A second example would be "What's the Name of that Town?", in which Epikt (note the wonderful Hellenism: Epiktistes means "The Equitable One," a great name for a calculating device that takes all elements (Stoichae) equally) sorts his facts to discover that something must be missing. — Don Webb, “Effective Arcanum” Polemical post. Don Webb gives a lot of power to the unconscious meaning of words. Amusing, given how unselfconsciously wrong that bullshit about Epiktistes is. We

But when you have done all these fine things, quoth Trinquamelle, how do you, my friend, award your decrees, and pronounce judgment? Even as your other worships, answered Bridlegoose; for I give out sentence in his favour unto whom hath befallen the best chance by dice, judiciary, tribunian, pretorial, what comes first. — François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book III, Chapter XXXIX, translated by Sir Thomas Urquhart His passion is for the British law, and he has spent

. . . our present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself . . . — Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom” (2003) This towering strangeness is part of their towering holiness. — Serpent’s Egg (ch. 2, p. 17). A thinking-aloud post about one of the thornier aspects of Serpent’s Egg. Early in the book, Lafferty tells us that in 2035, the year when the book takes

They keep accounts on Prime World; ultimate accounts, I mean. They keep crabbed, careful, fetishistic accounts. Oh, Noah, would I ever have to pay! That world is real, and all others are shadows of it. You say this, but you are afraid to mean it, and you are afraid to acknowledge yourself a citizen of it. But your only alternative is to own yourself to be a reflected and not a real person. 408. When will Christ judge us? Christ will judge us immediately after our death, and o

III. The Past This section catalogues specific historical periods, events, and figures that characters within the Argo Legend claim knowledge of, participate in via non-linear time, or which form the specific historical backdrop distinct from the foundational Mythic Past. These interactions demonstrate the characters' deep entanglement with, and reinterpretation of, established human history, or from within the Legend, the truth of history relative to Prime. A. Ancient Times.

So does Hell seem an altogether pleasant place, when it comes with its both hands full of enticements. —Where Have You Been, Sandaliotis? Some interpretations on the blog will seem really out there. I would defend them with confidence, from arguments about being inside a female reproductive system in “Flaming Ducks and Giant Bread” to the reading of “Junkyard Thoughts” as a story about a mental breakdown taking the form of a dissociative episode. However, the interpretation I

Book editors don’t add glosses or footnotes to the old SF stories they reprint, but many of those stories require cultural references that modern readers are not likely to recognize, because the references come from mid-century (i.e. the last century) popular culture. How many people under seventy will recognize that Philip K. Dick’s “Oh, to Be a Blobel!” is a reference to Marianne Moore’s poem, “Oh, to Be a Dragon”? Or that his “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” riffs o

By anybody’s standards, this was a beautiful place. The folded, rolling hills were covered with clover, or they were covered with grapes. Everywhere the three explorers walked the air was pleasantly noisy with bees. There were a dozen heavy white cattle grazing belly-deep in clover, there were exposed rock strata of shale and slate and chalk. There were beech groves. “I have never seen time piled up so deep in a place,” Ethan Farquharson said. “Not insufferably ancient time,

Strip Pit Puca dramas differ in pace and climax from the dramas of Earth people. In the high classic form, there is always a scene (very near the end) where all the bloody stuff is heaped together for the greater enjoyment and convenience of all. It is extravagant and outré. It is both tragic and comic in the tall burlesque of it. It thrills the liver and entrails and heart of the Pucas. And to Earth people it would seem rather crude and excessive. — The Reefs of Earth A Happ

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. The previous Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny post called the book one of Lafferty’s most Catholic works because the bloodshed of

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