INSTALLMENT 7: 1 JANUARY 81
PUBLISHED 10 MARCH 81 FUTURE LIFE #26 COVER-DATED MAY
Sitting here listening to an absolutely superb recording of Arnold Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 2 in F-Sharp Minor, Opus 10 (1908), performed by The Sequoia String Quartet on a Nonesuch Digital pressing (D-79005). A miraculous series of musical entities that finally, in the fourth movement, surges into a kind of cosmic atonality. As appropriate for background as anything I might have selected to accompany the task of writing a column that replies to your many letters. I warn you, some of you are veering dangerously near to sanity in your remarks.
As usual, most of you can’t follow simple directions. I specifically begged you not to write letters, to send postcards with your comments or questions simply and directly stated. So of course hordes of you wrote long and dithyrambic letters in envelopes that were cleverly sliced off when the nameless person at Future Life committed a federal offense by opening mail addressed to me with some sort of berserk guillotine machine. In future, chums, I’ll only answer post cards. Letters will be heaped immediately on a bonfire and you’ll miss out on getting that sick attention you all seem to need.
Thank yous are herewith extended to the several hundred people who wrote in requesting the Asimov essay and followed the directions by enclosing a stamped self-addressed envelope and the words ASIMOV ESSAY on the outside. Those have all gone off. I even returned the 15¢ to the lady who assured me in this life nobody gets nothin’ for nothin’. What a cynic. I told you it was a public service.
And so to the mail at hand.
Douglas Gray of Johnson City, New York was annoyed by the L-5 Society advertisement in Future Life #20, the first issue in which my column appeared. He took umbrage at the Society’s solicitation of funds to oppose the Moon Treaty. He made some very sensible observations about the arrogance of the human race in its desire to “colonize” space and compared it to the ethnocentrism of the European nations that “colonized” South America (for instance Spain, that “colonized” whole civilizations out of existence while introducing such cultural necessities as the Inquisition). He believes the Moon Treaty is a rational way to keep the lunar landscape from becoming yet another territorial imperative battlefield for the human race, and he asks my position on this question.
I must confess I know less than I ought about such an important matter. I’ve tried wading through mountains of L-5 material, sent to me from every corner of the globe, but most of it is so badly written and obtuse that I have never been able to work up the sufficient interest to do my homework. I have a gut feeling that any organization that seriously tries to further the space program is an okay outfit, but in my reading I also get a resonance that I’ve detected when dealing with Scientologists, members of Mensa, players at Dungeons & Dragons and suchlike role-filling games, and true believers who know with a messianic fervor that science fiction is better than any other kind of literature. It occurs to me that even as mild a querulousness as that will net me hundreds of feverish letters from L-5 proselytizers attempting to “correct my thinking” as born-again types have tried to “correct my thinking.” I urge them not to bother. I’m not that firm in my concerns. Just sorta chatting idly about it, friends.
Dozens of you, like Rick Eshbaugh of Greenfield, Wisconsin and Marc Russell of Los Angeles and Pat NoLastName in Minneapolis, have sent me lists of irrationalities to supplement the congeries I entered here several issues ago. I’m saving them all up for a later column.
Dianne Channell of Santa Fe is a terrific human being who has subscribed, she says, because of my column. Her husband is also nifty, because he recommended Richard Hofstader’s excellent study ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN AMERICAN LIFE, which I commend to you. She also wanted the September through January issues of Future Life because her subscription started late and she wanted the columns she’d missed. Well, she’s not missing as many as she thought because Future Life isn’t published monthly, it’s published every seven weeks, or eight times a year, so An Edge in My Voice appeared in August, September, November, December and February. What this means in terms of what Ms. Channell is missing, I do not know. All I know for sure is that she should write to the subscription and back number fulfillment department where yet another nameless personage will lose her request. This is what we call one of life’s little challenges.
