tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-59042985100690739462024-02-20T12:53:27.711-08:00The Ants Of God Are Queer FishAnd Walk Now Gently Through The FireDaniel Otto Jack Petersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278782665152906956noreply@blogger.comBlogger159125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5904298510069073946.post-22555590128755647192019-04-03T09:12:00.000-07:002019-04-03T09:19:09.347-07:00A Tall Jail-Break in Scotland<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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One pleasant afternoon Mazuma O'Shaunessey was in jail in a little town in Scotland. The jailer was gloomy and suspicious and not given to joking. </blockquote>
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“No tricks from you now. I will not be taken.”</blockquote>
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“Just one to show I have the power. Stand back so I can't reach you.”</blockquote>
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“I'm not likely to let you.”</blockquote>
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“And hold up a pound note in one hand as tightly as you can. I will only flick my handkerchief and the note will be in my hand and no longer in yours.” </blockquote>
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“Man I defy you. You cannot do it.”</blockquote>
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He held the note very tightly and closed his eyes with the effort. Mazuma flicked his handkerchief, but the Scotsman was right. He could not do it. This was the only time that Mazuma ever failed. Though the world quivered on its axis (and it did) yet the note was held so tightly that no power could dislodge it. But when the world quivered on its axis the effect was that Mazuma was now standing outside the cell and the Scotsman was within. And when the Chief came some minutes later Mazuma was gone and the Scotch jailer stood locked in the cell, his eyes still closed and the pound note yet held aloft in a grip of steel. So he was fired, or cashiered as the Old Worlders call it, for taking a bribe and letting a prisoner escape. And this is what usually comes as punishment to overly suspicious persons.</blockquote>
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-from "Adam Had Three Brothers" (first published in <i>New Mexico Quarterly Review</i>, Fall 1960)<br />
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This is a classic Laffertian take on the tall tale. The stacked reversals and jokes, the simultaneous understatement and overstatement, the simultaneous effect of both laugh-out-loud humour and heart-stopping wonder - it's something you see probably hundreds of times across his body of fiction in little self-contained vignettes like this. He inflates the comic exaggeration technique of the tall tale and thereby giantizes giantism, here at the level of the entire planet (or cosmos, depending on how you read 'the world'). The planetary axis-quiver produces a particular physical wonder that is almost Lynchian rather than just wildly funny and marvellous. Traditional tall tales often narrate the impossible, but here Lafferty's impossibility is not a mere verbal flight of fancy or 'whopper' of a lie. It has strong hints of the uncanny. It's a little (or a lot) disturbing in its casual disturbance and redistribution of reality. But no sooner are readers perhaps feeling some heebie-jeebies than Lafferty hits them with the final topper of a punchline: that the jailer was fired for taking a bribe. Hilarious. You've barely registered the gigantically weird and uncanny aspect of the tale before what began as a chuckle has turned into a guffaw. And it is in just such ways that Lafferty achieves what I call a 'horror-comic' mode of storytelling. The world-shift and spatial reversal is so huge and outrageous that it's not out of order to call it monstrous. But it is narrated through particularly effective comedy and thus the trembling of both laughter and terror are combined (as Lafferty explicitly maintains in his story 'Days of Grass, Days of Straw'). Admittedly, the valence of 'horror' in this episode may be quite buried and perhaps slight. I was in fact surprised to note that it was an element of my emotional response to this yarn when I read it this time. I hadn't noticed that before. In any case, as any reader of Lafferty knows, he makes the horror far more explicit in any number of stories and novels, usually with no less humour and laughter.<br />
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One more tidbit: there's an implied joke about tight-fisted Scots here (whether conscious or incidental on Lafferty's part I don't know). Scots are famous even among themselves for being 'cheap' or thrifty. It's something I've heard them joke about since we moved to Scotland in 2002. One of my favourite jokes they've told me is that there were three British ministers telling each other why they loved the Christian gospel of salvation (indicating the national stereotypes of being intellectual, emotional, and frugal respectively). Englishman: I love it because you can analyse it with your mind. Welshman: I love it because you can sing it with your heart. Scotsman: I love it because it's <i>free</i>.<br />
