An Edge in My Voice

by Harlan Ellison

  We sat at the cabaret tables as Art Dutch and Daniel Chodos and Kimit Muston and Robin Riker stood before the blocky old-style mikes, holding their scripts; and David Surtees worked out of his cornucopial suitcase of sound effects, and once again as I had been pleasured as a kid, I was taken into the magic realm of radio drama. Once again the owner of the Daily Sentinel, Britt Reid, put aside his public persona, took up the mask and sleep-gas gun of the Green Hornet and, with his faithful Filipino assistant, Kato, cruised the streets in the Black Beauty, seeking evildoers beyond the reach of justice. Once again Doc Savage set out to unravel a baffling mystery: the enigma of the green ghost.

  For my friends, who had grown up in the age of television, it was a wonder. If you doubt me, just call Lydia or Arthur at 986-6963 and ask them. They’ve become addicts of old-time radio, and consider an evening at the Center something rare and special.

  Next Wednesday night, at 8:00, I am privileged to work with these dedicated and antic spirits, in presenting for the first time in more than thirty years, a live radio performance of one of the most memorable dramatic productions ever aired. Carl Stevenson’s “Leiningen Versus the Ants” is a program that no one who has ever heard it can forget. If you’d like a small sample, tomorrow night (Friday the 7th), I’ll be asking KPFK’s Mike Hodel to play a bit of the original show from the Forties program Escape, on Hour 25 from 10–12 PM. That’s 90.7 on the FM dial. Listen in, get hooked, and come out to the Variety Arts Center next Wednesday.

  Dude up. Come early and have a good dinner in the Roof Garden restaurant, where former Musso & Frank’s chef Victor sets out a good meal for between nine and fifteen dollars (including beverage and dessert). Stop by and have a drink in the W. C. Fields bar, and then amble down to the Tin Pan Alley cabaret theater. It’s free. Won’t cost you a sou. One note of warning: The Tin Pan Alley cabaret is only a 99-seat theater. Right now, as you read this, you’d better call 628-7782 and make reservations for the 8:00 performance. Or you’ll wind up sitting on the floor.

  But you will spend the sort of evening you mean when you mumble to your friends, “I want to do something different tonight, something exciting.”

  It can’t get much more different and exciting than being trapped in the middle of the Amazon jungle as the voracious tide of the marabunta oozes toward you. In short, bored and exhausted readers, tired of the same old cable tv bullshit, what we are offering you, free of charge next Wednesday, is…Escape!

  Interim memo

  This was the last column of An Edge to appear in print in the Weekly. My dissatisfaction with the petty harassments of the publisher (but never the editor, Phil Tracy) had been growing, and we were having regular telephone arguments about what I should be writing about, the ways I was writing what I was writing about, the length of the columns, and etcetera etcetera. The reasons for my pulling the column are described in fuller detail in the afterword to this book. But this was my goodbye column though no one—myself included—knew this was the kiss-off.

  INSTALLMENT 58: 10 JANUARY 83

  Ignorance ain’t no way bliss. It is a condition of extended infancy; it is balm for inactivity. Confucius tells us, “Ignorance is the night of the mind, but a night without moon or star.”

  When the weight of knowledge grows oppressive, when the world is too much with us, we drop head into hands and think how much happier we would be if we were like those mythical drones we picture working on assembly lines, who know not…who know not that they know not…and whom we perceive to be always as cheery as bunny rabbits because they know not.

  But that is another of the free-floating bits of distractive philosophy engendered and sustained by the paladins of the Status Quo to keep us from looting when the power grid overloads and the world is plunged into darkness. It is as much of a shuck as “Poverty is ennobling,” the line fed to aspiring artists so they don’t demand decent recompense for their efforts.

  With all my soul I deny the dehumanizing subtext of ignorance being bliss. The ignorant are femur and cranium and sinew, even as we. They suffer and ache and yearn, even as we. They know they are beleaguered and unable to cope, beset by unfathomable Forces that keep them poor, that make the goods they buy fall apart before the time-payments are completed, that drive their children to bad street dope and Valley Girl dialogue. The only difference between those with wisdom and those without is that the former have an inkling of who is responsible for all that angst. The ignorant hurt just as much; they just don’t know who’s holding the hammer that keeps knocking them in the head.