Steven Philip Jones of Cedar Rapids, Iowa read a story of mine in another magazine, a story in which a writer tells his heirs to build dorm rooms so struggling young authors can live at his large home after he’s dead, where they can write in peace and seclusion. Mr. Jones writes me to ask if the place really exists, if it’s here at my house, and how he can take up residence. Mr. Jones seems to have trouble differentiating between fiction and reality. There are such places, of course, and they are called writers’ retreats or workshops, but one usually has to pay, or get a grant to live in such an operation. My home ain’t one of those. And though I usually have one or another of my writer-friends hanging out here in Ellison Wonderland, the operative word is friend. As sincere and talented and wonderful a person as Mr. Jones may be, I assure you that if he were to turn up at my door with a rucksack and a battered Royal portable, I would sic my gargoyles on him. I have spent many years finding my sanctuary, and I frankly don’t want it festooned with hungry writers.
Peter & Kathleen in Seattle: I didn’t write “the taste for Armageddon,” whatever it is, and if I ever saw Ray Milland and Jane Wyman in The Second Time Around I have forgotten it.
Clarice Dickey of Hartford, Connecticut asks me what music I listen to while writing. She read somewhere that I cannot write without music blaring. She asks if punk or New Wave is conducive to my working situation. First, she’s correct. I work to music, as indicated by the reference to Schoenberg at the top of this column. Second, with the exception of Root Boy Slim and the Sex Change Band, the Lamont Cranston Band and a little Elvis Costello, I outgrew rock a long time ago and find most of the shit being listened to today so devoid of craft or message that I would sooner listen to disco, which makes me wanna womit, so that answers that. (And again, I’ll get a thousand letters from wimps extolling the manifest virtues of the B-52’s or The Dead Kennedys or X or Red Crayola or whichever overnight hot flash has you drooling at the moment. And though I’ve been listening to and enjoying Captain Beefheart for more years than some of you have been extant, that does not mean I confuse the dreck Tower Records has stacked at point of entry with genuine artistry. So you need not write me trying to “correct my thinking.” Arthur Byron Cover spends many of his waking—and several of his sleeping—hours trying to get me to listen to groups who run the risk of being electrocuted by their own Fenders when the Clearasil smeared over their paws and faces carries the current. And one nuhdz for rock in my life is enough.)
What I do listen to is primarily classical; a lot of old jazz heavy into Django Reinhardt, Bob Dorough, Ellington, Monk, all the early sides Miles cut on Prestige, Bird, Prez, Art Tatum; big band stuff from the Thirties and Forties; Moody Blues still holds up, Richie Havens, Return to Forever, Stevie Wonder, Mike Nesmith, Dave Grisman, Hubert Laws, Willie Nelson, Alan Price, Peter Allen; a lot of old Al Kooper stuff and a lot of old Gerry Mulligan cuts; Chick Corea, Dory Previn, Billy Joel, Dick Feller, Howard McGhee, Stephane Grappelli.
But mostly I like classical music. I won’t run down the list, I’ll just recommend a special nifty album that I managed to luck onto recently that you will go nuts over, if your brains haven’t been turned to spackling compound by repeated exposure to The Germs, The Damned, Tortured Puppies or The Plasmatics. (These last four groups I got from Arthur Cover.) (My all-time favorite name for a group stands unchallenged, even with the monstrous inventiveness of the New Wave appellations. It is: JoJo & The Sixteen Screaming Niggers. Now that’s class!)
The record I urge you to order—by mail is its only current availability—is a most unusual rendering of Bach’s Partita No. 3 in E Major, Poulenc’s Sonata and (this is a stunner) Bartok’s Roumanian Folk Dances (originally written for full orchestra) as performed by Tatsuo Sasaki on xylophone, with Howard Wells at the piano. I am not much one for “novelty” renditions of classical works—Tomita, for instance, bores my ass off—but Mr. Sasaki’s interpretation of the Bartok Dances is, simply put, astonishing. I have written two new stories to this music already, and if you crave a singular listening experience I cannot recommend highly enough this album (Microsonics CG003, $8.00 including postage, available directly from Tatsuo Sasaki, 5842 Henley Drive, San Diego, California 92120). You may use my name when ordering so the gentleman will know whence comes all this attention.