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No idea if Lafferty intended it or not, but it's hilarious to me that only a Scotsman could hold onto his money so tightly as to constitute the only instance in Mazuma O'Shaunessey's life in which he failed at performing one of his powerful tricks.<br />
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<br />Daniel Otto Jack Petersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278782665152906956noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5904298510069073946.post-48206040550994355612019-03-19T08:56:00.001-07:002019-03-19T08:56:11.437-07:00Glimpse of the Thesis BibliographyAlways want to post so many things, but too swamped with thesis work. Due to submit this September. (!!!!!!)<br />
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For fun, here are some titles I'm consulting for my 'ecomonstrous' reading of Lafferty's bioregional fiction (i.e. mostly his stories set in Oklahoma or the Southwest—or that are flavoured that way even if taking place, say, on another planet, e.g. 'Smoe and the Implicit Clay'—and which feature the nonhuman). The major areas of research are basically the <b>U.S. (South)West</b> (mainly through Native American Studies and Frontier Tall Tales), <b>Ecocriticism</b> (mainly through Object-Oriented Ontology and New Materialism), and <b>Ecotheology</b> (mainly through contemporary ecological readings of Thomas Aquinas and Hans Urs von Balthasar, though also through some theologians engaging New Materialism and the concept of the Anthropocene). As to the M<b>onsters and Monstrous</b> element, I feel like I'm largely forging my own way here. Monster Studies is still a fairly nascent field and it tends to deal almost exclusively with culture (race, gender, class, etc.) and very rarely with ecology or nonhumans. And even with all these conceptual parameters I am, of course, only mapping a small portion of Lafferty's erudite brain. At my lowest times I feel overwhelmed, out of my depth, and/or off on a goose chase of implausibility. (If it's a mud goose, then maybe I'm okay. See Lafferty's story 'Boomer Flats'.) At my highest times, I'm absolutely soaring with the joy of learning about all of these fields and far more so with the joy of reading Lafferty's fiction closely and feeling as if perhaps a few things are just possibly unlocking and connecting a bit.<br />
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Below is a tiny fraction of the bibliography, and of course doesn't touch upon all the journal articles that go into it as well. But it's a quick colourful distraction. Here's hoping I can make a coherent argument out of what might appear to be all these disparate materials:<br />
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Daniel Otto Jack Petersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278782665152906956noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5904298510069073946.post-22909520734806391432018-07-15T07:37:00.001-07:002018-07-15T07:37:22.564-07:00All Pieces of a Lafferty Dissertation: Ad Hoc Update On the PhD (sort of)Can't believe it's been over a year since I posted on this blog! I've got the hankering today, so, instead of trying to craft a thoughtful post and then not getting round to finishing (or sometimes starting) it - which is what's kept me from posting for the past year - I'm just going to launch in.<br />
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I can tell you one result of my doctoral work on Lafferty: his fiction holds up extremely well to critical, close reading. Not that I doubted it would. But it's a great pleasure to see how it even exceeds my expectations so often. Sure, there are stories that perhaps don't yield as much depth for analysis as I might have hoped. But then there are so many more that turn out to be far more layered than I had realised. My most recent example is his wonderful regional yarn 'All Pieces of a River Shore'. Just a few months ago I completed a 10,000 word draft chapter on that story alone. I didn't mean for it to take up a whole chapter, but it just kept on giving and giving with its depth of bioregional detail and ecophilosophical ideas. It's no wonder it was the inspiration for a 2003 <b><a href="https://www.jeffwarrin.com/all-pieces-of-a-river-shore/2017/2/3/all-pieces-of-a-river-shore" target="_blank">contemporary art installation</a></b> of the same title (which I only discovered as I researched the story).<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" mozallowfullscreen="" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/58912108" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="640"></iframe><br />
