“The Plague and I” is a most unusual follow-up, in that it documents the nine months MacDonald spent in a tuberculosis sanatorium in Seattle in 1938, when she was 30 years old. This was, remember, a time before antibiotics so the treatments and the martial discipline imposed on the patients to cure them seem draconian and almost inhumane today. Yet, despite the harshness and coldness of the regimen — and, often, the nurses — she tells the story with warmth, humor, and jaw-dropping details, and credits the sanatorium with saving her life. In the last chapter, she finds that adjusting to “normal” life proves just as difficult as her entry into the sanatorium.

One of the episodes she writes about is the institution’s inane “occupational therapy” — here, “occupational” meaning “to busy one’s hands to take your mind off your troubles” rather than, as Betty hoped, “to prepare for a job when we finally make it out of here.” Instead, the OT leader has her charges make what Betty calls “toecovers.” Her description of toecovers had Liz in stitches so I thought it would be worth preserving here. It’s a nice homely word for something this world still needs a name for.

Toecover is a family name for a useless gift. A crocheted napkin ring is a toecover. So are embroidered book marks, large figurines of a near-together-eyed shepherdess, pin-cushion covers done in French knots, a satin case for snapfasteners (with a card of snapfasteners tactfully enclosed so you won’t make a mistake and think it a satin case for hooks-and-eyes or old pieces of embroidery thread), embroidered coat hangars, hand-painted shoe trees (always painted with a special paint that never dries), home-made three-legged footstools with the legs spaced unevenly so the footstool always lies on one side, cross-stitiched pictures of lumpy brown houses with “The houfe by the fide of the road” worked in Olde Englishe underneath, hand-decorated celluloid soap cases for traveling with tops that once off will never fit back on the bottom, crocheted paper knife handle covers complete with tassel, bud vases made out of catsup bottles, taffeta bed pillows heavily shirred and apparently stuffed with iron filings, poorly executed dolls whose voluminous skirt are supposed to cover telephones.

A toecover is not a thing that follows economic cycles. During the depression when everyone was making her own Christmas presents, toecovers abounded. In good times toecovers are not made at home but are bought in the back of Gifte Shoppes whose main income is from the lending library in the front.

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Steve Donoghue has apparently been around since the days of the first Trek fanzines and writes with authority not just about that era of human achievement. He seemingly does nothing but read and writes — with charm, vigor, intelligence, shrewdness, and a wicked sense of humor — about what he reads. What I love about his blog (and what has moved his posts high in my Google reader feeds) is his catholic taste in subject matter: popular magazines, comics (he’s a Legion of Super-Heroes fanboy), foreign literature, Elizabethan/Victorian/Edwardian literature, and — probably his most cherished category — historical fiction and literature, especially Tudor-era novels. Click on any month under his Archives link and wallow in the variety and types of reading matter this fellow ingests. It makes me wonder how much he reads that he doesn’t write about.

In addition to his blog, he contributes reviews to Open Letters monthly site, for which he is an editor. Recently, he wrote a long and satisfying post on Pindar, encapsulating not just the era in which Pindar wrote, but what makes Pindar worth knowing about and reading about.

But though every post promises something new I’ve probably never heard of before (I’ve added many a book to my Amazon wish list based on Steve’s recommendations), it’s the barbed wit that keeps me coming back. Here’s one of my favorites from his Star Trek books post:

Fans ate it up, and by this point they had guaranteed the continuation of their own feeding in the only way that ever guarantees such things: they put their money where their mouth-breathing was.

Read any of his Vanity Fair or GQ posts for drive-by snipings of this week’s celebrities.

And while I enjoy his whimsical reading projects – such as his reviews of romance novels on which cover model Paul Marron appears — I like that he doesn’t shy away from tackling more worthy subjects. He recently gave the National Geographic a right thrashing for its King Tut cover story and laments Christopher Hitchens, in several senses of that word. And he’s not forever carping or sniping, though lord knows, there always seems to be more bad than good out there (especially in the penny press).

I enjoy his clear-eyed appreciations and opinions of well-known authors or classic works, such as Dracula and his hellspawn, Gore Vidal’s essays, Howard’s End and on and on. But I particularly enjoy his touching appraisals of quixotic little books that were sent out as letters in bottles, and whose delicate and touching messages found in Steve the perfect reader.

