Unavailable
Unavailable
Unavailable
Ebook232 pages4 hours
Memos from Purgatory: An Autobiography
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this ebook
From the Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author of Strange Wine: A gritty memoir of life in NYC that became the basis for a Hitchcock TV drama.
Hemingway said, “A man should never write what he doesn’t know.” In the mid‑fifties, Harlan Ellison—kicked out of college and hungry to write—went to New York to start his career. It was a time of street gangs, rumbles, kids with switchblades, and zip guns made from car radio antennas. Ellison was barely out of his teens himself, but he took a phony name, moved into Brooklyn’s dangerous Red Hook section, and managed to con his way into a “bopping club.” What he experienced (and the time he spent in jail as a result) was the basis for the violent story that Alfred Hitchcock filmed as the first of his hour‑long TV dramas. This autobiography is a book whose message you will not be able to ignore or forget.
Hemingway said, “A man should never write what he doesn’t know.” In the mid‑fifties, Harlan Ellison—kicked out of college and hungry to write—went to New York to start his career. It was a time of street gangs, rumbles, kids with switchblades, and zip guns made from car radio antennas. Ellison was barely out of his teens himself, but he took a phony name, moved into Brooklyn’s dangerous Red Hook section, and managed to con his way into a “bopping club.” What he experienced (and the time he spent in jail as a result) was the basis for the violent story that Alfred Hitchcock filmed as the first of his hour‑long TV dramas. This autobiography is a book whose message you will not be able to ignore or forget.
Unavailable
Read more from Harlan Ellison
Alien Sex: 19 Tales by the Masters of Science Fiction and Dark Fantasy Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Grave Predictions: Tales of Mankind's Post-Apocalyptic, Dystopian and Disastrous Destiny Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Blood Is Not Enough: Stories of Vampirism Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy & Science Fiction Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMore Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Outstanding Stories of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Fantastic Stories of the Imagination (with linked TOC) Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5
Related to Memos from Purgatory
Related ebooks
The Complete Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe First Gonzo Journalist Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Day I Met Charles Bukowski & Other Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAn Angle on the World: Dispatches and Diversions from the New Yorker and Beyond Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsYou Can't Win: A Story from Life Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Burning Wheel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCharacters and Plots in the Novels of Horace Mccoy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMesopotamia Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Brits, Beats and Outsiders Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Blue Guide to Indiana Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Printed in Utopia: The Renaissance’s Radicalism Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Glory Of The Trenches Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Philip K. Dick Short Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTelevision: An Essay from Chuck Klosterman IV Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAlasdair Gray: A Secretary's Biography Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Tales from the Eternal Cafe Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPoems Written by a Government Prisoner in Georgia, USA Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Made-Up Man: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Letters of Robert Giroux and Thomas Merton Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Swing State: A Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPaintwork Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Dream Life of Balso Snell Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Story of the Y Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTop Rankin': A Punk/Ska Noir Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHard Landing Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Bring Your Own God: The Spirituality of Woody Guthrie Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Town Smokes and Other Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Social Science For You
Questions for Couples: 469 Thought-Provoking Conversation Starters for Connecting, Building Trust, and Rekindling Intimacy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA People's History of the United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Art of Witty Banter: Be Clever, Quick, & Magnetic Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All About Love: New Visions Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Come As You Are: Revised and Updated: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fervent: A Woman's Battle Plan to Serious, Specific, and Strategic Prayer Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5My Secret Garden: Women's Sexual Fantasies Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Just Mercy: a story of justice and redemption Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Like Switch: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Influencing, Attracting, and Winning People Over Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Denial of Death Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Verbal Judo, Second Edition: The Gentle Art of Persuasion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dumbing Us Down - 25th Anniversary Edition: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Body Is Not an Apology, Second Edition: The Power of Radical Self-Love Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Human Condition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Memos from Purgatory
