Saskia van Uylenburgh “I change history here and now, Saskia. I paint forgeries of things that would not exist for a generation yet, and now will never have existed.” — "Dutch Master" Doodkiststraat: A street in Amsterdam where the death-house and Dead Christ Church are located. The name literally translates to “Coffin Street,” reinforcing the chapter's focus on mortality and the blurred lines between life and death. — Half a Sky After that, Dana and Galopade were following t

In Germany, Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, published in 1929, was plainly a post-novel in a postfictional form. But the structured world did not end everywhere at quite the same time. In the United States there was a brilliant “last hurrah” of novels for several decades after the fictional form had disappeared in Europe, and Cozzen’s By Love Possessed, published in 1957, might still be considered as a valid fictional work. That special form of fiction, the Short S

Lafferty wrote the unpublished “Pomponia” in 1958, when he was trying to break into different markets, and, like some of the stories he wrote for that purpose, it is both unmistakably Lafferty and somewhat askew from the Lafferty we know. One of the handful of places to which he sent the draft before giving up on it was Seventeen magazine. It reads like the kind of piece he imagined Seventeen might like. It takes the form of an exchange between a flighty girl and a mid-centur

“Looking at the Japanese from the outside (as I must) it seems that one of your finest literary entertainments and pleasures is the ‘Ghost Story’. And the essence of the Ghost Story is the juxtaposition of horror and fun, or reality and dream state, of the familiar suddenly gone strange and weird, of the loved and cherished suddenly turned frightening, and of the comic standing up like a giant among the various realities and rationalities.” “I seldom write ‘ghost stories’ pe

“People think I am being droll when I answer to the question ‘Who do you think is the best short story writer in the world’ — ‘I am.’ Yes, I'm partly being droll, but partly serious.”— Letter to Joye Swain, 1987 I’ve been putting together notes for a Lafferty syllabus, which means sequencing texts and sketching a few lectures, wondering whether a Lafferty course is feasible. My one rule on the blog is don’t waste a reader’s time, but I’m not sure how to say what follows quick

Tulsa postcard, c. 1965 The persona is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual. — C.G. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology The only one of us (and he is not technically of us) who holds fully to the Third Revelation is Diogenes Pontifex. Diogenes is completely outside

Lafferty’s ontological distinction between characters and persons is underappreciated in part because modern ideas of personhood have been shaped by mass-mediated character and by the categories of modern psychology. The modern person thinks nothing of bumping into the Narcissist or the Borderline, but would be taken aback by bumping into Vice. Daniel Otto Jack Petersen has pointed out that an interesting parallel to Lafferty’s work is the medieval dream vision. This strikes

Pre-War Apartments, Tulsa, OK Q: Do you believe in the perfectibility of man, or is he a constant fool at odds with the gods of the universe, to be forever rebuffed at his attempt to rise above the madness which surrounds him? RAL: The perfectibility of “man”? I believe in the perfectibility of people—some people, possibly most people. I do not believe in the perfectibility of society, or of the world, or of “man” in the abstract. Maybe it is a madness that surrounds and reb

Winding Stair Mountains, Oklahoma Reverence is the chief joy and power of life—reverence for that which is pure and bright in youth; for what is true and tried in age; for all that is gracious among the living, great among the dead, and marvelous in the powers that cannot die. — John Ruskin What's this stuff about art not supposed to be didactic? I buy you geography and arithmetic books and you chew them up and don't learn what's in them. Then I put the stuff in SF parables,

Okeene Rattlesnake Round Up, Okeene, Oklahoma Vivian was in with a loud rustle, and her footsteps like music as she started up the stair (the tone of her footfall at a frequency of 265, just above middle C, compounded with a vagrant, two harmonics, and a mute). Few men could so analyze their wives' footsteps. Everything about her was in tune, and she hummed the "Dreamer"as she ascended. May God us keep From Single vision & Newton’s sleep! — William Blake, Letter to Thomas But

