Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585) They were very friendly little girls for about ten years, from the time they were eight or nine years old. — More Than Melchisedech " Ce premier jour de May, Helene, je vous jure " (“This first day of May, Helen, I swear to you”) — Pierre de Ronsard, Sonnets pour Hélène The effect of Eva was similar — and of Roberta and of Helen (who had three little daughters as like her as three golden apples) . . . . This post moves into tricky territory. Sign

What the Eleans call the pillar of Oenomaus is in the direction of the sanctuary of Zeus as you go from the great altar. On the left are four pillars with a roof on them, the whole constructed to protect a wooden pillar which has decayed through age, being for the most part held together by bands. This pillar, so runs the tale, stood in the house of Oenomaus.— Pausanias, Description of Greece 5.20.6 “Which Great God, yours or mine?” Porcellus grunted. “They aren't the same,

“The last story is always true until it is superseded.”— "Cabrito" (1957) “Gees, his eyes were bugged out when they cut him down. He wasscared to death by the ghost all right. That ghost made about a dozenmore hang themselves up there too.” “That many?” “Ghost in the Corn Crib” is an exciting piece of prenucleation period Lafferty, showing, in a nascent form, how his later preoccupation with consensus reality can be created, revised, and forked over a short period. It i

But one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water. John 19:34 “Your name is ape,” the man said, smiling in his pain. There are elements of sourness in Lafferty that surface in his eschatological thinking, and I haven’t worked out how to understand them. “And Name My Name” is bleak and beautiful. It denounces humanity. A figure who is certainly Christ—still bearing the wound from Longinus’ spear from which water and blood flowe

The aim here is to create a record of Lafferty’s translations and an episodic account of Dotty , so what follows is inevitably a bit disjointed. If it has a center, it is in the way poetry remains a constant throughline in Lafferty’s artistic life. People like to say Lafferty wrote tall tales, but in a real sense, he wrote prose poems. Before Lafferty turned to professional writing in 1957–1958, one of his hobbies was translating poetry. (I’ll include a list of his translatio

“We will show you the back of the tapestry. What you see now is not the true face of Astrobe, not all of it. The other side of the tapestry is shaggier, but it is a real picture also, and a much more meaningful one than the world you look at now. […] Have you never had the feeling, Thomas, that you were looking at everything from the wrong side? You have been.” Thinking again about Ouden, I wanted to put together some thoughts about how it works in Past Master . It seems help

First, let it be understood that I am a very prejudiced man. “Prejudiced” means simply working from prejudgments, from previously acquired information. A juryman in a trial case should be free from prejudice as to that case, but I cannot think of another circumstance where prejudice is a disadvantage, though unfortunately the word has a bad name. It is a distinct disadvantage to have to wake up in a new world every day and to learn it all over again. — Luna #67, interview wi

This isn’t a question of turning you upside down or inside out. You have all been turned inside out for a very long time. The approximate dates of the turning are in my databanks; the reasons and circumstances of it are not. That is not your right surfaces that you have been seeing for this long time. Those are your blooming entrails on the outside of you, draped about you, looped over your pseudo-ears. Even more than on the physical do these analogies apply on the psychic pl

There was the Asteroid Midas, a big-beaked bird of a gambler who could do things with card and dice and markers in his long talons that seemed unlawful. — Space Chantey (1968) They plucked that Asteroid Bird, the two of them, man and machine. He had been one of the richest and most extended of all creatures, with a pinion on every planet. They left the great Midas with scarcely a tail feather. When Tell and Gahn did business with a fellow now, they really did business. And

“I began to see that there was an element of humor in that dubious transaction that I had made so many years ago, and that part of the joke was on me.” In September of 1976, Lafferty finished “Bright Coins in Never-Ending Flow,” a short story about a man named Matthew Quoin who may or may not have made a deal with the devil. I’ve been thinking about it because of the role the U.S. penny plays in Quoin’s life. The story builds up to the consequences for Quoin after the penny c

