The Observer, February 25, 2005
Volume XXXVII, Issue 19
Up close & personal with Harlan Ellison
Award-winning writer and film maker Harlan Ellison, who has written more than 75 books, thousands of articles, and episodes for TV such as Star Trek and The Twilight Zone looks back on life.
On college visits:
Harlan Ellison: My lectures are not like lectures, which is, by the way, the correct way to use the word "like." My lectures are very much the way Mark Twain worked or Lenny Bruce worked or George Carlin works, and I can't stand to be bored so I swore many years ago when I started going to colleges that I would never bore anybody, and so most of my lectures are funny. I try to talk about important things but i say them in funny ways.
MT: What are your feelings about coming to Case next week?
I have discovered over the last 10 or 12 years that people know more and more about less and less, and you would think with the access to the Internet and with libraries, which they don't go to anymore, that they would be getting smarter, and they would have more information at their disposal and at their beck and call, so when I go in and talk to them, I don't have to explain everything or see them stare at me with blank faces.
The question was how do you feel about going back to Case; I have no problem with Case at all, I've lectured there before and I've always had a good time. What my concerns are these days is that no matter on what low level I speak or I pitch my information it's going to go over the heads of half the people there.
I wander through the world getting older and older by the minute trying to keep up with everything and -I try to stay very much cool- and man I can't listen to those singers on American Idol. They all sound alike and every word has five syllables.
MT: So you think society is getting worse because people aren't searching for the information and it's being filtered?
HE: Well, you hit it right on the head. That's a logical thing to assume. The less people know, the easier to make them vote for someone like Schwarze-negger or George W. Bush. I mean, if you look at the way the American public got sucked into this war in Iraq and lied to -just simply lied to- nobody seems to care. Nobody says "Jeez, we outta throw this man right out of office." Whether the war was right or wrong is not my concern. I mean, I was in the army back in 1957, '59 so I'm not a Communist; I'm not even a Democrat for Christ's sake. I'm for chaos, but yeah I think the world does get worse.
On staying current:
I'm gonna be 71 in May, and I take it very, very seriously that I stay in touch with everything, and not get crazy behind stuff that I used to like, and say "You know, well we should have vinyls and no CDs," I got 'em both, and I like all kinds of music, but boy I have a hard time with rap, man. Rap music is like an oxymoron to me, like military intelligence or giant shrimp.
MT: What is the best medium to express your creativity?
HE: It depends... First of all, I cannot draw. I can see everything in my head and I've been an art director, and I can tell artists what to do to get the picture I want, but I have no talent as an artist in that way. Yet, I've done comic books, and I love comic books. I think they're the most perfect medium because you have the advantages of the written word, you can use the internal monologue -which you can't in movies or on the stage- and I don't believe for one second that a picture is worth a thousand words. I think a thousand words is worth a thousand words. They're different items.
If you want to be, it seems to me, a fully-realized creator of artistic works, you gotta work in every medium. I've won Grammys for spoken word recordings, I do voiceovers for cartoons, I've written movies, I've written television [episodes], newspaper columns, all kinds of essays, non-fiction books, and I've written a lot of fiction. Seventy-six books on that many subjects, and when they ask me "Are you a science fiction writer?" I say "No, no I just happened just to be a writer who had written occassionally on science fiction." Please don't stick that label on me. I just get crazy and kill whoever asks that, and then I eat their liver with some nice faba beans.
On the writer's life:
It's a tough life. Writing is a tough life. There was a great sports writer who said, "Oh, writing's easy. All you gotta do is open a vein and bleed into your typewriter," and that's what it's like. You work hours that if you were working for somebody, you'd quit! And under conditions if you were working for somebody, you'd think "This guy's a slavedriver. I'm getting the hell out of here."
I've got a terrific life. I have a great marriage with a sensational wife, I got a 7000 [square]-foot home on a mountain top in the middle of Los Angeles, quarter of a million books in the house, all the music that I'd ever want to listen to, and I've got terrific friends. Robin Williams comes over to the house and we play with our transformer robots.