<a href="https://vimeo.com/58912108">All Pieces of a River Shore</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/user8405544">Metabolic Films</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.<br />
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Some other richly layered stories I'm finding want to sprawl into their own lengthy chapters include 'Boomer Flats', 'Days of Grass, Days of Straw', 'Smoe and the Implicit Clay', and 'Narrow Valley'. These are all stories that I was always planning to include in the thesis, along with 'Snuffles', 'Oh Tell Me Will It Freeze Tonight', 'And Name My Name', and 'Animal Fair' (and probably 'Love Affair With Ten Thousand Springs'). There's also brief engagement with 'Eurema's Dam', 'All But the Words', 'Condillac's Statue', 'And Read the Flesh Between the Lines', 'Mud Violet' and probably a few others I'm forgetting.<br />
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Other stories crowding in, which I hadn't planned on including, but which I now hope to make at least some mention of, include 'Cabrito', 'The Wagons', 'Configuration of the North Shore', 'Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas', 'Ghost in the Corn Crib', 'Rain Mountain', and 'Continued On Next Rock'. And now I've also got the idea to include a brief discussion of 'And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire' as a coda to the thesis. (Oh and there's a bit where I'll probably at least nod toward 'In Deepest Glass'.)<br />
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As to novels, <i>Okla Hannali</i> was always going to get some engagement, and for some time I've been planning on a whole chapter dedicated to <i>Fourth Mansions</i> as I think it's indispensable for unpacking the theological sources for Lafferty's ecomonstrous vision.<br />
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Now I'm also wanting to give about half a chapter toward the earlier part of the thesis to <i>The Reefs of Earth</i>, establishing Lafferty as a distinctly Oklahoman writer through this delightfully bizarre Southwestern Gaelic-Gothic s.f. novel. Lately I've been describing it as a fever dream mashup of <i>The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn</i> and <i>The Martian Chronicles</i> (which, of course, doesn't even begin to capture it.)<br />
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Also toward the beginning of the thesis I plan to quote some relevant passages from <i>Past Master</i> as to Lafferty's overt monster discourse. In the closing chapter I also plan to quote excerpts from <i>The Fall of Rome</i>, <i>Serpent's Egg</i>, and <i>Arrive At Easterwine</i> in regard to Lafferty's cosmic vision.<br />
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As you can imagine, all this is going to challenge a word limit of 100,000 words. So a lot of the puzzle in the coming year will be what to include and exclude. (I'll be submitting a final draft of the thesis by September 2019.)<br />
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The incredible mosaic that is Lafferty's body of work simultaneously invites and defies large-scale analysis. One can easily get lost in the plenitude of tiny details and connections, which are a delight in themselves. But seeing the potential for even some hint of a coalescence of the whole is pretty awe-inspiring. The fact that he built an open-ended aspect into his work makes large scale interpretations all the more strange, unstable, risky, and exciting.<br /><br />If I have any readers left, please feel free to ask me questions or give me advice, juicy tidbits, warnings, opinions, anything!<br />
<br />Daniel Otto Jack Petersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278782665152906956noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5904298510069073946.post-74466668727972987102017-05-16T07:46:00.000-07:002017-06-27T08:22:39.389-07:00The Flame is Green (1971)[Cross-posted from <b><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2001499649?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1" target="_blank">Goodreads</a></b>.]<br />
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Four and a half stars. It's probably five stars in the sense of being one of the ‘high art’ novels that Lafferty produced (along with the likes of <i>Fourth Mansions</i>, <i>Okla Hannali</i>, <i>The Fall of Rome</i>, <i>Archipelago</i>, and others). But it didn't resonate with me quite as strongly as the novels I like best by Lafferty. It's pretty incredible though, as I would expect from his unique genius.<br />
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The first chapter is one of my favourite things I've ever read by Lafferty. It hits all the right notes of myth and marvel and history and narrative sophistication, in the way that only Lafferty can hit and combine those notes - and in the setting of 19th century Ireland, which I don't think I've run into before in Lafferty.<br />