But my best working-to music are the film scores of Ennio Morricone. You may know his sound from the Sergio Leone Italian westerns—A Fistful of Dollars, The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, etc.—but you probably don’t know that he’s done almost five hundred film scores, songs, albums of background music, television tracks, arrangements, orchestrations, canonical and ecclesiastical works, full orchestra pieces for modern classicism, incidental music and what all. His “sound” ranges from the dramatic exuberance of, say, The Big Gundown, a 1967 Lee Van Cleef oater, to the exquisite loneliness of Terry Malick’s film Days of Heaven, for which work he was nominated for an Oscar. Morricone is my best companion when I’m deep in the world of what I’m writing.
Which probably answers Ms. Dickey’s question more fully than she might have wanted. But you asked.
George Andrews of Cleveland, Ohio writes to buttress my recommendation that you pay no attention to astrology; and he offers the Bible as support. He points out that in the Old Testament God says do not believe in astrologers, soothsayers, necromancers or the like; believe in me only. Which is keen, having God on my side…except it seems a bit self-serving on God’s part. I mean, if I were running for Supreme Deity, I’d say the same thing. Now if God had said don’t believe in them and don’t believe in me, believe in yourself, then I’d feel a lot easier about aligning myself with Him. Or Her. Or It. Or Them. Or None of the Above.
Alma Jo Williams of the James A. Baker Institute for Animal Health at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York picks a semantic tibia with me as follows:
“In…your first column you make this statement: ‘Those millions go to maintaining the status quo, also known as entropy. I am foursquare for chaos; I am anti-entropy.’
“Status quo is NOT entropy. Entropy, as understood by the physical chemist, etc., is the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics which states that matter and energy can only be changed in one direction, i.e., usable to unusable, available to unavailable, or order to disorder. As one of my Physical Chemistry instructors neatly put it, entropy is a measure of messiness. The opposite is enthalpy which is the extracting of useful work from the energy.
“If you are for chaos, you are pro-entropy. (It takes energy just to maintain the status quo. As the Red Queen said to Alice, ‘You have to run as hard as you can just to stay in one place.’) So much for thermodynamics.”
Hmpphh!
Definition four, THE RANDOM HOUSE DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE; page 477; column 2:
“Homogeneity, uniformity, or lack of distinction or differentiation: the tendency of the universe toward entropy.”
Ms. Williams is, of course, correct.
Further, deponent sayeth not.
Greg Higginbotham of Springfield, Missouri sent along some photos taken of me when I was lecturing there four years ago, and asks how I view the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan to the throne. Apart from the small succor I derive from the knowledge that historically we go to war under Democratic presidents and have extended periods of economic upturn under Republican presidents (and Reagan believes, as did Calvin Coolidge, that “the business of America is Business”), I recall with a shiver Ronnie’s instant response to the Free Speech Movement sit-ins at Berkeley in 1964 when he was California’s governor and a member of the university’s board of regents: he called out the troops and the police, and almost singlehandedly lit the fire that became a conflagration of student-administration confrontations for almost a decade (between January 1st and 15th of 1968 there were 221 major demonstrations involving nearly 39,000 students on 101 American campuses). Yes, it was the times, but doesn’t it give you a momentary shiver to know that at the initial pressure point Ronald Reagan had the choice of rational negotiation and irrational force…and chose the latter?
That, and Reagan’s selection of anti-ecologist James G. Watt as Secretary of the Interior (his first utterance upon being named to the post was, “I’m not against ecologists, I’m just against ecological extremists, those who would stand in the way of commercial development of unused lands”), make me shudder at the idea of Bonzo’s playmate in the White House. But then, I voted for Carter the first time around (Anderson this time), and I was sorely disappointed; so what the hell do I do now?
