Give me back the Berlin wall Give me Stalin and St. Paul Give me Christ Or give me Hiroshima Destroy another fetus now We don't like children anyhow I've seen the future, baby It is murder —Leonard Cohen, “The Future” As to your selecting the name “Kirol” that was just to preserve you from a little numerological trap. Advanced Lafferty. In my last Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny post, I called the book one of Lafferty’s most Catholic works because the bloodshed o

This interactive map links to my work on the angstrom stories. It shows how Lafferty drew on E. I. Watkin’s The Bow in the Clouds (1932) to shape the sequence before departing from Watkin’s scheme. Watkin uses colors to explain his Bonaventurist account of knowledge and experience; Lafferty builds stories around them, sometimes following Watkin, often arguing with him. Lafferty later transmuted this material when he turned to In a Green Tree. In composing The Men Who Knew Eve

Anthony Quinn's illustration of Mad King Sweeney Eorann: All the same, I would prefer a hollow tree and Sweeney bare — that sweetest game we used to play — to banqueting with him today. I tell you, Sweeney, if I were given the pick of all in earth and Ireland, I'd rather go with you, live sinless and sup on water and watercress. — Seamus Heaney, Sweeney Astray “I suppose that I had better take up my den in the tree,” Enniscorthy Sweeny had said. “They won’t know how to drive

About Sweeny’s work, those endless and topless mountains of music, and the rivers of words that run like waterfalls out of those mountains, is it really influencing and creating events in the world? Yes it is. And the music is much more powerful than the words in these creations. Alexandr Scriabin (1871–1915) went out in a bad way. A pimple on his upper lip developed into an infected boil. Attempts to lance it failed to stop the infection. There were no effective antibiotics

Even with Nipkow, his “spirally apertured rotating disc that provided, at both sending and receiving ends, a simple and effective method of image scanning”, I wish I had an illustration of it. I can't quite figure what the damned thing looked like. — Handwritten note On November 18, 1992, Lafferty wrote to Patrice Duvic about his story “Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies.” Some handwritten notes about Nipkow also survive. In the letter, he wrote, “Paul Nipkow got his p

Posed and “Injun’d up” in war bonnets. “Your analogy is a little strained,” Mary Mabel said. “Those Indians we saw in Florida and the ones at Atlantic City had war bonnets, and they couldn't very well have been the kind of Sioux you said. And just last night on the TV in the motel, those Massachusetts Indians put a war bonnet on the President and called him the Great White Father. You mean to tell me that they were all phonies? Hey, who's laughing at who here?” You can tell a

“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

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

The largest church in my city is that of a Christian sect that will not show the cross. It is built in imitation of a style that requires the cross, and the simple elimination of it would leave an emptiness and discordance. What is done to disguise this gaping omission? There is not permitted to be seen one right angle in the entire building, not one natural congruence of horizontal and vertical line. There are asymmetrical spires all over the place, there are twenty-nine deg

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

“Charles,” Gorgonius Pantera said, “you wrote some of the easiest-to-ignore works in all the history of disreputable literature. Did you really have anything to go on at all? You created a whole universe of your own, but did you use anything at all that was material in that creation?” “No, Gorgolanza, I didn’t create a universe, I discovered one. I named it the Fortean Universe when I found that it was unnamed. I don’t know why many persons didn’t discover it before I did. Th

The quicksand eels will finally eat all his flesh and bones, but they cannot eat his form or his displacement. But these cranky old ko-el ghosts are the ancestors of some of us. When they kill and dismember one of our children, it may be a descendant of theirs. Cannot dead ancestors do whatever they wish with their descendants? The NFL season, my favorite time of the year, started last week, which brought to mind one of Lafferty’s great unsung works, an odd one even by Laffer

Chesterton’s “The Nightmare,” Oriel Overlark, and the place of Lafferty’s monsters beneath the throne in Fourth Mansions.

“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

Harry Langdon (1884-1944) Whenever someone thinks of Lafferty and silent movies, the story that comes to mind first is "Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies," one of his stone-cold masterpieces. He graded it himself in September 1978, reporting to a correspondent "a fair story in Orbit 20, a fair story in Shadows (Doubleday, edited by Charles L. Grant), and a very good story ('Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies') in Terry Carr's Universe Eight." If that story is L

Well, why did not the men of Kyklopolis get together in great numbers with many boats and torches and weapons and hunt out and kill this Grendel? Should such a peril be allowed to live? But this is to ignore who Grendel really was, to forget of what race he was the last surviving member. For Grendel, who had once been completely human, was of the race of Cain. Moreover, Grendel was not only the descendant but also the murderer of the murderous Cain. He had disregarded the Mar

"Pioneer [Reventlo] was a sort of ghost in that he had a very loose association between body and soul. He was inhabited a little by the ‘Eden Archetype,’ a projection from the future. He knew of course . . . that all archetypes are these projections from the future and none of them from the past. And yet he sincerely believed it was the past he was excavating.” They were all quiet for a day and a night and a day. Then the spirit came and moved over them. But which way did it

“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

Three special treats of this ‘Little Golden Age’ were Cordwainer Smith, J.G. Ballard, and Arthur C. Clarke. Well, Smith died and Ballard lost a bit of his fine hand after a bit, but these were still the great treats. There was a sort of magic winking and blinking in half-a-dozen places. It would be hard to extinguish all those new and elegant sources, though it would be attempted. — “The Case of the Moth-Eaten Magician” J.G. BALLARD A beach without an ocean yet, A cartless h