And so it ended. This last essay, calculatedly a coda to the television essays I’d written circa 1968–1972, collected in THE GLASS TEAT and THE OTHER GLASS TEAT, served as update and more-or-less final statement about the television medium. It appears as the introduction to my 1978 story collection, STRANGE WINE; and it is included here as part of the Hornbook cycle, in the spirit of completism.
Upon reflection—buttressed by rereading these forty-six pieces a decade and a half later—it becomes clear to me that what I was learning when I wrote the columns of “The Glass Teat” series, was put to effect in the Hornbook outings; and that the year I spent doing these commentaries was a transition phase, a bridge between the casual, peripatetic manner of the tv criticism, and the more structured writing in AN EDGE IN MY VOICE and HARLAN ELLISON’S WATCHING.
Throughout those years, my fiction and film/tv work was drawing most of the attention, and the non-fiction writing—perhaps because it was appearing in Southern California rather than in a national venue—was almost totally ignored. But when I insisted on including four essays in STALKING THE NIGHTMARE (1982), suddenly an audience developed for the commentaries. Mike Burgess of Borgo Press solicited a collection of essays, and did so solely because of the four pieces in STALKING. It took me by surprise, to be honest. Though I’d been writing easily as much non-fiction as stories since I’d begun my career—and had done even more work as journalist, columnist and magazine article slavey during college and the first years of professionaldom than I had as a fictioneer—I’d always downgraded the importance of the non-fiction in my own mind. Have no idea why that was so. Perhaps because, when I was learning my craft, fiction was more highly considered by the Establishment, magazines published tons of fiction, and those who wrote non-fiction usually did it from some special knowledge.
But when Burgess asked for the book that became SLEEPLESS NIGHTS IN THE PROCRUSTEAN BED, that new audience appeared; and since that first venture—somehow the two TEAT books seemed out of contention—well, everything I’ve done in the essay form has found its way into print in hardcover. Now, with the publication of the HORNBOOK, the last large chunk of commentary is on the record.
As for this final word on television, written twelve years ago, the only comment that seems needful by way of updating is this:
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Or, as we say in the teevee biz, “Whaddaya think, Bruce, can we recycle Perry Mason again? Howzabout we make him blind, quadriplegic, transvestite and miraculously remitted from AIDS? Whaddaya think?”