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The rest of the book is more mixed for me. There are many more marvels of both language and event, but there are also long sections of comparatively mundane material and plot motivations that I don't fully understand (due to unfamiliarity with this era of European history generally and Lafferty's more arcane interests in it particularly). After the first chapter, the setting moves swiftly from Ireland to Spain and eventually to a few other European locations. (It’s worth comparing in this respect with his novel <i>East of Laughter</i>). So <i>The Flame is Green</i> is more of a European tale than a specifically Irish one, though the fact that the protagonist, Dana Coscuin, is Irish remains central. The cast of supporting characters are very tall and salty as you'd expect from Lafferty. The geographical descriptions, after the first chapter, are perhaps not as strong as I could have hoped, though a significant amount of the action takes place in the mountains and this setting is firmly felt. I happened to be reading this section of the novel whilst travelling through mountains in Spain for the first time, on holiday with my family, which was a very exciting coincidence. (We live in Scotland, so this trip isn't as huge as it may sound to USA readers of this review. It's kind of the equivalent of a Midwesterner taking a vacation in Florida.) But the richest fun is to be had more in the character descriptions and their darkly comic and mythopoetic interactions.<br />
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There are the usual philosophical and theological discourses and asides, which I always enjoy and find enlightening for understanding Lafferty's body of work as a whole. The novel is about some sort of freedom fighters on the eve of another European revolution. In the idiosyncratic ideological terms of the novel, it is the Green Revolution (to which Dana and his company adhere) vs. the Red Revolution (to which an equally tall and salty company adhere). Dana and Co. are ‘Carlists’, at least in their Spain setting. Brief visits to Wikipedia, together with speeches given in the novel, suggest the Green Revolution represents a sort of counter-Enlightenment movement, which opposes, among other things, the reductionism of the alleged Age of Reason. As a member of Dana's company argues:<br />
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The rational age has cracked wide open with the realization that man is not a rational apparatus. He is a stolid animal, or he is an hysterical ghost, or he is an effete avatar; but he is not a reasoning machine. But should we not respect and strive for reason? For reason in grace, yes. For reason out of grace, no. (Ch. 3/p. 49)</blockquote>
Or as is later urged: ‘There is no rationality at all without passion, and no logic. What would one hang them upon?’ (Ch. 5/p. 87) (This is remarkably close what Timothy Morton argues in his latest book, <i><b><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1972125942?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1" target="_blank">Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Co-Existence</a></b></i>.) This anti-reductionist ideology is vividly portrayed as well as argued in Lafferty's novel. Take a scene involving recovery from a battle injury:<br />
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Certainly the six-inch-deep knife wound had not been healed in three days, nor had the great ragged slash on his face. But Dana had sloshed wine immediately into his wounds, and he had been blessed with curative magic when he lay atop Magdelena Brume and imbibed grace from her and covered her with his blood for a sign. Moreover, Dana had had his wounds cleaned and bound by a doctor in Isaba before he had come to Pamplona. (Ch. 3/pp. 54-55)</blockquote>
Folk ways and modern medicine combine here. Many scenes such as this make this novel (along with a number of other novels by Lafferty, notably <i>Okla Hannali</i> and <i>Archipelago</i>) significantly overlap with the international genre of magical realism.<br />
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The Green counter-revolutionaries are theologically motivated, of course, as can be seen by the references to ‘grace’. It is also seen in their concerns about turns the Catholic church is taking toward empowering bishops who seem to be sexually and theologically decadent in not fully fleshed out terms in the novel. They also oppose what Lafferty presciently (this was published in 1971) calls the coming ‘pornocracy’, calling it the ‘easiest way, the cheapest way, the stultifying way, the indulgent way’ (Ch. 7/p. 111).<br />
