his CD reissue of a vinyl recording first released in 1983 and long out of print contains nine tracks which document Ellison's lectures from various gigs during the years 1981-83. Ellison's new liner notes—tinged by being written directly after the World Trade Center tragedy—introduce this reissue.
The first track, "Introduction: Caveat Ellison," finds Ellison bracing his audience for the tirades and angry, truth-telling riffs to come. He gives honest, rough-edged warning of his no-holds-barred approach, especially with regard to the language he intends to employ. Track two, "You're Short," records Ellison's banter with his audience, culminating in a longish joke intended to establish his control of a raucous crowd. "Selected Quickies" follows in third place. Ellison does a Herve Villechaize impression, and sings a few bars of several songs.
"Did You Really Mail a Dead Gopher to an Editor?" speaks to issues of justifiable revenge. The tale concerns a time when executives at a certain publishing firm violated a contract clause regarding one of Ellison's books. Frustrated by the publisher's intransigence, Ellison embarked on a campaign of both rude and sophisticated gaslighting. Ellison's deeper philosophical position on life's real values is the topic of "Bugfuck Is A Way of Life." "There is no security this side of the grave," maintains Ellison, who then goes on to illustrate, with a mix of humor and acerbity. "Carl Sagan Is a Nifty Guy" is a rousing defense of intellectualism over bone-headed ignorance.
In "Cosmic Nuhdjes" Ellison takes on the heartland, its superstitions and irrational beliefs, in the form of UFO sightings. Ellison acts as the anti-Art Linkletter in "Gee, Gang, Kids Say the Darnedest Things," recounting oddball incidents with various children. "An Edge in My Voice: Installment #54" is the most formal presentation, as Ellison reads aloud from one of his LA Weekly columns, which as a whole run earned him a Silver Pen Award. This column concerns the strange occurrence, now mostly forgotten by the general public, when a protestor outside the Washington Monument threatened to blow up the obelisk and met death instead.
Still feisty after all these years
Possibly hundreds of thousands of people have heard Harlan Ellison speak live, and millions of others have watched him on television. Even unto this current day, Ellison takes time off from creating his award-winning stories and essays to travel the globe and address audiences in any number of venues: SF conventions, college auditoriums and bookstores alike. But still, many of his fans will never have had the chance to catch one of Ellison's rambunctious stage performances, which can be likened to a blend of Mark Twain, Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor. This CD insures that now anyone can enjoy Ellison in the privacy of his or her own parlor. But make certain that homeowner's insurance is paid up, for drapes may catch fire and precious vases explode from Ellison's tirades, assaults and upbraidings.
The many faces of Ellison on display in these recordings range from the near-sentimental (his anecdotes about kids) to the unrepentantly vicious (his terrorizing of the publisher what done him wrong) to the empathetic and contrarian (his clear-eyed examination of the Washington Monument "terrorism" of an everyman named Norman Meyer). Like Walt Whitman, Ellison confesses to the full range of human behavior, denying no aspect of himself, however devilish or angelic. In this sense, he joins the great confessional writers of our day, such as Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac.
Humor is Ellison's greatest weapon, and he employs it liberally here. Most of his Cassandra-like ranting and Rabelaisian invective is laced with dollops of laughter, and the audience responds as intended, swallowing the harsh medicine more easily thanks to the sugar-coating of weird accents, melodrama and one-liners. The topicality of these two-decade-old presentations is nothing that precludes enjoyment of Ellison's observations, which still carry full weight after all this time. (And the transference from vinyl to CD has been done with technical care to make for a very listenable experience.)
What I missed were any of Ellison's stories concerning his actual fingers-on-the-keyboard writing, and any full-fledged presentation of at least one of his fictional narratives. He can deliver great anecdotes about the genesis and composition of his fictions, as attested to by his numerous printed forewords and afterwords, and my personal preference would have been to see a little of that core material. But this CD represents Ellison inveighing about the world outside the printed page, and we have to be glad to get this much down on disc for posterity.