  Inexplicably, ignorance frequently does not produce the expected condition of humility; but rather a towering arrogance, in which state the uninformed clings to the justification of unknowledge like a doomed soul sinking in quicksand clutches a rotted vine. Ah’m an Okie frum Muskogee an’ damn proud tuh be as smart as a pencil eraser.

  Trust me on this one: ignorance produces nothing even passingly close to bliss; what it encourages, tragically, is a condition of manipulability in the ignorant. Thus, when Ronald Reagan reaches an impasse with the MX missile, he employs the tactic of semantic pollution, renaming the weapon “The Peacekeeper,” and the malleable uninformed puff up with Hestonlike patriotism and simper their approval. The wool has thus been pulled over.

  But the travail wrought by ignorance affects us in a hundred tiny ways on a personal level every day. In an effort to make the point on the most mundane level possible, consider this:

  Several weeks ago I mentioned en passant that receiving resubscription hustles from magazines as much as a year before one’s previous subscription has run out…pissed me off mightily. It was one of those idle Erma Bombeck comments that I thought would get a cursory mumble of agreement from others who’d been likewise lumbered…but nothing more. Imagine my surprise at receiving a dozen cards from readers who were as incensed as I was. Apparently, it is an imposition that angers a great many of you.

  So I did some checking with the subscription manager of a national magazine, who has been a friend of mine for many years. He asked that I not use his name, but this is what he wrote in response to my query:

  “Renewals are the life-blood of magazine publishing. When the renewals are pouring in, our president walks around smiling; it makes his day. New subs are usually offered at a low discount rate just to hook the reader: we don’t make a dime on them. Renewals are where we get fat; they’re the best and easiest way to make money. They are the reason we exist.

  “I looked you up in our computerized subscriber files and, as I suspected, approximately three times a year you receive what is called an ‘advance renewal.’ It tells you that we are giving you the opportunity to extend your sub and alleges that in this way you are being protected from inflation. That, of course, is bullshit. All our subscribers get those letters, regardless of when the sub expires. Nowhere does it say the sub is running out; but people get confused and think that’s what the letter must mean, so they just keep sending those offers back to us and they keep paying for year after year after year. We love. people who do that. We think they’re jerks, but we love them. Loyal subscribers. Some people actually don’t expire until 2003 AD. It absolutely convulses me: we probably won’t even be here then; not with the trouble we’re having getting available ad space filled. Damn television!”

  He went on to explain that six months before a subscription expires, they start sending out regular renewal notices. If they get the usual money return for “advance renewals” from the blissfully ignorant, it will be between 2 and 3% of the notices sent out, which he estimated to be between 5000–8000 renewals at $24 a shot. And so, even if it’s only six months premature, it means his publisher can invest between one hundred and twenty thousand / one hundred and ninety-two thousand dollars in a money market account at 9 ½–10% interest.

  Unless you wish to lay claims to being a philanthropist, letting someone else play with even twenty-four bucks of your money at those kind of rates, makes you a patsy. Ignorant. But how much b
liss attaches to not being able to buy twenty-four dollars’ worth of food for the family?

  He went on to say, “You’ll receive up to six efforts, each pretty much saying the same thing, just packaged and worded a little differently than the ones directly preceding or following it. The 5th and 6th efforts tend to sound a bit more dramatic, if not hysterical and panic-stricken; but people are actually paid a lot of money to write these packages for us.”

  There is surcease from this hustle, fortunately.

  Just send a note, along with your mailing label, to the circulation director of the offending magazine(s), asking to have your name removed from all mailing lists, mentioning in particular resubscription appeals. By law they must honor your request. Just don’t write the note across the front of a bill or renewal notice. Only a computer will see it.