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It's not quite as reactionary as some of this may sound (though I sometimes worry ‘alt-right’ leaning readers might think, mistakenly I hope, that they have an ally in the author of this novel; that an Afro-Caribbean man, one Charley Oceaan, is included in the company of the Green Revolution counts for something one hopes). Lafferty is well-known as a self-professed conservative, sure, but one not easily pigeon-holed. The rhetoric he puts in the mouths of the Green Revolutionaries contains nuance, if also tending toward the irascible and polemical, such as this quote that has been passed around the web for some years, even though there must be very few readers of this obscure, limited-run novel:<br />
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Things are set up as contraries that are not even in the same category. Listen to me: the opposite of radical is superficial, the opposite of liberal is stingy; the opposite of conservative is destructive. Thus I will describe myself as a radical conservative liberal; but certain of the tainted red fish will swear that there can be no such fish as that. Beware of those who use words to mean their opposites. At the same time have pity on them, for usually this trick is their only stock in trade. But do not pity them overly: it is your own death and your soul's death that they work by their deception. (Ch. 5/p. 78)</blockquote>
There is pity, even if limited, toward ideological enemies here. More than can be said on many a social media account. That said, the rhetoric can be more strident at times, though admittedly compelling in some respects:<br />
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“There are only two possible statements that can be made about the worlds,” the Black Pope of the Carlist Hills had lectured one day. “Alpha: There is a God. Omega: there is not a God. To adhere to either of these two statements strongly is to be logical at least. Not to do so is to be in the snivelling wasteland between and to have no point of contact with logic or reason. Upon either of these two statements a total system can be built, and it can be true to itself in each of its million details. But the two systems cannot have points of contact in even the least detail.”</blockquote>
I can't agree with that last sentence especially (and I'm pretty sure Lafferty's work overall shows that he didn't fully agree with that idea in any strict sense as well). Nor can I agree that all those who remain undecided between these poles are ‘snivelling’. Some occupy that ‘wasteland’ quite honestly in doubt and deferral. Some do so by principled agnosticism. I sympathise with doubters and agnostics, yet I also feel the force of the alleged logical divide set up in this quote. At any rate, it makes for fiery reading.<br />
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Yet the way the details of the novel play out show a more generous and muddy view. Dana is a very compromised character, especially by his own movement's lights. He quite fleshily falls from grace by literally sleeping with the ideological enemy. And is restored by grace. And this ‘enemy’, though she is portrayed somewhat villainously, is nevertheless drawn with some complexity and sympathy. Mind you, the ‘good’ characters are of no more, or less, depth than the ‘evil’ ones - that's just the way Lafferty writes. As some have said, Lafferty's characters are more like archetypes than traditional characters; but I would add that they have many telling human details as well, so that they hover between the mythical and the ‘naturalistic’. Even the ‘son of the Devil’ in this novel (one Ifreann Chortovitch, an apparently literal offspring of the Devil, in keeping with the magical realist tone) is portrayed with some sympathy, even as a genuine friend of sorts to Dana whilst also a dangerous, corrupting enemy. Dana and other characters have a huge drinking party with the son of the Devil at one point in the novel, another falling from grace moment, from which they are again restored. Saints and sinners, as in most of Lafferty's fiction, often blend in this novel. Trajectories of good or evil may be strong in various characters, but no one is untainted by either grace or sin. It's richly human reading in that respect.<br />
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And the Green Revolution rhetoric can be downright beautiful and strange and inviting as well. A character named Catherine Dembinska, who eventually marries Dana, speaks like a St Francis or a Black Elk:<br />
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Listen, all you people, the green-growing world is not restricted to its vegetation. There is a green-growing God above, there are green-growing people on the earth, and plants and rocks and ores and machineries, and graces and dedications and ideas and arts. There are green-growing prayers arising. But the devils in Hell are not green-growing, and those on Earth are not. [...] I even say ‘Listen, all you people’ when I talk to birds in the parks or to cats sunning themselves in windows. Listen, all you people: no, I am not a pantheist, not even a green one. To be that is to confuse the bridge with the ultimate shore. It is to confuse the pot with the potter. But I am a living pot; I am a green vessel of earth; I am the perfume of a <i>full</i> vase. (Ch. 9/p. 157)</blockquote>