This was the outrageous prediction: ‘Eleven-year-old Caspar Lampiste didn’t seem very much worried when I told him that he had only one day to live, that he would be killed by an automobile then. “What kind of automobile?” he laughed. “Shouldn’t I get to pick what kind of automobile I want to be killed with?” “It will be a foreign car named Le Hot Sport,” your faithful reporter, I, George Hegedusis, told him.’ “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow!” young Caspar sang out.” And the son Casp

“Laff, do you remember 'Johnny Crookedhouse,'" Barry Malzberg asked me once. ‘How could you have known, how could anyone have known?’ I gasped. ‘For my sins I was sometimes assigned to the slush piles when I worked for publishers,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember anything about it except the name, and I can never forget it. It was, it was—’ ‘The worst story ever written,’ we both said at once. No, of course there is no copy in existence. I hope not.” Being a big Barry Mazberg fan,

Lafferty finished the original draft of “Once on Aranea” in October 1961 and rewrote it in January 1965. It first appeared in his short story collection Strange Doings (1972). Originally a story that focused on personal horror, in the rewrite, it became a piece of cosmic horror and one of my favorite Lafferty stories. It begins with a survey team exploring the asteroids of the Cercyon Belt. They have an odd and funny procedure of leaving one man behind to test for latent thr

The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve; lovers, to bed; 'tis almost fairy time. I fear we shall outstep the coming morn as much as we this night overwatch'd. — William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream , Act V, Scene I “ . . . the sun really is darkened and the moon really does not give its light. The time has almost all run out. The iron tongue of midnight is already swinging, and when it will clash and sound, the angular velocity of psychic accumulation is seen t

"This is power politics," Julius Brass explained it to James Tyrone. (They still talked together sometimes.) "I don't look like a Jew. I'm tow-haired and light-skinned and pug-nosed and freckle-faced. I'm an Anglo if there ever was one. And since my father changed the name from Messing to Brass we don't even sound Jewish. The kids don't recognize hardly any of us as Jews. But they know the niggers when they see them. And they know the Catholics because they go to the Catholic

Advanced Lafferty. I have a fairly complicated Thomist reading of how Ouden and the various allegorical set pieces work in Past Master (1968). At bottom, it comes down to the argument that Ouden cannot be a character because he is a complete privation, which does not exist as res (a pleonasm, that). There is, however, a fascinating way one could work Ouden into the Thomist tradition and give him a kind of being. It would be by calling him what late scholasticism referred to

perfect (adj.) — early 15c., classical correction of Middle English parfit “flawless, ideal” (c. 1300), also “complete, full, finished, lacking in no way” (late 14c.), from Old French parfit “finished, completed, ready” (11c.), from Latin perfectus “completed, excellent, accomplished, exquisite,” past participle of perficere “accomplish, finish, complete,” from per “completely” + combining form of facere “to make, to do” (from PIE root dhe- “to set, put”). — Online Et

“When a pitcher’s throwing a spitball, don’t worry and don’t complain, just hit the dry side like I do.” — Stan Musial Lafferty’s unpublished 1958 short story “The All-Star Series” is slight, though it touches on themes dear to Lafferty: tradition vs. sterile progress, the letters vs. the spirit of the law, nostalgia and loss, ingenuity and getting one over on the system, and the importance of fun. We have an uncomplicated bad guy, the Imperator, who cannot wait for baseball

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.” — Franz Kafka, in a letter to Oskar Pollak (January 27, 1904) I'm under the weather, taking a sick day, and thinking about The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny . This will be a response to a great Thomas Flight video I watched on YouTube. In my professional life, I push for colleagues to embrace new technologies, a stance that can be quite polarizing. Many of my colleagues take a “burn-it-with-f

“A superior smile is the sovereign wonder-worker,” Griggles Swing said to Belinda Greenglow on a Monday evening. “One smiles superiorly at God and is one-up on him. But if God would smile superiorly at man, he must do so anthropomorphically, on man's own terms. The morning stars snickered and the little hills melted like wax when this was first discovered. When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Job 38:7 The hills melted like wax at the