Joan de Joanes (Valencia, c. 1505 - Bocairent, 1579), Pentecost . "I took a live mermaid not far from here one morning," said John Counts. And then he paused. "That pause, old Wiedervogel," he said after a bit, "that pause was for you to say 'Incredible!' or something similarly apropos." "Consider it said. Was she real?" "She said that she was. She seemed to be. She was ugly as sin . . . Her skin was green and rough... She smelled like a mermaid, or at least like a fish

Some notes on Lafferty's planets, especially for those new to Lafferty. As a kid, I loved the idea of Heinlein’s Future History, Poul Anderson’s Technic Civilization, and Niven’s Known Space. Lafferty won't give you anything like that. More often than not, his planets are hyper-concentrated ideas taken to their logical and hyperbolic extremes, a kind of planetary monomania. Each world is its central concept: Pudibundia is Politeness so absolute it becomes dangerous; Skandia

These animals on our coming up to them stared at us and remained quiet where they stand, not knowing whether they had wings to fly away or legs to run off, and suffering us to approach them as close as we pleased. Amongst these birds were those which in India they call Dod-aersen (being a kind of very big goose); these birds are unable to fly, and instead of wings, they merely have a few small pins, yet they can run very swiftly. We drove them together into one place in such

A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it. It has been said, that a man of wit could not resist it; that it was a voluntary deviation from sense. But I believe he indulged himself in it, as a practice of the age, to show his reading or his memory, and to divert by producing something unexpected. — Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare (1765) THE ANGEL. Yes. You are all now under judgment, in common with the rest of the

“Knowledge is one thing, virtue is another; good sense is not conscience, refinement is not humility, nor is largeness and justness of view faith.” — John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University (1852), Discourse V, Section 9 Nobody ever heard such a display of shouting, bawling, snorting, neighing, and just plain bad manners as followed. It was enough to make one ashamed of being a man or horse. Slocum beat on the airy shield with now bloody fists and shouted vile obsceniti

“But the fact is, Paul, that I write as clearly as I am able to. I sometimes tackle ideas and notions that are relatively complex, and it is very difficult to be sure that I am conveying them in the best way. Anyone who goes beyond cliché phrases and cliché ideas will have this trouble. It's a little bit like polarized glass. It's all clear enough looking out from my viewpoint; but it may be opaque from the other side to eyes different from mine. It can't always be helped, th

“To discover the way in which this first human thinking arose in the gentile world, we encountered exasperating difficulties which have cost us the research of a good twenty years. [We had] to descend from these human and refined natures of ours to those quite wild and savage natures, which we cannot at all imagine and can comprehend only with great effort.” — Giambattista Vico, The New Science (1744), §338 “First, you have a dignity of aspect, and you seemed almost like a R

“The concept of the ‘immanent Trinity’ (alternatively called the ‘ontological Trinity’) and the ‘economic Trinity’ is the result both of the distinctions of the tradition and of the unique pressures exerted by modernity. The terms ‘immanent Trinity’ and ‘economic Trinity’ themselves are modifications of the early distinction of theology and economy, in that they refer to trinitarian persons and their relations immanently in God’s being (immanent Trinity) and these persons and

“You have filled the whole world with tombs and sepulchres; though it is nowhere said in your scriptures that you must grovel among tombs and pay them honour. — Julian the Apostate, Against the Galileans , fragment 90 (ed. Wright, The Works of the Emperor Julian , vol. 3, Loeb Classical Library 157, London: Heinemann, 1923), pp. 360–363. “The coffin which contained the relics of the martyr was removed; but even the ground where it lay retained its healing power, and those who

"We may deny our own family, we may deny our father and our brother. But what we have to understand is that we are even closer than that. We are not just related persons in one family. It is more as if we were parts of one body. We are all of us one person. We are the same person. [. . .] For I must acknowledge that Timothy whose odor is more pungent than the odor of sanctity, is more to me than a natural brother or husband could be. But it is hard to acknowledge it." Laffert

