"Harlan Ellison - Shatterday" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

you). I donтАЩt know how you perceive my mission as a writer, but for me it is not a
responsibility to reaffirm your concretized myths and provincial prejudices. It is not my job to
lull you with a false sense of the rightness of the universe. This wonderful and terrible
occupation of recreating the world in a different way, each time fresh and strange, is an act of
revolutionary guerrilla warfare. I stir up the soup. I inconvenience you. I make your nose run
and your eyes water. I spend my life and miles of visceral material in a glorious and painful
series of midnight raids against complacency. It is my lot to wake with anger every morning,
to lie down at night even angrier. All in pursuit of one truth that lies at the core of every jot of
fiction ever written: we are all in the same skin...but for the time it takes to read these stories I
merely have the mouth. You see before you a child who never grew up, who does not know
itтАЩs socially unacceptable to ask, тАШWho farted?тАЩтАЬ
Thus I try to codify in noble terms the obsession with Art and the inability of the
writer to stop writing, to get along with others, to view without rancor the world as a gem, at
once pure and perfect. But thatтАЩs flapdoodle, of course. I write because I write. I can do no
other.
 It is the love of conversation.
I am anti-entropy. My work is foursquare for chaos. I spend my life personally, and
my work professionally, keeping that soup boiling. Gadfly is what they call you when you are
no longer dangerous, when the right magazines publish your work and you donтАЩt have to seek
out obscure publications as homes for the really mean stuff, when they ask you to come and
discuss matters of import with тАЬcelebritiesтАЭ on the Johnny Carson Show. I much prefer
troublemaker, malcontent, pain in the ass, desperado. As IтАЩve said elsewhere, I see myself as a
combination of Jiminy Cricket and Zorro. Thus do I ennoble myself in the times when all the
simple joys IтАЩve forsworn rush back on me as chances lost, and IтАЩm left with only the work
and something Irwin Shaw said: тАЬSince lam not particularly devout, my chances for salvation
lie in a place sometime in the future on a library shelf.тАЭ
Why is he telling me all this?
HeтАЩs telling you all this because the feeps thought they were getting off a hot one
when they accused him of merely writing to shock.
ThatтАЩs my job. To stir the soup, to bite your thigh, to get you angry so you keep the
conversation going. DonтАЩt invite me to parties for pleasant chat. I want to hear the sound of
your soul. Then I can translate it into the mortal dreads we all share and fire them back at you
transmogrified, reshaped as amusing or frightening fables.
Look, itтАЩs like this: I was in Utah doing some work for the Equal Rights Amendment
late last year, and I said some things like this during a radio interview. So the interviewer,
who was a very bright guy, pushed at it a little. He asked me to explicate some of these
тАЬmortal dreadsтАЭ that we all share, that I thought I was illuminating by writing such weird and
troubling stories. I thought about it a moment, and then in a fit of confession that passes for
honesty I told him about writing the title story of this book, тАЬShatterday.тАЭ
тАЬI was sitting in a hotel room in New York in the middle of a January snowstorm in
1975,тАЭ I said. тАЬI had to have the story finished by 7:00 that night so I could present it at a
reading uptown at 7:30, allowing myself time to get a cab and find the auditorium...and I was
writing furiously, hardly thinking about how the story was creating itself --тАЭ
The interviewer looked at me oddly.
тАЬIt was creating itself?тАЭ
тАЬYeah,тАЭ I said. тАЬI was just the machine that was putting it on paper. That story came
out of secret places in my head and ran at the paper without regard for my breaking back or
the deadline. It created itself. Well, I finished it barely in time, got downstairs, shoved an old
lady out of the way to grab her cab in the snow, and just got uptown in time for the reading. I
didnтАЩt even have time to proofread the copy.