The Glass Teat: Essays of Opinion on Television

1970

Essayist Ellison at the top of his form -- quite possibly his best book. Wanna fight about it?

Sure, Teat is dated, almost a '60s cultural artifact, with its groovy-man vernacular and anti-Vietnam War undertone. Except for "60 Minutes," all of the programs critiqued here have long since faded from memory or passed into that video purgatory known as "Nick at Nite." But these essays, reprinted from Ellison's column in the Los Angeles Free Press, have a gutsiness, a lack of self-consciousness, that the author has rarely achieved since. Highest recommendation.

A planned sequel, The Other Glass Teat, wasn't published until the mid-1970s, for reasons Ellison explains in later editions of both books. The two volumes were supposed to have been published in a revised, single volume in the late 1990s as the fifth installment of White Wolf's Edgeworks series, but the project was abandoned. However, in 1997 BiblioBytes did publish both books as The Compleat Glass Teat in PDF (Adobe Acrobat) format.

Contents

• New Introduction: The Glass Teat Revisited: A Supplementary Introduction (1975 and 1983 editions)
• 23" Worth of Introduction
• 53 chapters, dated 4 October 1968 through 30 January 1970