routine inventory

I move on from things, but they don't move on from me. I was into the prog era of Genesis for a couple of years and then I got into Lou Reed & David Bowie, and I then don't think I listened to a note of prog Genesis for at least another quarter-century. (The pop stuff couldn't be avoided.) I wore a Historical Products t-shirt of William Faulkner to the appointment for my first driver's license picture, and I read Light in August and The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! and Sanctuary and The Wild Palms and all the major short stories, and then I was elsewhere. I do always mean to return to the Snopes trilogy – I have a very nice boxed hardbound set of it – but who knows? I move along. I retain sharp memories of the engagement – in these two examples, of feeling like my innermost self was being voiced by Gabriel's "Now! Now! Now! Now! Now!" at the climax of "The Musical Box," or getting to the Why do you hate the South? payoff everybody knows about. I am essentially a collection of these memories of intense engagements.

But I never stop checking in on the things I was into – the bands, the authors, occasionally the directors. I keep track, and sometimes reengage, which can be an intensely diaristic process: Who was I when I first bought Souled American's Flubber? Who am I now, preparing to finally see them live this October in Evanston, they who have held silence since the late 1990s, they whose music held such a specific room in my heart? Who was I buying Gass's The Tunnel while on tour in 1997 or thereabouts, and reading it, and who am I years later, having used a quotation from it on the work for which I'm best known and having read his other novels, and his essays, and his short fiction? As with all relationships, the vantage points mature: sometimes we don't love what we loved as well, or, if we do, we love it for different reasons. Nostalgia, or affection for our younger selves.

When I was twelve I found that comic books weren't doing it for me like they used to, and, while I kept up a little – this was during the Chris Claremont X-Men run; there were storylines to close out – my affection wandered to the science fiction and fantasy sections of the libraries and used bookstores. The fiction I loved, but the editorial voice – in introduction, in annotations and afterwards – reached out to a need in me. It was subculture, and I yearned for belonging; I was then in junior high, where I hadn't found an in-group. At lunch I sat on some bleachers and read books by myself. I'd spend whole Saturday mornings at the Paperback Exchange, or with a stack of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, getting the lay of the land, learning what worked for me and what didn't. I read broadly and I kept current, and somewhere in here I discovered Harlan Ellison, who, for about two years, was my north star.

Ellison was a better writer than most of his peers if you went in for style and voice. Connecting with the voice was an indispensable aspect of Ellison fandom: if you found his persona off-putting, you weren't likely to enjoy his work, but for an aspiring young author, that persona was irresistible. The inherent value of writing and self-expression, the dignity of the craft, the infinite possibilities of the written word: these were non-negotiable values for Ellison.

They amounted to a creed for me, and I collected as much of his work as I could. At one point I had at least twelve autographed copies of his books, which I'd gotten when I saw him at the Sherman Oaks bookstore Dangerous Visions, where he was doing a trick he did occasionally: writing a story, on his manual typewriter, inside the story, in a little alcove where you could watch him work as long as you didn't bother him. Pages from the story would be posted as they were completed; the story he was writing was called "On the Slab," and I think it ran in the premiere issue of either Omni or The Twilight Zone.

I was still an acolyte when I got to high school, but sometime during my freshman semester I discovered poetry, and then Faulkner, and I stopped keeping up with Harlan Ellison. I still looked for his books in libraries, just to see if there was anything I hadn't seen, and I would wonder, from time to time, about the fate of The Last Dangerous Visions, the long-promised third volume of the Dangerous Visions anthology series, whose first volume had made a big splash and whose second volume, Again, Dangerous Visions, had seemed to me even better. The Last Dangerous Visions was part of Ellison lore: if you were at an event where Ellison might be taken questions, you were specifically enjoined from asking him when it would be published. He had, over the years, announced its immanent publication several times, but nothing came of it. The English science fiction writer Christopher Priest published a pamphlet called The Last Deadloss Visions, which documented the history of Ellison's inability to complete the book; it didn't circulate widely, but then the Internet happened. I read it on an early text-only webpage around 1999, at least sixteen years after having last read any Ellison at all: I was in the Ames public library and I wondered, idly, if anything had ever come of Ellison's plans. Priest's theory was that the project had simply gotten away from Ellison, and that he was embarrassed both by his inability to complete it and by the grandiose promises he'd made about it – to the authors who'd given him their work on the promise of future royalties, and to readers who'd been hearing about it for years.

Next month, Blackstone will publish The Last Dangerous Visions, edited by J. Michael Straczynski, Ellison's friend and the executor of his estate. Some of the book's introduction, "Ellison Exegesis," is readable on Google Books; it explains the book's life-long delay, and also Ellison's eventual silence after twenty years or so of legendary productivity. For me, having occasionally wondered about why a once-prolific author had stopped publishing but having also seen, when I worked in hospitals, what mania looks like, the story offers no real surprise. But it does broaden my perspective on a figure once so important to me that I sent him copies of my own novels as they published: not to seek feedback, just as gifts.

Another writer I was very into for a long time, and whose sentences I still look to as examples of clarity and concision, is Joan Didion, whose line "I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be" remains, as is I think evident here, something of a guiding principle for me. It's a rich experience, in the case of the posthumous The Last Dangerous Visions, to find that self nodding back.