Here you go. At long last the Ellison/Fantagraphics settlement agreement. Basically everyone agrees not to say nasty things about each other any more, Ellison’s interview is removed from future printings of THE WRITERS, the offending paragraphs are removed from the upcoming history of Fantagraphics while they get to post a rebuttal on the internet. Also, everyone is responsible for their own legal bills. Fantagraphics can’t solicit any more defense fund contributions, but can continue to sell those that have already been donated.
And then, everyone goes home.
amazing.
What a long-winded waste of time & energy on ego.
navan.ghee Says: What a long-winded waste of time & energy on ego.
Ego, whatever happen to the days of just speaking your mind and not having to apologize for this an that? Sorry, rhetorical question. “This and that” can lead to $ to repair a bruised ego.
All I know is I still have my Fantagraphics edition of “The Book on the Edge of Forever”.
That’s a nice story.
Someone needs to post the soon-to-be-expurgated passages.
“Someone needs to post the soon-to-be-expurgated passages.”
No, that exposes Fantagraphics et al to a libel charge again, so let’s leave well enough alone.
No it doesn’t, Robert. They can’t do it… anyone else can.
That’s a real shame that the Ellison interview will be removed from future editions of THE WRITERS. Do I have to tear the one out of my own copy and shred it? It’s a great interview, particularly the mean-spirited stuff. It all seems just so wrong to do that.
“No it doesn’t, Robert. They can’t do it… anyone else can.”
No, it’s called perpetuating a libel – it’s a genuine can of worms if one wants to maintain a settlement like this.
Robert, I don’t think it was every actually established that it was indeed libel. It never got that far. Both parties came to an agreement. That doesn’t mean that it was actually libelous.
You’re right, but restating the comments con open the matter up to adjudication again. This is the kind of thing I have to discuss with lawyers all the time when I’m editing for magazines.
“Can”, not “con”. Sigh.
As a graduate of the Close Cover Before Striking School of Law, I can state without equivocation that the ruling covers the principals, and not third parties like us, so post away!
I was edified to learn that according to some wittling thng called blog.kobek.com posting just prior to this, that I “lost” my recent lawsuit.
Simple objective reading of the original suit filing, and what I was seeking, followed by simple objective reading of the final settlement, and what I got, might suggest that the great legal mind behind that kobeckoid pronouncement is, well, to be kind, predisposed — whatever the empirical evidence — to skew and slant and knock-cockeyed-to-produce-a-prejudged-result. Tsk-tsk. Even troglodytes should behave more honestly.
Harlan Ellison said: “Simple objective reading of the original suit filing, and what I was seeking, followed by simple objective reading of the final settlement, and what I got…”
Sounds like fun- let’s do it.
In your filing, you asked for Fantagraphics to pay all your legal fees. You did not get that.
In your filing, you asked for punitive damages to be levied against Fantagraphics in an amount “appropriate to punish or set an example of Defendants.” You did not get that.
In your filing, you asked that Fantagraphics stop the sale- and destroy all remaining copies- of Comics Journal Library 6; The Writers. You did not get that.
In your filing, you asked that Fantagraphics pay you “general damages” for supposedly profiting off your name by using it on the cover of The Writers. You did not get that.
In your filing, you asked that Fantagraphics pay you “general damages” for supposedly libeling you in “Comics As Art.” You did not get that.
In your filing, you asked that Fantagraphics pay you punitive damages in an amount “appropriate to punish or set an example of Defendants.” You did not get that.
In your filing, you asked that Fantagraphics not disseminate the allegedly libelous statements about you. You did get that. It seems to me to be something of a pyrrhic victory, however, because the mere fact of your filing this lawsuit has insured that those very same libelous statements are now being spread all over the internet- I even found them on your own site (they appear in your original complaint).
You are also now obliged to let Gary Groth go over to your site and post anything he wants about you (in 500 words or less!). This is not a privilege he is required to extend to you.
You once wrote about another lawsuit that “This is not, let me say at the outset, one of those grotesque, disingenuous “it’s a matter of principle” locutions. It’s the money, dummy.” This suit brought you no money- and it did great harm to your reputation as a defender of free speech.
Considering all of that, I have no trouble agreeing with Kobek’s assessment that you lost this one.
Wow. Now I’m officially middle-aged.
Ellison was my favorite writer when I was a kid. I mean, in my Young Angry Adult reading years, graduating from Heinlein and Lovecraft to Hunter S. Thompson and Ellison and trading Burroughs’s from Edgar Rice to William S. All perfect reading for a typically fucked-up geeky high-schooler, but of the three Ellison was the best fit. Crazy macho Hunter S. and gay junkie Burroughs were completely out of my experience, but Ellison, despite his claims to a picaresque past, was so obviously book-obsessed, over-smart, teenager-cranky and way too conflicted about women. Just like me. And he could write.
But, eventually, you drag yourself out of adolescence and start to deal with the world on a deeper level than how much it hates you and how much better you are than it, and literary tastes follow suit. Ellison was the perfect writer for a teenager and one of the least perfect afterwards but every year or two I’d still go back and re-read some of my favorite short stories and essays.