Richard Latimer of Dayton, Ohio asks me to do a column on filmmaker Peter Watkins (The War Game, Privilege, Punishment Park) or an interview. Well, an interview isn’t likely: last I heard, Watkins was in Australia and I have no plans to go tromping off to the bottom of the world unless Future Life pays my way, which seems unlikely. But Mr. Latimer enclosed a dandy long quote from Watkins that I want to reprint here, not only to encourage you to look into his films, which are exemplars of social conscience, as well as being damned good cinema, but because it speaks to my intentions with this column. You see, when I first engaged to do these screeds, Kerry O’Quinn, one of the publishers, had some trepidation about what he termed my “frequent pessimism.” He was afraid I’d unload a lot of negative vibes on youse folks and that would run sales down the tube. I tried to tell him that I’m actually a cynical optimist and that when I do a smash&grab on some subject it’s usually out of a sense of viewing-with-alarm. Well, I’m not sure Kerry is complacent even now that I’ve been at this for seven installments. I get the feeling that he doesn’t know quite how tough or lackadaisical you can be. I have faith in your ability to deny the corrupt state of the world to your own ease of existence, chums; and I know my pitiful rages won’t have much effect. But as to this canard of being pessimistic, I offer Peter Watkins’s comments, as published in Joseph A. Gomez’s biography of the director:
“I should have thought that you would have been bloody glad that I didn’t come out with a silver tray with answer 475 and say, ‘Here you are, darling; go home and take this piece of dogma.’…If I were a pessimist, I would have made Laurel and Hardy reruns since 1965. I think our society is totally caught up in the abuse and misuse of these words ‘optimistic’ and ‘pessimistic.’ I don’t believe that one is pessimistic to look at very real problems that we are involved in…I think I am an optimist to talk about these problems in the sense that if I don’t talk about them, it would be because I couldn’t care less about humanity or the potential of mankind. But I do care very much, which I think is optimistic. I also care enough to make these films. I also care enough about your own sense of responsibility not to do what is done with you every day in your life—in education, in television—which is to force feed you with directives, force-feed you with answers, force-feed you with directions to move—until you are zapped left, right, up and down. I won’t do that to you. I will try and show you a problem as hard and as strongly as I can; but what to do about it, even if I had the answer, which I don’t usually, I would never say to you. I would never reveal it. I would chew it over in my own head; because I would leave you to try to develop your own strength to find the answer.”
Liz Wilderson of Leavenworth, Kansas wants me to do a column on the Hugo Awards and asks how fans can vote for the Hugos and how they can obtain the annual list of nominees. Despite my having won 7 ½ of the large metal things, I am the last guy in the world to chatter about the Achievement Awards of the World Science Fiction Convention. I won’t go into any long diatribe about the Hugos and how they’re awarded, save to note that Richard Lupoff has just had published through Pocket Books a splendid anthology called WHAT IF? VOL. 1, subtitled Stories That Should Have Won the Hugo; a collection that includes as strong and convincing a set of arguments for the revamping of the Hugo-awarding mechanism as any I might cobble up.
The paperback is only $2.50 and I commend it to your attention more for the Lupoff editorials contained therein than for the stories, all of which are gems; which says a lot about how important I think Lupoff’s comments are.
As for how to vote, well, all you have to do is become a member of the World Convention each year, and you automatically get a ballot. As to how to join a convention, and how to obtain a list of the nominations as soon as they’re released, well, you might care to subscribe to one of the newsletters of the sf / fantasy world: Fantasy Review (monthly, Robert A. Collins, 500 N.W. 20th Street, Boca Raton, FL 33431, single copy $2.75, $20 per year). This publication will give you the address of the current WorldCon convention committee, and will keep you abreast of the selections. Vote for me. I’m greedy.
Lori Bailey of Alton, Illinois suggests that the two books of tv criticism I wrote (THE GLASS TEAT and THE OTHER GLASS TEAT) were not enough horror for me to suffer and that I should do it, as Count Basie puts it, one more once! I suggest she read that one more once written as the introduction to my book STRANGE WINE. It is as much update on the ghastliness of tv as I can muster in these, my declining twilight years.
David A. Green: forget it. Roderick Sprague, Moscow, Idaho: dumb idea, forget it. James J.J. Wilson, Downers Grove, Ill; Cadence Gainey, Hatfield, Penn; Robert Wayne Richardson, Bristol, Tenn; and Christy Ory, Scottsdale, Ariz; thank you thank you thank you. You are each and every one a credit to your species. Chris Summers of Hanover Park, Illinois and Kim Tankus of Dusseldorf, West Germany: don’t send me your stories. I don’t read stories submitted to me. I’ve already said why in a past column. Sorry to cut you off, but it ain’t me, babe.
