The Last Dangerous Visions

I've finally finished the long journey of reading THE LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS, assembled by Harlan Ellison from 1973 until his death in 2018, and finally completed by his literary executor J. Michael Straczynski.  I'm one of the people who's waited 50 years for it to appear.  So allow me to congratulate all who were involved, both living and dead, and offer this list of my favorite stories from the book.  Bear in mind that they're not necessarily the BEST stories (however that would be determined), simply the ones that moved and stimulated me the most.

1.  J. Michael Straczynski, "Ellison Exegesis."  Not a short story but a nonfiction account of Harlan's struggle with bipolar disorder.  Revelatory and heartbreaking, but ultimately an inspiring paeon to friendship.

2.  Stephen Robinett, "Assignment No. 1."  I detected a touch of Bradbury in this short but powerful tale of what all of us might face.

3.  Stephen Dedman, "The Great Forest Lawn Clearance Sale -- Hurry, Last Days!"  The final line had some of the punch of Clarke's "Billion Names of God."

4.  Cecil Castellucci, "After Taste."  Perhaps my favorite story in the book.  The shocker had some of the feeling of an EC Comcs SF tale, but goes far beyond it.

5.  Steve Herbst, "Leveled Best."  A short but powerful story touching on a classic SF theme.

6. Jonathan Fast, "The Malibu Fast."  As a New Yorker who always wanted to live in California, I naturally loved this one.

7.  Stephen Utley, "Goodbye."  Utterly original and immensely moving.

8.  Dan Simmons, "The Final Pogrom."  Timely and timeless.  As a Jew, I was particularly affected by it.

9.  Ward Moore, "Falling from Grace."  The funniest story in the book.

10.  Adrian Tchaikovsky, "First Sight."  The best "first contact" story I've ever read.

11.  Kayo Hartenvaun, "Binary System."  The author's first published story, and a memorable one.

12.  Mildred Downey Broxon, "The Danann Children Laugh."  The haunting Irish countryside atmosphere was beautifully done.

13.  Edward Bryant, "War Stories."  I confess I didn't fully understand this story, but it has some of the most powerful writing in the book.

A baker's dozen of delights.

The book is the third in a trilogy that includes DANGEROUS VISIONS (1967) and AGAIN, DANGEROUS VISIONS (1972), two classics of cutting-edge speculative fiction.  It's very satisfying to see that the trilogy is now complete.

Harlan Ellison (1934 - 2018)

Photo by Beth Gwinn/Getty Images. 

Harlan Ellison's death on June 27, while hardly unexpected, hit me hard. His was the latest in a series of deaths of men around my father's age, writers and artists whose work I had grown up with since my teens. Philip Roth, Tom Wolfe, Steve Ditko, and Harlan Ellison -- large parts of the verbal and visual accompaniment to to my life. None of them were as omnipresent and life changing as the words that Harlan sometimes characterized as his "reporting in." His urgent, unique voice makes me want to thank him even after he is no longer here to receive those thanks. Neither of us believed in an afterlife, but I'll say this anyway. Thank you, Harlan, for your stories and essays and books that helped me get through adolescence. Thank you for the wisdom and passion I continue to find in your work in my adulthood. Thank you for the kind words and encouragement you occasionally offered me on your website, Harlan Ellison's Art Deco Dining Pavilion. I sincerely doubt I would have broken through into being a published writer without your hard-headed but sympathetic noodging. I regret I didn't have the guts to approach you at Lincoln Center where they were showing the terrific film about your life, Dreams with Sharp Teeth, when I saw you chatting with your wife and some friends in the alcove before the film. I didn't want to bother you, and frankly, what could I say except what I'm saying now, only it would probably have come out sounding much worse then. Still, I wish I'd walked over and said hi. Thank you for living a life of unimpeachable integrity and the pursuit and achievement of artistic excellence. Thank you for being one hell of a raconteur, a brilliant writer, and someone who made this world a more exciting during the years you walked upon it. Thank you for making me laugh and think and realize that it's essential to give a damn.