  Now that we’ve shone light into that corner of your ignorance—hoping that by arguing from the smaller to the greater you will perceive the value of taking note of the tiniest incursions into your privacy and well-being—we are ready to move on to the next annoyance: those ugly glued mailing labels that deface the magazines you want to keep for reference or rereading later. Those labels that obscure the fine art or expensively-commissioned photography that you are prevented from enjoying in an unmarred state, that if you try to remove leave the cover of the magazine adhesive with remnant glue that rips off the back cover of the next issue stacked on top of it.

  From the smaller to the greater. Next week you will discover that something as seemingly unimportant as which cover—front or back—the magazine uses to affix the label is a manifestation of Big Business’s disrespect for you as a consumer.

  Next week I will ask you to enlist in one of those small crusades that will do nothing more than improve your life in an almost imperceptible way. But it may give you a feeling of having some power, of getting a little more respect from those you support with your money and your loyalty.

  Next week, for your pleasure, we begin the Addressee’s Crusade. Bring your grail and your lionheart.

  Interim memo

  I wrote this one, and the publisher of the Weekly wouldn’t run it. No one, he contended, wanted to read 2500 words about (are you out of your fuckin’ mind, Ellison?) mailing labels. So I reminded him that our deal had been a simple one: “I write ’em; you run ’em.” No changes, no directions about what I should say, no bullshit. If that policy didn’t sit well, then adios, muchacho. By this time the publisher was getting static from inside the Weekly organization, from the punk poseurs who were filling the paper with endless reviews of heavy metal and New Wave bands that formed and folded within weeks of their rave notices. The newspaper was doing very well now, the circulation had jumped considerably (by all reports from the circulation department in large part because of my column), and my “tone,” one of commitment to action and a sort of battlement mentality, rankled the shit out of many of the post-teens more concerned with Def Leppard and the Gang of Four, how spikey and aqua-tinted they could get their hair, how surly they could pretend to be (what we call “copping an attitude”), and how many advertisements for hair styling salons they could squeeze into the Weekly’s pages, than they were about publishing unpopular personal opinion. But then, what else do you expect me to say? In any case, this column, which ain’t really about mailing labels, if you’ve got the simple sense to read the greater rather than the lesser, appears here for the first time.

  INSTALLMENT 59: 25 JANUARY 83

  UNPUBLISHED

  The panic was on. Deadlines were coming due in bad karma job-lots. There simply were not enough hours in the day to do it all; and everyone was screaming. I’d been at the typewriter for thirty hours trying to do three jobs at once. The coffee was going through me without passing go, without collecting two hundred dollars. The word cranky would ennoble my attitude.

  Then I came to a place in one of the pieces I was writing that required a specific fact about the new use of Doppler radar in monitoring tornadoes.

  Samuel Johnson once noted, “Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information.” I’m blessed with one of those pack rat intelligences that remembers vast amounts and varieties of seemingly useless minutiae. But I can’t remember it all. What I can do…is make a mental note of where the information was published. Which is why my home and office creak under the weight of something like 47,000 books, magazines, tracts, pamphlets and assorted incunabula. I may not know what I need to know, but I have at my fingertips the sourceworks that contain the knowledge.

  And I remembered that Doppler tornado detection had been featured on the cover of an issue of Science News about two years back. So I went to the Science News files and started leafing back through, knowing I’d find it on the front cover. All I had to locate was that color radar display. Forty minutes later, with time to accomplish the crushload of work slipping away as I went insane trying to find a magazine that was not there where it should have been, I gave up and faked the data.

  Naturally, I got caught. The one error I’d made in the article was in relation to the fact I couldn’t find.

  A month later, trying to find something else entirely in my files of Science News, I came across an issue whose cover had been ripped loose. The cover was sticking to the back of the issue that had been laid on top. I peeled it loose, and naturally it was the June 7, 1980 issue with the tornado essay.

  And for the millionth time since I’d started subscribing to magazines in my teens, I cursed the sonofabitchin’ address labels they affix to the face of periodicals.