Eric Shinn of Columbia, Maryland: yes, I may have written an introduction to a book of stories by Keith Laumer, who was once my friend, but we have not been friends for a long time and the last thing in this life I’d want to do is get involved doing the screenplay for a Laumer book. As far as I’m concerned, Mr. Laumer no longer exists in my world. I’m sure the feeling is mutual. And that’s how I want to keep it. Try Paul Schrader or Stirling Silliphant.
Tom Looby of Vergennes, Vermont writes to say he read my apocalyptic introduction to APPROACHING OBLIVION and he’s scared about what’s happening to the human race, and wants me to tell him what to do. Well, I’ll tell you, Tom, it’s a long and arduous process, this what-to-do business. Every time we cut off the censors at the pass, some bunch of self-appointed guardians of morality like Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority rise out of the slime-pits to burn books. Every time someone beats an institutionalized criminal like, say, a movie studio or a tv network for plagiarism in a court of law, a dozen other thugs steal a little more craftily. Eternal vigilance, kiddo. You have to be as smart as you can be, as tough as you can be, and as pragmatic as you can be. Don’t believe everything you read or everything they tell you. Keep asking questions. And when you get angry about something that’s going down, in your school, your town, your state or the world at large—DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. Put yourself on the line! Risk a little! And even if you only do a little bit of good, you’ll feel like a bloody hero, you’ll alter the state of the universe a tot, and you’ll get tougher for the next time. Here’s one to start on now: help get gun control passed in the U.S. Senate. No more Lennons being gunned down senselessly. Don’t buy that bullshit about people needing to protect themselves from crooks with guns. Most of the murders every year aren’t by crooks or muggers…they’re by people getting pissed at people and blowing them away. Or guns in the hands of nutcases like the one who offed Lennon. Gun control, gun elimination can help. In a big way. And I say this as a resident of Los Angeles, which in 1980 became #1 Murder City in America—1,042 slayings.
Jim Dawson of Sterling, Virginia wants me to do a column on vasectomies, noting my history of having had one. It’s on the way, Mr. Dawson. Most of the time, though, I just sit on top of the silent tv set, smiling at the ceiling; otherwise, it hasn’t had a deleterious effect on me. Hmmmmmmmm.
Some of you, like Sharon Norberg of Miami, Florida, wrote me letters that required no answers. Mrs. Norberg wanted to tell me how much she liked the Star Trek movie. Others wanted to deliver long panegyrics on topics almost as boring. I have read as much of as many of these letters as I can. (Sometimes I fall asleep.) Before Mrs. Norberg lectures me on how my putting down of dull movies can inhibit tender souls’ dreaming of the future, I suggest she do something concrete about getting the Equal Rights Amendment passed in Florida, a matter that has much more immediacy for dreams of the future than her plonking down $5 time after time to see the exploitation of what little love remains for Star Trek by its fans.
While we’re on the moronic subject of the Star Trek movie, back in April a Mrs. Lisa Baker of Castle Rock, Colorado wrote Starlog columnist Bjo Trimble asking her to rap my knuckles because I had, in her view, made an error in noting when I reviewed the film—Paramount’s contribution to the Ennui Enhancement of life in general—that an ornament on a headband worn by Persis Khambatta hung on the left side in one shot, then over the right on a follow-up. This seeming error in my otherwise flawless reportage of the year’s dullest movie apparently drove Mrs. Baker, a grown woman, into paroxysms of anger. Bjo wrote her, quite properly, that her Starlog column was intended for other purposes than vilifying Ellison and that it was none of her, Bjo’s, business and that if Mrs. Baker was that outraged at my assailing her sacred cows, she ought to write me directly. Since I have not heard from Mrs. Baker directly, but since the matter has come up nonetheless via a Xerox copy of her letter, forwarded to me by my editor, Bob Woods, let me just say this:
Mrs. Baker is a pathetic case. A grown woman so distanced from reality that her ire is raised enough to prompt the writing of a letter not about how high her taxes are, not about how much she’s paying for gas, not about nuns being shot to death by government troops in El Salvador, not about gun control or abortion (pro or con) or Nestlé selling death-dealing baby formula to underprivileged countries…but about a minor point in an undistinguished movie.