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Raleigh resident Lewis Shiner made his name in the ’80s as a cyberpunk science-fiction writer, though he has worked many genres as a fictioneer: westerns, hard-boiled mystery, anarchic skateboarders, rock music, fantasy. He won the World Fantasy Award for his 1993 novel Glimpses and his most recent, Say Goodbye (1999), was a bittersweet story of a young woman’s indie singing career. He’s written dozens of short stories in his 30 years as a writer, but times are changing for short-story writers. Short stories continue to be written and read, but interested readers have to search them out, and, for genre writers particularly, the short story outlets are pale shadows of what they once were. In a manifesto on his website, Fiction Liberation Front, Shiner says “that whatever future the short story has, the Internet will be involved in it. ”

Although compensation for writers is still an open question, Shiner has decided to embrace “this uncertain future” with his website, which aims to stock all of his short stories, screenplays, fugitive journalism, and other writings — for free — under a Creative Commons license. It’s an experiment, of course, and who knows how it will turn out.

In the meantime, read the fiction! Although Shiner is best known for his science fiction, his technical range and emotional subtlety use genre as simply another tool to tell the story. His most personal and white-hot stories center on music: “Sticks,” about a rock-band drummer, and “Perfidia,” about the mystery surrounding Glenn Miller’s death, embrace pain, loss, and personal responsibility. One of his most powerful stories is “Steam Engine Time,” a take on what would have happened if Elvis had arrived on the scene 50 years early. By contrast, “Lizard Men of Los Angeles” is a throat-grabbing thrill- ride on the old sci-fi pulp wagon.

Lew just sent an email today saying two more novels from his backlist — Frontera and Glimpses (the latter won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1993) — are being published by Subterranean Press. They’re available through Amazon.com, your local independent bookseller, and — of course — the Fiction Liberation Front.

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Roald Dahl‘s memoir Boy, published in 1984, is a fine example of the kind of memoir we enjoy. It’s well-written, with vivid scenes, conversations, and observations; it doesn’t sag, get overly poetic in description, or droningly philosophic in its digressions. It satisfies also what I recall Roger Ebert quoted George C. Scott as saying he wanted to see in movies: show me people I’ve never seen before, in a place I’ve never been before, saying things I’ve never heard before.

Boy covers Dahl’s first 18 years, growing up in England, attending public schools, and then his transition to manhood, just before he joined the RAF in WWII. It’s a time when boys were brutally caned by headmasters and housemasters for utterly capricious and arbitrary reasons, motor cars attained high speeds of 30 miles an hour, and anesthetic was never used when visiting the dentist or lancing a boil (he describes watching, fascinated, as a clever doctor performs the latter operation on a sick boy). Liz almost screamed several times: “Why aren’t they using anesthetic, for God’s sake?!?”

But Dahl is describing the past, a foreign country and, as LP Hartley said, “they do things differently there.” On the occasions where a serious operation is needed–his sister needs an appendectomy, his nose is sheared off in a motorcar crash and needs to be sewn back on–the doctor comes to their house, lays a clean cloth on the gardening table, soaks cotton in ether to knock the patient out, and gets down to it. Otherwise, Dahl reports, anesthetic was simply not often used in the 1920s and ’30s, and one was simply expected to take it.

Liz also had me skip over the numerous passages devoted to boys being whipped, caned, and treated like dirt by the adults and others with power over them; the cruelty Dahl describes is simply too harsh to take. In one episode, he describes the boys perusing someone’s caned bottom and admiring the housemaster’s technique with the cool attitude and commentary of connoisseurs. Dahl at one point apologizes for telling so many of these stories, but the book is a skimming of the memories that made such a deep impression on him that they were the moments that stood out. Being whipped by a master who later became the Archbishop of Canterbury was enough to convince him that this God business was obviously wrong; and he said that, as an adult, sitting on a hardwood chair for too long awakened the feelings he had as a child sitting down after being caned, and he would have to stand up.

It’s an unsentimental look back at his life, funny, gentle, and at times horrific, very well told.