“Oh sure, you're loaded with weird stuff. You couldn't function otherwise. It's an essential enzyme in you. It will replace itself as rapidly as it's used, and it's meant to be used. The whole world is there in caricature, and something is busy there solving the problems and fictions of the world. Or else it is the prime stuff in there, and it is the world that is the caricature of it.” — “It’s Down the Slippery Stairs” A few quick notes on being totalizing: I believe reade

A few years ago, there was some discussion of “Ishmael Into the Barrens” on East of Laughter that made a few interesting points, most of which were made by Petersen . But it was clear that, for some readers, the story amounted to an old man yelling at hippies. There is some of that, but it is not the whole of it. What the old man is yelling about is the sexual revolution and how it decoupled sexual pleasure from procreation. The story will never be well understood or much li

And once more it was like a high dive that Leo was afraid to take, like a leap across an abyss — but he must get it off to however unlikely a goal was left him. So he achieved separation. Then Fang struck and broke the body of Cuthbert in half, and there was no life left in it at all. — "Goldfish" “His brain is now emitting impulses in the delta pattern... Lisman is sending, he's probing, he's getting ready for a leap. He's gauging the footholds and handholds on the other sid

This post is a first attempt to chart Melchisedech Duffey’s peculiar sexual life and aspects of antisemitism in More Than Melchisedech , situating them within the blog’s broader exploration of neglected sides of Lafferty's fiction. It confines itself to presenting textual evidence, without advancing interpretation beyond highlighting the link between Melchisedech Duffey’s sexuality and antisemitic tropes in the Argo legend . In the novel, Duffey is blackmailed for pedophili

"She had never given much thought to the devil for she felt that religion was essentially for those people who didn’t have the brains to avoid evil without it." — Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories Flammus sometimes said that he wasn’t a killer by choice. But sometimes he deceived himself and sometimes he lied. And also these things happened regularly in his trade, and he took what satisfaction he could from them. His satisfaction from killin

45. Also I beheld my God, and the countenance of Him was a thousandfold brighter than the lightning. Yet in His heart I beheld the slow and dark One, the ancient One, the devourer of His children. 46. In the height and the abyss, O my beautiful, there is no thing, verily, there is no thing at all, that is not altogether and perfectly fashioned for Thy delight. 47. Light cleaveth unto Light, and filth to filth; with pride one contemneth another. But not Thou, who art all, a

“Holly Harkel and myself, Vincent Vanhoosier, received funds and permission to record the lore of the Shelni through the intercession of that old correlator John Holmberg. This was unexpected. All lorists have counted John as their worst enemy. ‘After all, we have been at great expense to record the minutiae of pig grunts and the sound of earthworms,’ Holmberg told me, ‘and we have records of squeakings of hundreds of species of orbital rodents. We have veritable libraries of

Teresa was an attractive girl. She had a cute trick of popping the smallest rat out of her mouth so it could see what was coming into her stomach. She was bulbous and beautiful. “Like a sackful of skunk cabbage," Bascomb murmured admiringly in his head, and then flushed green at his forwardness of phrase. Teresa had protuberances upon protuberances and warts on warts, and hair all over her where she wasn't warts and bumps. “Like a latrine mop!" sighed Bascomb with true admira

“Lord Randal had invented the bow-and-arrow. But Axel could shoot the arrows farther and faster. And higher. And when he was six years old, Axel did what many persons have dreamed of doing: he made his mark on the sky. He dipped the heads of his arrows in mud, and he shot them up with uncanny accuracy and made mud marks on that transparent sky-cover which was twenty meters above them. He made about a hundred mud marks that conveyed a message in the written form of ‘code Chald

Lunel, France “ . . . the Coming (the First and Second comings are non-sequential aspects of the same event and are neither first nor second) . . . Part of the difficulty seems to involve the difference between time and eternity . . . the trouble with time is that it is so temporary. In eternity there is no time element. There is no beginning or end, and the trouble with interpreting it is that simultaneously it will have been ended . . .” — Lafferty, Letter to Robert Sirigna