That was true even after I got a better feel for his public persona. The first hint was a ranting letter to a magazine (Analog?) over some non-issue. The off-kilter edge to it put a different slant on all those “how-I-fought-the-good-fight” bits. After that it was easy enough to get more information from people who’d actually met the man. And then of course there was “Deadloss”.
But writers are not what they write, and even less so what readers read. And it didn’t change my appreciation for his earlier works and for how they made me feel at the time.
But now to watch this excruciatingly-prolonged public meltdown… First the Hugos grope and subsequent cringe-making non-apology, then the lawsuit by a man whose best days are long behind him against a company publishing some of the finest work in the field today…
And now that it’s finally settled, to see him here crowing about his “victory” at litigious bullying…
Ah well. Thompson put a bullet in his brain, Burroughs nodded off for good, but Ellison shambles on. I’ll put aside reliving my youth until I get past my new, middle-aged, crankiness, or until my senile years begins. Or his end.
@Kevin Greenlee – of course in such situations smart people ask for more than they want, remedy-wise, so that when they have to come to a compromise, they have a chance of getting what they actually want. So I suggest only Ellison and his lawyers know to what degree they “lost”, if they lost at all.
Dan-
Please don’t forget that it was Harlan Ellison himself who suggested we evaluate whether or not he lost his suit by comparing what he asked for in his original filing with what he received in the final settlement.
Well, now that that’s settled, he can get to work on The Final Dangerous Visions, right?
(No?)
A terrible hard lesson for bloggers to learn:
Acknowledgment of their minuscule status by accepting the simple truth that mere assertion is not evidence.
If I lost, Mr. Greenlee, water-carrier, why am I so satisfiedly happy?
Oh, nevuh mind. I’m sure as a minuscule status bloviater you can conjure up simply oodles of jabberwocky to explain my current jollity.
For reasons unclear to me, Mr. Ellison appears to have a wholly undeserved reputation in some quarters as a fierce debate opponent. In my limited encounters with the man over the last few months, I have found that when- as often- he cannot muster an intelligent response to something he runs away petulantly or orders his foe banned from his website or- as now- he resorts to name calling.
In his initial post on this thread, he invited us to compare a “simple objective” reading of his original filing with a “simple objective” reading of the settlement agreement. I took him up on that interesting invitation and reported the results here. Because I did this, Mr. Ellison- much like a second grader- stomps his foot and calls me a name.
If Mr. Ellison cannot explain his feeling of victory based on an objective reading of the facts and now wants to shift things over to a subjective reading of his own emotions then that is his affair. All I can say is that if Mr. Ellison did not think comparing his original filing with the settlement was a fair barometer of determining who “lost” then he should not have suggested it. (I fully expect Mr. Ellison to respond to this point by calling me a poopyface).
And, despite Mr. Ellison’s apparent confusion on the matter, repeating the demands of his suit does not constitute “mere assertion” but is in fact evidence- evidence which his first post suggested he himself thought was highly relevant. (Mr. Ellison’s rejoinder to this will likely be to call me a double poopyface).
It is probably worth mentioning too that since I do not have a blog it is inaccurate to refer to me as part of a group of bloggers (to this, I am sure Mr. Ellison will call me a triple poopyface with a cherry on top).
Amazing how the prose is purple even when he’s just leaving comments on a blog. Must be hardwired or somethin’.
THAT”S talent!
He’s the Fletcher Hanks of the written word!
Ellison started this whole thing becuase of passages in an interview about a guy that were misunderstood by that guy. But Harl already clarified he meant no harm, and the guy knows he misunderstood the context. So why the fuss? Why try to supress the interview? The easier way would for Harl to ask Mr Groth to just add a little end note clarifying the statement for future readers. Even if he didn’t, by now most people understand the context.
How many copies of the original book were printed? If Ellison has to wait for the next printing for his interview to be removed, it’ll still be awhile. And if anything, Harl made the book a faster seller, more popular, by the lawsuit.
“But, eventually, you drag yourself out of adolescence and start to deal with the world on a deeper level than how much it hates you and how much better you are than it, and literary tastes follow suit. Ellison was the perfect writer for a teenager”
I agree. He’s good for the angry teenage male, but most people eventually grow up. Problem is Harlan Ellison has always sold himself as the enfant terrible. It’s getting old, loosing its charm, but since the author has become so dependant as being seen as the guy with a temper, he’s just become a charicature of that rather than be a complex author.
Ellison: “If I lost, Mr. Greenlee, water-carrier, why am I so satisfiedly happy?”
Because like the article says “everyone agrees not to say nasty things about each other any more” and the whole affair is supposed to be put to rest. You can’t publically declare that you aren’t happy.
“long-winded waste of time & energy”
What an excellent new nom de plume for Ellison.
Mr. Greenlee, water-carrier, minuscule status bloviater, suddenly has more status with me than the great Harlan Ellison. Odd how the web changes things.