El Morro in 1868 We will not record what he carved, as he has already done so, and besides, as we said, it was too stilted and stylish. But yet like all the other marks it was capable of variant and fuller translation. Lafferty’s short story “The Cliff Climbers” seems to have been inspired by El Morro National Monument in western New Mexico. It is a massive sandstone bluff, rising some two hundred feet from the high desert floor like a spire. Because of a reliable waterhole

Finnegan had the barrel of the rifle in his hands. Then he had Saxon Seaworthy in his hands, far underwater in a turmoil. Saxon did not die easily or willingly. To lull the grip he went limp as though already gone. Then, thirty seconds later, he erupted with violent writhing so as to break away. It was not easy to throttle a man with so sinewy a neck that was also protected by the pherea, the throat protuberances of an old satyr: and to choke off the air of a man already unde

“In Outraged Stone." This is the stubborn refusal to accept that there is no transcendence, that there is no ultimate reality. When they try to tell you that you are only an artifact in a collection, that you are not alive, that you have never been alive, that is the time to get mad ”— "Introduction," Ringing Changes (1984) And the five young mind-scientists from Earth. Five? Not six? Christopher, George. Philip, Bonta, Helen,Margaret. Do they not come to six? No. There a

I refrain from writing "The End" here. It must not end. — "The Day After the World Ended" “C’mon, Justin,” came an ankle-high voice from a small lady, with the red-thread or fairy mark on her throat and with a Jewel-Bird egg in her navel. “These illuminated people get mighty murderous if you don't use their brand of light. They'll kill you. Let's go to the thirteenth. C’mon.” Today I want to look at Lafferty’s “The Emperor’s Shoestrings,” a fun story that doesn’t get much att

“The berserks speak of light as though it were white or golden and as though it were singular. Apparently they cannot even see the shattered and dynamic psychedelic lights nor even the kaleidoscopic psychedelic sun. And the berserks, the marching virgins, are serious in their madness.” Only at first glance. In reality he had the plastic smooth, primordial, unfinished look of a typhonian. He could still bemolded into anything. But the noise of him and of his apparatus! Most re

“He is fifty-three years, seven months, and nine days old. His calculated worth is three hundred and twenty-two thousand dollars (my own calculation but a close one); you are his heir, Clinton. He is, moreover, highly insured withsuch a multiplicity of policies that it is almost impossible to tabulate them, or even to be sure that I know about the mall. He is unsound of heart, liver, lung, kidney, and stomach; has high blood pressure, ulcers, and Evan's Disease; in short, he

The psychoanalyst C. G. Jung (mostly in the essay Aion) argued that the human person was made up of the Ego, the Self, the Shadow, and those opposing twins the Anima and the Animus. That’s five persons in us, and he hints at quite a few more. But can these different persons in the PERSON be physically separate and visible? They can be, but not as a usual thing. But in certain hysterias and raptures and hilarities and exuberances and plain High Spirits (when the Ghost hangs hi

“In conceiving a story or inaugurating a plot which involves threads weaving with threads, if the thread A, or viewpoint character, should figure with the thread B in an opening incident of numerical order n (with respect to the incidents in the conditions precedent) there must be invented a following incident n + 1 involving threads A and C; an incident n + 2 involving threads A and D; an incident n + 3 involving threads A and E; and so on up to perhaps at least n + 4 or n +

“You will hear it for yourselves, and it will surely fill you with wonder.” — Marco Polo, The Travels “All the voyages, whether to the moon or to worlds ten million times more distant, take about the same time to complete," the sea captain said. "When you use anti-geodetic force for propulsion, all places are equally close, all places are really only “six leagues from Lop. Come. It is a great enjoyment if you have not traveled to far places before!" What an unusual story “Six

“The last story is always true until it is superseded.”— "Cabrito" (1957) “Gees, his eyes were bugged out when they cut him down. He wasscared to death by the ghost all right. That ghost made about a dozenmore hang themselves up there too.” “That many?” “Ghost in the Corn Crib” is an exciting piece of prenucleation period Lafferty, showing, in a nascent form, how his later preoccupation with consensus reality can be created, revised, and forked over a short period. It is