What He Said
From Warren Ellis, via his email-list-blog-thingie, BAD SIGNAL:
“If I use the word “monkeymass” to describe a vocal section
of the comics “fan” population online, I invoke Harlan
Ellison, who used the word first in my experience. And
there but for the grace of god. The guy’s a hundred years
old, but you can still read of him described as an “enfant
terrible,” often simply because his personal sense of what
is right is unquiet. Who the hell wants to be an enfant
terrible at thirty-five? It’s embarrassing. Who wants to
be a “gadfly,” which is how, if I recall correctly, Ellison
described his own journalistic works when he was my age?
It invites swatting. It invites a constant expenditure of
your strength against the lazy palms of people too stupid
to tie your shoes. And look at the guy now. His cardiac
muscle is held together with garden twine and Lego. When
on his game, he’s a magician of prose, and I imagine he’s
won almost every significant battle he’s fought. But I
can’t help but wonder how much storytelling was not done,
was lost through endless days and nights of kicking against
pricks. I mean, you read about them in his essays, and I
sit there thinking, why did you elevate these people simply
by gracing them with your time? Why live in a constant
state of stress?”
Holy distillation of inner thoughts, Batman.
Anyway…in case any of you were still wondering, that’s a good approximation of why I don’t spend any time railing against the asshats any more. Too much energy wasted, too many stories untold, and too much elevation of worthless fuckwits.
I no longer get to indulge the visceral satisfaction of skewering a gibbering dweeb with poison-pen bon mots, but the trade-off is that my productivity is climbing.