I may well be taken to task for pillorying this woman. What harm is she doing by objecting to my alleged error in a critical article, it may be said. Why kill a gnat with a howitzer? Well, I’ll tell ya, gang, it’s like this: Mrs. Baker is a classic example of what many of you have become. And the name for that is zombie.
Mrs. Baker will no doubt reject this. I’ll be apprised in short order that Mrs. Baker has led the fight for equal rights in Colorado, that she cooks meals for shutins and old folks every day and then drives them over to the recipients free of charge, that she rescued eleven orphans from a burning building, that she discovered a cure for bone-marrow cancer last week, that she is a serious political cartoonist whose work in the Castle Rock Blat has brought dozens of crooked politicians to book, that she is beloved of her family and friends, that she has written the definitive social conscience work on the Dreyfus Case, and that in her spare time she does RN work at the local leprosarium. No doubt I’ll be told all of this, to prove how shallow and vicious I am in calling Mrs. Baker a zombie.
But until such time, I judge only by the internal evidence of her letter. A letter that is concerned with silliness, a letter that reveals her dander is gotten up not by what goes on in the real world, not even what goes on in the slapdash world of an imbecile movie, but what goes on in a piece of criticism of that slapdash movie! I submit Mrs. Baker as an object-lesson to all of you who justify your obsessions with movies whose sole purpose in this life is to make money for multinational corporations that own movie studios by lying to yourselves that these movies bear some relation to life, either as we know it today or as it pertains to the future.
I submit that all of the multi-million-dollar monstrosities you’ve slavered over in the past five years—from Star Wars to Alien—and I liked Alien a lot—that not all of them, taken in totality, equal by one one-millionth the humanity contained in The Elephant Man or The Competition. Not one of them says as much to us as human beings, instills as much hope in us, speaks as clearly to the human condition as do Paths of Glory or A Child is Waiting or The Deer Hunter.
Even to discuss empty and empty-headed persiflage like the Star Trek movie in the same breath with Oh, God! or, again, The Elephant Man is to elevate transient commercial dreck to the level of serious attention. And for Mrs. Baker to spend even a microsecond of concern on my being right or wrong about such a minor cavil in the first place, even to dignify her concern by suggesting all my critical faculties should be called into question because I didn’t perceive—as she suggests—that the second shot of Persis Khambatta was seen in a mirror, indicates that Mrs. Baker read the critique and then went back to see the goddamned movie again, just to be able to say I was wrong. Now Mrs. Baker may well be correct. That second shot may have been a mirror reflection (though if a viewer sharp enough to see that the ornament was hanging on the opposite side couldn’t tell it was a mirror image, that says something about the quality of direction in the film) but I’d have to go see the film a second time to ascertain same. And frankly, if I need a couple of hours sleep I won’t pay $5 to Paramount for the privilege, I’ll just reread Mrs. Baker’s letter and doze off.
I attack not Mrs. Baker herself, but what she has become. A person whose concerns are trivial in a world where triviality and mediocrity are used to keep us diverted, entertained, oblivious to what Tom Looby has begun to suspect, that we are in trouble, that we are becoming ever more helpless because great forces push and bend us, that we must be alert and awake and aware…and never permit ourselves to forget that sports and trash movies and dope and God-shouting and all the other toys of the Status Quo, whether called Entropy or something else, are intended to turn our senses and our anger away from the desire to fight back.
Mrs. Baker attacks the wrong foe. Television is her enemy; the venal corporations that put together a bad movie to take her $5 from her are the enemy; the designers of products that fall apart on schedule and for which she cannot get replacement parts are the enemy; stupidity and triviality are her enemies. Our taste in films may differ, Mrs. Baker, but when I walk out of the theater, at least I live in the Real World. God or whoever’s in charge only knows where you live!
There are more letters. Seventeen more as I sit here. But I’ve spent too much time on Mrs. Baker and a few others. So I’ll have to save them for the next roundup, just a mere six months away. I hope this interlude of sweetness and light has buoyed up your spirits. Feel free to drop me a postcard. Workouts like this merely get me in shape for the serious work to be done.
And have an angry New Year.