Rating: 3.75 out of 5 stars
4/5
8 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5well worth reading, as is anything by Harlan Ellison, this is a memoir centring on his arrest for having an unregistered handgun dating from his stint writing about gangs in New York, probably for "Hustler"magazine. In my opinion the Magazine was far inferior to it's stringer, and the time spent within these pages will amply repay the reader.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Laughably bad. The self-congratulatory introductions, the unbelievably cheesy opening chapters, the likely bogus gang stuff; there's all that. THEN comes "The Tombs". Ellison went to jail. For a day. A DAY. And thought it merited 90 pages of whining such as you would not BELIEVE. The name Boethius came to mind while reading this, for two reasons. The first is that some of the passages in the book read just like passages from Ignatius Reilly's notebook. Take this, for example:'The guards shoved them forward roughly, though not with any real brutality, despite the fact that one old man screamed like a chicken, "Keep your fuckin' hands offen me, hack!"That was my first occasion to hear the prison slang word for guard used. From that moment on, I thought of them as "hacks" also. After all, wasn't I one of the boys?'Good lord. I mean it goes on like that. It's the most embarrassing book I've ever read. He seemed to have no idea of reality while writing it, or of how it would read. The second reason it reminded me of Boethius is because Boethius went to prison and was executed, brutally executed, on a bogus charge. While in prison awaiting his execution he wrote a work of philosophical literature that is widely read to this day. Ellison went to jail for a day, mistakenly, and it produced an embarrassingly bad book of whining. If these two meet in any kind of afterlife, I hope Boethius punches Ellison in the mouth.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5In 1954, Harlan Ellison moved to the Red Hook section of Brooklyn with the intent of joining a street gang, research for his next tome. His experiences as "Cheech" Beldone, from his ritual deflowering of one of the Baron Debs to an Indian knife fight with a fellow Baron, are harrowing and disturbing images of gang life in the 50's. Although the "when you're a Jet, you're a Jet" ideals are now "cute" compared to gang life in the new millennium, it's still horrifying. Memos From Purgatory is actually two books in one; Book One:The Gang deals with his gang life, while Book Two: The Tombs is an account of an occurrence six years later in which Ellison spends 24 hours in New York's jail system. Set up and tipped off to the police by a disgruntled acquaintance, Ellison is held on weapons possession (stemming from the weapons from his gang days that he used as display on his lecture tours about the book). It's at this point Memos From Purgatory loses me. Whine, whine, whine. That's all Ellison does in this second half. He does admit that there are those out there who would question his frenzied reaction at being incarcerated for only 24 hours (and acting like it's 24 years), and I suppose I'm one of them. The whole time I was reading Book Two: The Tombs, I kept thinking, "Man, Ellison, calm down." He gives a good overview of the miserable conditions of jail in the Big City and the screwed-up judicial system that accompanies it, but the overreacting is just too much. I heartily hand it to Ellison for having the nerve to join a street gang and write about it, but Book One: The Gang should have stood on its own. Book Two: The Tombs seems a senseless afterthought, more so when Ellison admits that the inclusion of a one-in-a-million chance meeting with the head of the Barons, a fellow jailbird, was a fictional device suggested by the original publisher because he felt there wasn't enough linkage between the two halves of the book. Well, there still isn't.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5For ten weeks in 1954, then twenty-year-old writer Harlan Ellison adopted the alias of teenager Phil “Cheech” Beldone and joined a NYC street gang called the Barons all in the name of research—an endeavor that nearly cost Ellison his life on more than one occasion, from the gang initiation ritual to the final savage, bloody rumble against a rival gang in Prospect Park.Fast-forward seven years to 1961 when Ellison attended a gathering in NYC and encountered an old “friend” named Ken Bales to whom Ellison had loaned a typewriter—which Bales promptly hocked. While at the party, Ellison took the opportunity to demand compensation from Bales. A few days later, two detectives arrived at Ellison’s apartment based on an anonymous report of drug parties and illegal weapons. Was Bales the caller? Ellison seemed to suspect as much.Known for this vociferous anti-drug lifestyle, Ellison explained to the detectives that there were no illegal narcotics in his apartment and the weapons, taken from a street gang, were now used as part of his popular lectures on juvenile delinquency. After allowing the detectives to search his apartment, Ellison is relieved to learn that no charges will be filed for narcotics—but they will have to arrest him on possession of an unregistered firearm, as a .22 caliber pistol was among the gang weapons.Thus begins the second part of this memoir—Ellison’s vivid and dramatic description of his 24 hours in jail. Here is where the narrative runs longer than necessary and I can understand how many readers consider it whiny. Memos from Purgatory is an unflinching, up-close-and-personal examination of street gangs and the callous NYC legal system of the times. It was one of Harlan Ellison’s bestselling books for nearly 25 years. While the material is obviously dated, the color of Ellison’s honest and raw narrative has not faded. I think the same can be said for most of his work.Of course, what Harlan Ellison book would be complete with an expository introduction? In this case, my 1983 ACE paperback edition contains three intros, one written for this book and two from each previous printing. Ellison’s commentaries are nearly as enjoyable his stories!