I cheered myself up during the last week reading Blood's a Rover, the last book to be published in Harlan's Lifetime and one he held in his hands not long before he died.  It was a kick to see Vic and Blood's adventures continued after all these years of wondering what became of them. The book's short stories and snippets and teleplay, written over the course of several decades, may not quite add up to a novel, but they provide a good idea of what the novel would have been if Harlan had lived to complete it. I suspect it might have become the Huckleberry Finn of speculative fiction, and probably been banned in just as many libraries as Twain's classic. Reading "A Boy and His Dog" as part of this longer narrative caused me to realize how much your work is in the main tradition of American literature, particularly according to critic Leslie Fiedler's theory that the classic American story is about the relationship between the friendship between a white man and a non white man (African American, Native American, an alien, or, in this case a telepathic dog), and their efforts to escape being "civ'lized," as Huck Finn famously says. But like Twain, Harlan believes the romance between outsiders can ultimately lead to a greater and more truly humane civilization than the one that previously existed. Moreover, Blood's a Rover demonstrates even more clearly than before how artfully Harlan drew on his experiences running with a gang in Brooklyn and brought those insights to create a new kind of SF. Few people can write about the turf wars between gangs, whether in the 1950s or the near future, as well as Harlan did. And it's obvious to me now that there's more than a little of you in both Vic and Blood -- Vic, the classic Ellisonian man struggling to survive in an uncaring and dangerous universe, and Blood, the wise-cracking and wise-headed mentor who cares about the proper use of grammar in one's speech as much as in sheer survival. Finally, the book dispells the absurd notion that the story is in anyway misogynistic, a notion which Harlan attributed to the influence of the 1970s movie of his story. The teleplay in the last section of the book introduces us to Spike, a very different woman from the Quilla June of "A Boy and His Dog." Spike's resourceful, tough, street-smart and a good shot, with ultimately a good heart. She's a heroine that any feminist could be proud of in 2018. The book reaffirmed that despite the darkness in Harlan's work, he was a humanist who believed in the potential of our too-often misguided species. For most of his 84 years he successfully instructed, guided, chivvied, emlightened, and most of all entertained us. His many books on my shelves are a constant reminder that he's going to continue doing that for me for years to come. What can I say? I miss the guy.

An Introduction, an Apologia, and a Hearty Welcome

No, that isn't a typo.  It really says "Robert Nason's Culture Bog."  And considering all the times I (and probably you) have valiantly attempted to type the highly-common word "blog" in an email to a friend, only to have that pesky spell check "correct" it to "bog," why not simply give in to technology (or to serendipity, which may just be a cheery mask for the same thing) and accept "bog" for "blog," though this is indeed a blog (or, How I Learned to Stop Recorrecting and Love the Bog.)  

But where, exactly, does the "Culture Bog" come in?  Well, you've come to just the right place to find out.  The culture bog -- a concept I've adapted from R. Emmett Tyrrell's, earlier, more narrowly political and somewhat Germanic formulation, "kultursmog" -- is the bog we all live in -- an all-encompassing swamp of texts, images, memes, sound bites (or bytes, if you will), classics and commercials (thank you, Edmund Wilson), and conflicting contexts that permeate the air we breathe and the space we inhabit for now and the near future; a cacophony of warring websites and unsocial media that fill our brains from the moment we take our first breath, accompanied by understandable wailing and gnashing of baby teeth, to our last, medically-induced, addled spurts of consciousness of the nursing home TV's current offering of disaster and catastrophe, either fictional, news-informational, or "reality" based -- and who can tell which of the three at that point, or even long before then?  Pixels and propaganda now fill our waking hours while our dreams are increasingly dominated by whiz-kids from Industrial Light & Magic.  We're stuck in the bog, and there's no escape.

But as the late Marshall McLuhan -- one of the unsung heroes of this blog -- famously said, the way out of the whirlpool was discovered by Edgar Allan Poe, a well-sung hero, in his story "A Descent into the Maelstrom": The hero must give in and stop resisting; by riding the whirlpool out to the very end, he can be sucked into the center and find an escape of sorts. But you'll have to read (or reread) that tale for yourself.

To put that into practical terms, it means that I, along with you, derive a great deal of pleasure from savoring the detritus and desire swirling about in our shared bog -- films old and new, novels cheap and novels classic, beloved TV shows from vanished youth, comics (now reborn as Graphic Novels), science fiction, mysteries, comedy, painters and sculptors, poster art and architecture, and the political machinations of scoundrels and statesmen, who surprisingly switch from one to the other given the crisis at hand.  And culture more broadly includes the whole farrago of customs, fads, forgotten trends, romance, disillusion, hope springing eternal, then ending again.  It's all part of the mix. And with luck, perseverance, and Poe's hero in mind, we might rise up from the swirling muck like the fabled Swamp Thing and find ourselves composed of the same stuff we were mired in, the same stuff that stars are made of, ready for action.  In other words, there's fun to be had and adventures to be embraced.  We'll walk that contemporary tightrope between academic naysayers who insist that all culture is mediated by power and privilege and the unwashed masses who simply love the show in all its myriad forms.  The former will grouse that it's just Bread and Circuses; those of us who are not entirely unwashed since we do believe in bathing now and then, will cheer that the human imagination has been so fertile in so many astounding ways.  We'll shoot zingers at both sides and pray they don't let go of the rope.