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Thanks to the glory of Netflix, Liz and I saw this documentary that I can assure you never visited  the Carolina Theatre. It’s a bio-doc on the writer Harlan Ellison, 72 years old at the time of the movie’s release in 2007, and covers an impressive sweep of his life, with samples of him reading from his stories, talking heads quotes from friends and other writers about his influence and the impression he’s made on their lives, and various NSFW-language interviews that evoke the man’s history, philosophy, irritations, annoyances, and, now and then, joys. (The YouTube video here is from the movie; it’s HE in his most typical mode of full-flow righteous anger–well-deserved, in this case.)

I was introduced to HE as a sophomore in high school and didn’t look back for nearly 15 years; his personality and writing were vivid, electrifying, throat-grabbing–uncompromising, is the word that leaps to mind. Uncompromising to the point of lunacy, sometimes, but all in the name of dignity, self-respect, and justice, which for HE are paramount virtues.

“Dreams with Sharp Teeth” was a real test, as Liz had never experienced Harlan and was put off by his abrasive and, it must be said, obnoxiously show-offy personality. But she said she grew to like him better as the movie went on; you see the grit, energy, anger and just plain orneriness (an old-fashioned word that Harlan would love) that took a bullied little kid from Painesville, OH (a metaphorical town name, if ever there was one) to Los Angeles and success, of a sort. The movie confronts the fact that, although his writing has always been admired by his peers and lauded by fans, his career never really took off. His labor in the vineyards of genre fiction, teleplays, and short stories won him many writers’ awards, but not mainstream success.

The documentary recognizes the respect that is paid to his longevity and his highest writing achievements–especially some of his most important short stories from the 1960′s, such as “Repent Harlequin, Said the Ticktockman” and “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.” But he still remains a marginal literary figure, it seems to me, a miniaturist in a culture that likes The Big Novel, the province of a dedicated few. His legacy, in addition to his thousands of stories and awards, may be more in the writers he has inspired who’ve gone on to produce Babylon5, the revamped Battlestar Galactica, and other TV series, or had more commercially successful writing careers themselves (such as Dan Simmons and Neil Gaiman, who pay tribute to HE).

As Gaiman says in the interviews, HE’s greatest creative act has been this character called “Harlan Ellison.” Partly sincere, partly schtick, with a freakish a memory for cultural and historical details, a fast-talking patter, and in-your-face energy–an electrical storm front on legs–driven by a hair-trigger temper and a determination to prove he’s better and smarter than the bullies around him.

He says, in a poignant reflection, that being beaten up every day by bullies makes you an outsider. I think that, in many ways, large pieces of him are still hurting and still wants a happy childhood.

Another legacy of his childhood is that he sees the world as a big bully that shouldn’t be let off the hook. In fact, the bully should be shamed, kicked where it hurts, and his nose should be rubbed in it. (“Revenge is a good thing,” he says in a 1981 TV interview.) It powered his writing and his political and civil rights activism, his numerous lawsuits against studios and networks, and made him a fiercely loyal friend and ally. But it also meant he couldn’t pick and choose his battles because everything–from a Writers Guild contract to the wrong brand of yogurt at the grocery store–demands a shouting confrontation, and if you cross him, then get ready for screaming phone calls.

While he never got to be one of the writers of great movies, as I think he dearly wished to be, it’s hard to imagine him being happy on a movie set. To have the sort of control he wants, he’d have to do what his acolytes have done: become the producer and helm the entire enterprise. But that would mean he’d have to be the boss, and I’m guessing he’d not enjoy that role. He considers writing his holy chore, not producing or directing. Although I think he’d love meeting and kibitzing with the actors (his life’s wealth could be said to be the devoted friendships he’s gained of rich and famous people), he’d be driven to mania and a rusty chain saw by the thousand compromises and trade-offs that are a major movie production.

And also, he’s always been an outsider; to be a producer/director would mean having to work inside the system, and he couldn’t flatter and cajole the suits whose primary concerns are the budget and the schedule, not the story. HE knows his confrontations and lawsuits have  poisoned the studios and investors against him and made him virtually unemployable except by a few younger-generation writer/producers who see him as a mentor who inspired them when they were teenagers. He says he has accepted that condition–though it’s hard to be sure. Regret and disappointment are other  major themes in his work.

