“It is the only animal that children dream of without having seen or been told about. Moncrief by his recall methods has studied thousands of early childhood dreams. Children universally dream of bears, Tahitian children subject to no ursine influence in themselves or their ancestry, Australian children, town tikes before they ever saw a bear toy. They dream of bears. The bear is the boogerman. Bears live in the attics of old childhood houses. They did in my own and in thousa

Technology is a queer thing. It brings you gifts with one hand, and stabs you in the back with the other. —C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures These were sometimes criticized, but mostly by persons of standards derived from an earlier age, from the pre-postliterate age. — Serpent’s Egg Lafferty sent this little piece off on February 2, 1975, for the “Oklahoma Authors” series in Oklahoma Librarian. It appeared eight months later in the October issue, alongside a great Lafferty photog

Bix Beiderbecke, one of Smith's great interests I began to write late in life when I realized suddenly one day that I was leaving nothing at all in the world. All old bachelors come to this feeling sooner or later. Don't let it ever happen to you . . . — Lafferty, letter to Sheryl Smith, October 1, 1971 This will be of interest to about three people. Sheryl Smith, Lafferty’s first strong critic and his clever correspondent, ran a computer consulting business in the years befo

No, I can’t recommend any good Irish myths or legends in translation. I have a copy of the John Strachan STORIES FROM THE TAIN which I have been meaning to translate for some years now, but it’s too damned difficult. It does have a glossary, but that covers only the unusual words. I have to go to my Dineen’s Irish-English dictionary a dozen times a page and it usually will not have the word, it being of modern Irish and the Tain being old Irish. But I have adapted several of

I have total freedom to do whatever I want to do, but at this point in time I am enjailed in a pokey or slammer in Boondocks New Jersey. — “The Wheel and the Shoosh” (unfinished draft) Lafferty was extremely good at getting the most out of his drafted material and ideas. Almost everything gets used, as if he were dealing with a buffalo. Over the twenty-plus years of his writing life, when he turned out the huge corpus, it seems he made most of it work. There are the unwritten

This might be a rather far-fetched analogy, but Lafferty’s style is somewhat similar to that of Seabozu, the ghost monster that appeared in episode 35 of the tokusatsu drama Ultraman (the original series), titled “Monster Graveyard” (directed by Akio Jissoji, written by Mamoru Sasaki). As anyone who has seen this episode knows, Seabozu is a monster with a grotesque appearance, with its exposed skeleton, and is known as a “ghost monster.” However, Seabozu did not appear on Ear

“Ginny Wrapped in the Sun” (1967) draws on a few unusual sources, including Isaac Asimov. Lafferty takes what should be a reassuring calculation from Asimov and turns it into evidence that humanity may be living on borrowed time. The source of the calculation is pretty obscure, and I came across it in some incidental reading. Lafferty, breaking into science fiction, must have read “The Slowly Moving Finger,” published in the February 1964 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and

Why have I been kept ignorant of a main thing in the popular arts that has been going on for several years at least? Asterix the Gaul has apparently had several of these adventures before. Everybody in France has known about him. Everybody of any moment in the world has known about him. And I was left out. As a quick follow-up to the post on silent slapstick and Lafferty, here is something on The Adventures of Asterix, which Lafferty reviewed in 1970. The comic was created in

John Logie Baird demonstrating a Nipkow disk in 1927 It is worth preserving as a remnant of that early era when there were giants on the earth. And, if it is preserved, someday someone will gaze into the old kerosene-powered receiver and cry out in astonishment in the words of the Greatest Bard: "—what poet-race shot such Cyclopean arches at the stars?" Whoever you are, and whenever or whereever you read this first story in the book, it will be best story you will r

“Seven-Day Terror” is one of those Lafferty stories that everyone seems to enjoy. It first appeared in the March 1962 issue of Worlds of If and belongs to Lafferty’s early series about the precocious and cheerfully dangerous Willoughby children. This time, nine-year-old Clarence constructs a “disappearer” from a beer can and two pieces of red cardboard. His experiment wreaks havoc on cats, fire hydrants, automobiles, houses, and finally a grocer. Now for some extreme Lafferty

