Love at First Insult: Happy Birthday Uncle Harlan

Today would have been Harlan Ellison’s 85th Birthday. My history with the man who was the Most Honored Living SF/Fantasy Writer went back to my teen years, when he wrote a column in the weekly L.A. Free Press called “The Glass Teat” about television and popular culture. He was insanely funny and insightful. Simultaneously, I would read stories by a guy named “Ellison” in various SF and mystery magazines, said stories being highly original, often angry, always smart and sometimes brilliant. And there was this guy named Harlan who appeared on various television talk shows speaking of current events with a serious Liberal bias, and the smarts to make his arguments sound almost inevitable.

At some point, I realized these were all the same person. I saw a flyer one day promoting a public appearance by this guy, at a local college. I went to see him, and was bowled over by his passion, the SPEED of his thought, the apparently infinitely eclectic range of his interests. There seemed nothing he didn’t have an informed opinion on, from the Civil Rights movement (he’d marched with King), martial arts (he’d briefly trained with Bruce Lee), to atheism (he was proudly Jewish, but a stanch atheist). More importantly, he had CHARISMA, that thing Napoleon Hill defines as “sexual energy channeled through your voice and body language.” He could hypnotize a room, and I watched…