The movie is a wonderful hagiography of Ellison (much better than the similar “The Mindscape of Alan Moore” in 2005) though it does assume that he’s loved by his fellow writers, which isn’t always the case. “The Last Dangerous Visions” issue is lightly touched on and then set aside. There has been some criticism of the movie because none of his enemies are interviewed–HE reportedly told the director, Erik Nelson, that he’s known by his impressive enemies list and they should have a hearing in the documentary–but Nelson replied that HE was his own worst enemy.

I’ve grown up seeing HE’s image in photos and television interviews, and it’s poignant to see how he has aged. The geeky kid in his teens becomes the slim, handsome, dynamic ladies’ man in the 1970s and 1980s, and now is a round matzoh ball who looks like Larry “Bud” Melman. The fire is still there, but the heart attacks, surgeries, chronic fatigue syndrome, and other maladies (none of which are described in the documentary) are catching up with him.

I came to HE’s writing first via The Glass Teat, which a high school friend introduced me to. For the next 15 or so years, I became an Ellison fanatic, read all the stories, interviews, columns, etc. His last great book of stories, to my mind, is Strange Wine. He’s written some remarkable stories afterward–”The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore” was selected for Best American Short Stories 1993–but I’ve not enjoyed them as much as I did his early work. His art has evolved from pulp genre fiction, to his own brand of fantasy, to, in the last 20 years, a Borgesian lyricism and vision, with non-linear stories that are collages, impressions, prose poems, descriptions of mood and interior states rather than character. That I can’t connect to this vision–which eschews the traditional short story and plot props I’m accustomed to–I will take the blame for. As an artist, HE  continues to evolve and follow his muse where it leads him; not all of his old fans can do the same.

I was often struck by the fact that HE wrote two or three novels during his years as a pulp writer, but none afterward. I think this was a shame and a missed opportunity. It could be that his inclination was more for the pointed message, the singular effect, the impatient prophet–maybe he had too many things to say–a sprinter, rather than a marathoner. Of course, the screenplays he wrote (such as his famous unproduced screenplay for “I, Robot”) also took as much time and measured energy to write as a novel. But I think movies called to him as an artist in a way novels couldn’t.

The documentary features television interviews from his heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, and a small tour of his remarkable pop-culture museum of a house, which is stuffed to bursting with books, ephemera, and toys. It struck me as the magical treehouse his 8-year-old self would have wanted to live in, a very safe and cozy Xanadu (complete with secret passageways and pizza) that’s retreat and recharging station and probably everything HE would have ever wanted.

It will be odd the day I wake up and hear that Harlan is not part of the landscape. I wonder whether he will see death as a bully or a friend.

Where to start. For the fiction,  The Essential Ellison is a good but large and baggy collection; Deathbird Stories is an earlier and more compact volume that contains many of his classics. Dangerous Visions is his groundbreaking SF anthology; I’ve not read it in decades but still remember some of its stories. His Dream Corridor comics are interesting curios, but not essential.

I daresay that his reputation, like Gore Vidals, may rest on his essays, which are remarkably supple yet all of a piece. It’s in these essays (and the introductions to his stories) that the Harlan Ellison voice and “character” were forged, and I can recall more happy moments reading them than I do his fiction. Sleepless Nights in the Procrusteam Bed is the best nice-sized volume that shows his range. The Harlan Ellison Hornbook reprints his 1960s essays and they’re all immediate and throat-grabbing. Harlan Ellison’s Watching contains his fugitive movie criticism; The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat contain his classic dissections of network teevee in the 1960s–truly a snapshot of another era and full of opinions that are still scarily relevant.

In the 1980s, he started a fan club thing called The Harlan Ellison Record Collection, which made available recordings of him reading his work. (This was pre-Internet days, kids — it was all done by mail and Pony Express.) Listening to him performing (not reading, performing) “Prince Myshkin, or Pass the Relish” and “Waiting for Kadak” are more fun than reading them. I also hugely enjoyed the 60-min interview of his “Loving Reminiscences of the Dying Gasp of the Pulp Era”; he clearly has a great nostalgia for that period of his young manhood, and there are times he can sure sound today like a cranky old man lamenting the good ol’ days.

But it’s the recordings of his public lectures that are the most entertaining. Of the On The Road series, my friend Scott says that the preferred order would be vol. 2, then 1, then 3.

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