Lign in drerd un bakn baygl! There is already something like a Jewish monopoly in high finance. There is a growing tendency to Jewish monopoly over the stage for instance, the fruit trade in London, and to a great extent the tobacco trade. There is the same element of Jewish monopoly in the silver trade, and in the control of various other metals, notably lead, nickel, quicksilver. What is most disquieting of all, this tendency to monopoly is spreading like a disease. —Hilair

La Banda’s under Eastern Sun And polyglottal stews, More babble-ish than Babylon And jew-er than the Jews. — Half a Sky So it must be. Why are people so afraid of being called anti-Semite when they are not at all afraid of being called anti-Catholic? — Letter Antisemitism is a small part of my interest in Lafferty, but getting a grip on his variety of Catholic satire as a whole (my primary interest) sometimes means dealing with it. Read a story or two for entertainment, and i

How Dotty’s image of God as “that Old Jew” changes from accusation to providence, and why that change matters to the novel’s antisemitism.

That the Prince of the World was following a time-table relentlessly was clear. But it was also clear that nobody cared very much about that. The Writing of Fiction ceased everywhere in the world with the unstructuring of the world. Fiction required a structured world. Without consensus fact and happening for background, there could not be fiction. When the structure was gone, people lived partly in the framework of fact and partly in the framework of fiction. But with one fo

“There’s only one thing in the world more pompous than a SF writer who takes himself too seriously.” “Whazzat?” “A SF writer who takes herself too seriously.” —Letter to Sheryl Smith, January 2, 1976 I have heard another Lafferty reader express some unease at the way Lafferty sometimes spoke about other science fiction writers. He certainly was no flatterer. We see this side of him in No Stone Unthrown, a series of short satirical squibs aimed at writers, editors, and reviewe

Sketch of the exhumed Little Hugh by Samuel Hieronymus Grimm (1791) 684 O yonge Hugh of Lyncoln, slayn also   Oh young Hugh of Lincoln, slain also 685 With cursed Jewes, as it is notable,   By cursed Jews, as it is well known, 686 For it is but a litel while ago,   For it is but a little while ago, 687 Preye eek for us, we synful folk unstable,   Pray also for us, we sinful folk unstable, 688 That of his mercy God so merciable   That of his mercy God so merciful 689 On us his

SF has never been very forward-looking. It is likely the least innovative of literatures. It has certainly never been daring, though several of its practitioners wear the ‘I am Daring’ badge hypocritically. It is a field compounded largely of patsies who can be led by nose-rings anywhere at all. — "The Case of the Moss Eaten Magician" I want to think a little about Lafferty's support for Joseph McCarthy and his refusal ever to believe that McCarthy had been wrong about commun

Dotty resolved to become the foremost Galveston-style piano player in the world. There are those who say that she became just that. She was good, very good, possibly the best. But that was some years after this first period of her return. — Dotty A twelve-year-old girl, a cripple, the daughter of the proprietor, was playing the piano. It was not for some time, due to the primacy of other matters, that Moysha realized that she was playing atrociously. Then he attempted to corr

“It is not my game. I am too guileless.” “The serpent in the garden said the same, but for all that he had a motive.” “Hands of the Man” was written in 1957 as a con-game story with no science fiction elements, and interesting for at least three reasons. Andrew Ferguson has documented the first two. First, it is a Wreckville story, so anyone interested in Lafferty’s heterotopia of brilliant confidence agents will want to know it. Aside from the early novel Antonino Vescovo an

“With the Jews the women remain always a little better; and this is a people that also unfolds slightly on further acquaintance and also disappoints; for while we are discovering new virtue in them, we are finding that much of their assumed worth is made out of air.” — Carl Curlee, Hell to Pay Hell To Pay is an abandoned Lafferty novel that Lafferty started at some point but didn’t record, then picked up again in 1959 and 1961. Apparently, it was to be a retelling of the Fau

"How about Plutarch’s Lives for the one book. No, it isn’t affectation to reach that far back. It is my belief that Plutarch invented the Novel as well as the biography in this. There were fifty short or medium-length novels here (the degree of fiction in them can’t be determined now) and they are good. He invented narration as distinguished from rhetoric and a few other things. He was the world’s best novelist (Balzac comes in second) and nineteen hundred years haven’t done

But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting. — Micah 5:2 But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting. — Micah 5:2 "Certainly we have hea

If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it holds places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes the more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity. Indeed, that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the

Following my request for a review of the materials, the University of Tulsa’s McFarlin Special Collections has updated its archival record: https://utulsa.as.atlas-sys.com/subjects/3870 https://utulsa.as.atlas-sys.com/subjects/4411 A word about this. The photograph of the Holocaust denial letter in the Antisemitism section was not reproduced from the University of Tulsa Special Collections, but comes from another source. Lafferty’s carbon of the letter is archived at Tulsa. S

Bernard Baruch with JFK The Three Armageddons of Enniscorty Sweeny is so damned slippery. “It is slippery, General, slippery,” Austro said modestly. There will probably never be a consensus about it—how it works, what it does, what it says. The book overloads the mind. It arrests thought. It does so deliberately, aggressively. That is why serious Lafferty readers should think hard about it rather than settle for confusion as an endpoint. Aggressive Lafferty is interesting Laf

By Sámi artist Andreas Alariesto (1900-1989) Although the human race must be regarded as a unit intellectually and physically, there have existed and still exist differences which permit a classification into various groups and races. Even the most ancient remains of man, dating from the glacial period in Europe, show differences that justify the acceptance of at least two races. Remains of skeletons that certainly belong to the Quaternary age have been found in France, Germa

Where is Eden PHISON qui circuit omnem terram Hevilath ubi nascitur aurum[which circles all the land of Havilah where gold is born] . . . Layout Cappadocian Highlands and toward Ararat. The east fork of the big bend of the Euphrates was once stolen from the Tigris. — Lafferty, note on the back of Sommerville Map — Island — Treasure: Map Gives 16 S 118° 35' 18" E which is antipodal to 16° N 61° 24' 42" W. Map location would show about 700 miles south of East end of Java and no

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 wit

"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

“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-fir