(A friend has advised me that there is indeed a distinct difference between a bog and a swamp; and in fact, there are many kinds of bogs, from the Valley bog to the Raised bog, the Blanket bog, the Quaking bog, and even, God help us, the Cataract bog.  There is even a sport known as "bog snorkeling" -- don't ask.  But the promising aspect of bogs in general is their "accumulated peat, "a deposit of dead plant material," plus assemblages of plants and animals, leading to a biodiversity from which the living can be reborn from the detritus of the dead -- or, for our purposes, the decayed but still valuable peat of old films, paperbacks, TV shows, comics, and ideas.  And since Stanley Kubrick is one of the resident gods of this blog, it's worth remarking that in the Anthony Burgess novel from which A Clockwork Orange was made, "blog" is the slang word for God.)

Bog is to the early 21st century what Beat was to the mid-20th.  They were beat, we're bogged down.  But to be beat was also to move to the beat, to beat the system, to achieve beatitude.  Our bog god beckons us to move beyond stagnation and overproliferation.  (Call it stagliferation -- not unlike the "stagflation" of America during the Carter years, that lethal combination of stagnation and inflation of the late 1970s).  This blog will, with luck, help encourage the nutrients in the bog to flourish, and provide hints for all of us to develop a more discerning culture-diversity.

In am interview some year ago, culture critic Susan Sontag was asked by Christopher Lydon, "What writers influence you, which ones do you light candles to?"  Sontag protested, "I don't light candles.  I read the writers I admire, and reread them," and went on to say she was interested in many things, and that listing all of them "would be pretentious."  I'm hoping the following list won't be pretentious.  At least I don't light candles to them (though in the case of Grace Kelly I've been tempted to).

Some of the people and subjects that might pop up here (and ultimately I'm the one who does the popping) are:  

Cinema masters Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Preston Sturges, Woody Allen, Luis Bunuel, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, and Francois Truffaut; screen icons Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, and Jack Nicholson, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Groucho Marx, Gene Tierney, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, and Natalie Wood; TV legends  Rod Serling,  Sid Caesar, Jackie Gleason, Mary Tyler Moore, 1950s' Superman's George Reeves, Honey West's Ann Francis, Dick Cavett and Tom Snyder; magisterial film critics Pauline Kael and David Thomson, British giants and eccentrics George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, W. Somerset Maugham, Philip Larkin, Malcolm Muggeridge, Colin Wilson, Winston Churchill, The Beatles, and honorary Brit Arthur Koestler; Irish geniuses Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett; French writers Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, and Boris Vian; American literary virtuosos F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker, Henry Miller, Raymond Chandler, James Thurber, J. D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, John Updike, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, P. J. O'Rourke, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth; literary critics H. L. Mencken, Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, Joseph Epstein, Clive James, and Louis Menand;  playwrights Harold Pinter, David Mamet, Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Tom Stoppard; speculative fiction wizards Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, Robert Silverberg, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein; historians Paul Johnson and John Luckacs; artists Salvador Dali, Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, Edward Hopper, Fairfield Porter, and Charles Addams; plus The New York World's Fairs of 1939 and 1964, Aurora monster model kits from the 1960s, Commentary, MAD, EC comics, Film Comment, Charles Krauthammer, Ben Hecht, jazz, Gustav Mahler, women, Paris, Vienna, kibbutzim, coffee, and the joys of Elmer's Disappearing Glue Stick.  (It sounds like it should be called Elmer's Disappearing Glue Trick, but we'll leave the magic for another time.)  

I should warn you that some of the above eminentoes are people with whom I have strong disagreements, but they nevertheless occupy significant places in my own mental culture bog.  (The links above will take you to some surprising and delightful places.)  I should further warn the faint-hearted among you that some of my views could be categorized as moderately conservative -- a good friend of mine has suggested I'm to the right of Carnegie Hall.  I'd revise that to read I'm slightly to the right of the Carnegie Deli.  That should provide the appropriate flavor to the proceedings to follow.

To conclude:  This is the place to come for the real lowdown on both the High and Low and every hybrid imaginable.  Put your cards on the table, face up -- and remember that the odds always favor the house, but here every man's a king and every woman's a queen, and there are two chickens in every garage and a car in every pot.  But please, no pot in here -- we welcome sober (but not solemn), thoughtful, clear-minded readers eager for a probing analysis of all the news that's not yet fit to print -- though as Ezra Pound noted, literature is news that stays news.  Personally I'll be shocked if any scoops are broken here, but I welcome any you might have to offer.  This blog will sometimes be playful, even silly, but despite Cary Grant's admission to Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest, "At my age the last word a man wants to hear is 'serious,'" it won't hesitate to be serious when the seriousness warrants it.  And remember -- sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.  So jump right in, the water's brine.  Or at least mine.