  When last we got together in this column, I used the paradigm of resubscription demands months ahead of your expiration date as an example of how we are “used” by big business to our detriment. A whole lot of you wrote in to say that had been pissing you off, too. So on the theory that these petty impositions fry you, and you say nothing because you figure they’re too niggling to worry about, that others will scoff at your fussiness, I propose this time to apprise you of yet another one that may have been making you grit your teeth for years, but about which you’ve taken no action because you don’t want to seem like an anal-retentive old fart.

  I speak, of course, of address labels on magazines.

  Now, if you’re one of those who haven’t the faintest idea what I’m going on about, if you get magazines in the mail and just toss them on the coffee table with the labels still affixed, and cannot understand why anyone would even give a shit about something so beneath notice…move along to some other section of this newspaper. But! If you are one of the millions who peel the label off the beer bottle as you sit chatting, if you are the sort of fussbudget who removes the price tag from the aspirin bottle before it goes in the medicine cabinet, if you are someone who saves the magazines you buy on the off-chance you may need to refer to them sometime later…you’re nodding your head and muttering, “Sic’m, Ellison!”

  Thus, you are ready to join me in the Addressee’s Crusade.

  As a reader, I subscribe to the following periodicals (this is a partial list): American Film, New York, California, Los Angeles, TV Guide, The Skeptical Inquirer, Zoom, Playboy, Heavy Metal, Parabola, National Geographic, Gourmet, Science News, Esquire, NY Review of Books, Time, Atlantic, Omni, Twilight Zone, The Underground Grammarian, Maledicta, US News & World Report, ART news, Business Week, Sport, Ms., Commentary and The Washington Monthly. Do you have any idea how many man-hours and foot-pounds of energy I expend removing those bloody goddam labels?

  Why do I remove the labels? Because, to begin with, they’re ugly. Now I realize many of you consider esthetics in the same class with studies of the pore-patterns in early New England stone walls, but for some of us the sight of a gummed label festooned with incomprehensible strings of numbers and code-letters, plastered smack in the middle of a fine art painting or a lovely Bob Peak portrait of Sally Field is an affront in the eyes of GOD AND / OR WO/MAN! In the second place, if you’ve been saving, say, Horizon since
the very first issue, when it was a handsome history and art publication bound in boards and tending more toward essays on Léger and the excavations at Ur than it does in its present form as a slapdash magazine with curiosity about, say, “The Art of the TV Sitcom,” then a full run of said periodical becomes a reference treasure no less valuable than the morocco-bound set of THE LEATHERSTOCKING TALES you occasionally wipe with saddle soap.

  But when you try to peel the labels, you find they don’t put them on with a light-application glue that frees the paper without damaging the magazine. You wail at discovering they use a hideous concoction I suspect is made of unequal portions of flour-and-water mucilage, Elmer’s Glue, stucco epoxy and (the single most adherent substance in the known universe) cassowary jizzum.

  What is left on the cover are (a) bits of attenuated label paper, (b) ripped slick cover stock and (c) at least two thick, sticky-lines of blue-or pink-tinted glue. And when you lay that magazine down or put it in the rack, it binds to the one beneath—waiting to be lifted so it can rip the next in line.

  After thirty years of this aggravation, the best I’ve come up with by way of solution is first to peel the label as slowly and carefully as I can, leaving as little of the glue as possible. Then, if one pours a bit of talcum on the glue, it can be wiped off leaving only hideous discolorations of the artwork beneath. Unsatisfactory, but the best I’ve come up with. Don’t use lighter fluid: it bleaches out the artwork.

  Okay, let’s get away from the obsessive nature of this undertaking. Just register your faithful columnist as a whacko with a need to remove labels, and let me ask the following question, which is, in truth, the nub of the problem:

  Magazines are forever bleating about not publishing this ad or that article because “it might offend.” They constantly revamp layouts, tables of contents, logos, in an effort to serve the needs of their readers and, they hope, hold onto them in an era where more and more readers simply tune out the print medium and tune in the glass teat. They institute service columns. They slant toward ever narrower demographic groupings.