be profiting off of someone’s work, you better believe the person will want compensation and yet a lot are surprised by this concept!
It is a bit ironic that Doyle, who created a character that showed how circumstances can be explained using logic and observation, was in La-La Land and such a rube.
I watched a special about Houdini and it talked about how Doyle led Houdini to become someone who went after the Mediums.
What had happened was that shortly after Houdini’s mother died – who meant the world to him – Doyle offered to let his wife do “spirit writing” to contact Houdini’s dead mother. Doyle’s wife wrote out some sentences in English and had the symbol of the cross on the pad she wrote on.
This infuriated Houdini because 1) his mother couldn’t speak English and 2) she was the wife of a rabbi, so she wouldn’t make the sign of the cross.
He then understood that a lot of the people going to mediums weren’t just suckers, they were people who had suffered a great loss and were looking for some closure/solace. So after that night, he went about exposing the frauds.
While I recall hearing about Houdini’s anti-spiritualism, I did not know the details! Very cool, Jeremy!
I’m going to do a post about the time I saw a spiritualist, and I would love to have people pipe in and let me know if they’ve ever been to a fortune teller.
I love all the quotes! And I’m definitely tuning in to Sundance Monday. Nice pics of the garden — all you need in the one with the 1/2 barrels is some dude in a tri-cornered hat with a musket…
Argh! I do not have Sundance! Curse my cruel fate which forces me to depend on snail mail!
I do love being able to turn on the internet every day and read something fascinating: The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Journal of Hgher Education, Vanity Fair. I don’t know if I’m getting any smarter, but I’m closer to the smart stuff.
Thanks for the Harlan clip. That was great! Harlan mellow! Perhaps after a lobotomy.
I don’t believe I have Sundance either but I am checking. Hold on! – i do have it. Whoo Hoo!