MINDWEBS was a weekly half-hour radio series created by Michael Hanson and Steve Gordon for WHA/WERN, Wisconsin Public Radio in Madison. Instead of conventional radio plays, listeners heard readings of science-fiction and fantasy stories, usually performed by Hanson and accompanied by music, sound effects, and a handful of other voices. The series began in 1975 and continued into the 1980s. Although the Lafferty letters I have read never mention it, MINDWEBS adapted his “Hand

“I’m Marco Rixthaler,” the young man said. “I am the son of the eminent Melchior Rixthaler.” — Aurelia Thinking about Aurelia and her crash landing a few weeks ago put me in mind of one of Lafferty’s best translations, his version of a poem by Fernán Caballero, the pseudonym of Cecilia Böhl de Faber. She was one of the most important Spanish writers of the nineteenth century. Born in Switzerland, she became associated with Spain, especially Andalusia, whose customs, landscape

There are persons with a strong interest and affection for themselves and themselves alone. There are persons with a strong interest and affection for the world about them, and for its furniture and people. So far as I know, these are the only two sorts of people there are, and the difference between these two sorts is very deep. It would seem that the persons of the first sort, having no real interest in other persons at all, would not be interesting to those other persons e

It is like starting a big bird off to fly, and it all comes apart in your hands. — Archipelago When Lafferty titled his translations, he chose Vogelsprachenkund, a word that appears several times in his work and informs “Bird-Master,” one of his great stories. In Friedrich Rückert’s “Aus der Jugendzeit,” the phrase Vogelsprachekund means something like “knowing the language of birds” or “versed in bird-speech.” Rückert addresses the child’s mouth as full of unconscious wisdo

A short post on a few essential works for a Lafferty reader. 1532–1564 — François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel. Rabelais, François. Gargantua and Pantagruel, five comic novels first published between 1532 and 1564. The Penguin Screech is the one I would recommend. Screech takes a scholarly stance against the view of Bakhtin and others (going back to the early 20th century) that Rabelais was a crypto-atheist. A comic, earthy Renaissance satire centered on the giants Garg

“Say, this is not quite the speech I intended to give. Nobody is throwing fruit or vegetables or eggs at me. But in the Indo-China War things are not muddy. There is no possibility of American gain or advantage. There are just not any lootable assets for us in Indo-China. We do not need their rice crop, we do not need their fish crop. Times were good when we intervened in accord with our treaty promise, and it was our involvement that turned times bad for us. The enemy does n

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

“As to the ‘Square Hills of Quintana Roo’ (dammit [. . .] you’ve got my typewriter upset again), I loved that title but I DON’T believe I ever actually wrote the piece. The square hills were the strange pyramids in Yucatan, believed by some archeologists to be older than the pyramids of Egypt.” — Letter, 1993 MAYA - YUCATAN setting novel. The HUITMANNA, bearded QUOTZO, still lives, and the civilization is still thriving under jungle shades. — Notes The Square Hills of Quinta

One question in Lafferty’s thinking about the end of contingent worlds is how to measure a life against the world’s. Everyone grows older and sees worlds fade. That is, anyone who is lucky enough to live long enough to experience that kind of loss. Lafferty certainly went through it. He was probably haunted by this more than most people (I think) because his father was so old when he was born, and he was the baby of the family. His grandparents were a century older than he. H

When the Abebaios Block (the Hesitation Block) had been removed from most human minds (usually by simple childhood metasurgery), people began to make decisions faster, and often better. The "Block" had been a mental stutter. When it was understood what it was, and that it had no useful function, it was done away with. And individuals sharpened up as if they had been gone over by a honing stone. Future readers are lucky that so much of Lafferty’s writing process survives, thou