A Distant Soil by Colleen Doran

Harlan 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.”