Authors Electric

A young Ellison, at his Olympia SG 3 Alas, we seem to be losing all the great ones lately. Well, this is a common illusion when some beloved figure dies. Last week it was Harlan Ellison, who died June 28, just a week ago in his sleep at 84, after suffering a stroke in 2014. Ellison was probably the least known famous writer in the world. To me and a lot of writers who were his fans, he epitomized everything the brilliant, provocative, flamboyant, prolific, wild-eyed writer ought to be - and usually fall short of. Whatever one thinks of his prodigious body of work, one could not fail to admire his ferocity as a creative spirit and human being. "Born without an off-switch," his friends said. He went, Energizer-Bunny-like, fully until he stopped. Jewish by birth, atheist by self-proclamation, Ellison lived consistently by the three great moral questions of Rabbi Hillel the Elder : "If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? "If I am for myself alone, t...

"The other one he loved like a slave, like a madman and like a beggar. Why? Ask the dust on the road and the falling leaves, ask the mysterious God of life; for no one knows such things. She gave him nothing, no nothing did she give him and yet he thanked her. She said: Give me your peace and your reason! And he was only sorry she did not ask for his life." That’s Lt. Glahn speaking, in Knut Hamsun’s 1894 novel, Pan. Later, John Fante would take one of the phrases there for the title of his 1939 novel, Ask the Dust:   The dust, of course, is unlikely to render many answers, and yet it has been a preoccupation of literature since its beginning… “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…”                                     Book of Common Prayer “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,...