There are many wonderfully weird battles and visions and travels and chases and spaces in this novel as well, but I will conclude this overlong, yet under-sufficient, review with another quote from Catherine (which has also made its rounds on the web for years). It would seem a caution to anyone wanting to slap some final interpretation on Lafferty's work, much less the world. Not because of some facile catch-phrase like ‘there is no truth’, but rather because full truth will always be both prior and higher than our finitude, requiring our constant adventurous maturation from its deep roots toward its towering radiance:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
Beware of those who manufacture final answers as they go along, of those who will catch you on their catch-phrases and let you perish in the traps. All the final answers were given in the beginning. They stand shining, above and beyond us, but they are always there to be seen. They may be too bright for us, they may be too clear for us. Well then, we must clarify our own eyes. Our task is to grow out until we reach them. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
We ourselves become the bridges out over the interval that is the world and time. It is a daring thing to fling ourselves out over that void that is black and scarlet below and green and gold above. And we must be rooted deeply. A bridge does not abandon its first shore when it grows out in spans towards the further one. (Ch. 9/p. 158)</blockquote>
Daniel Otto Jack Petersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278782665152906956noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5904298510069073946.post-66726715908028890592016-12-24T09:06:00.000-08:002016-12-24T09:06:14.129-08:00"I always break them," said the monstrous face.<span style="font-size: large;">There was the morning that Dana saw the whole fair landscape from horizon to horizon and realized that it was all on the inside of one very large soap-bubble. He saw then, beyond and dwarfing it all, the pipe that was blowing the whole bubble, and the face that was blowing the pipe. The wide world was quite small in comparison to that face. It was the face of a rather lack-eyed monster, somehow like an old Irish bummer, a little like that of one of the Other People who live under the hills. "Be careful, you'll break it if you puff any more into it." "I always break them," said the monstrous face. "I wish I could keep one of them sometime."</span><br />
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R. A. Lafferty, <i>The Flame is Green </i>(1971), p. 224<br />
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Almost finished with this sometimes incredible, sometimes baffling, novel, the first in the Coscuin Chronicles. (Pseudo) review forthcoming!<br />
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Have a happy Christmas Eve.<br />
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Daniel Otto Jack Petersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278782665152906956noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5904298510069073946.post-28883243372402014272016-08-04T16:12:00.000-07:002016-08-05T06:04:45.231-07:00A rundown of a dozen or so of Lafferty's novelsA year or so ago someone asked me on Facebook where they should start with reading Lafferty. (I've been asked many times.) In response I went a bit overboard and said a little something about nearly every novel I've read by Lafferty. This is because the collections of his short stories are in such short supply. These days more and more people first encounter Lafferty through his novels, which are usually thought to be <i>not </i>the place to start. Yet many who start there become just as hooked as those who started with the short stories.<br />
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Anyway, I'm re-posting here more or less what I wrote on FB. I'm also doing this because I hear from time to time that my particular Lafferty blog is 'not for beginners' or something similar. Maybe this slightly helps the uninitiated.<br />
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<b><i>Past Master</i></b> (1968) features Thomas More as its main character. He's brought to a future utopia on another planet and there's a ton of wild stuff going on. A band of nonconformist misfits traverse golden cities of perfection, horrifying cities of deprivation, and the freakish ecology of the planet's feral lands. I suppose the writing can be slightly uneven at times, but it's really genius, potent stuff and one of Lafferty's most overtly theological and political and philosophical works. It's also perhaps his most formally s.f. novel, though don't let that lull you into expecting the conventional.<br />
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<b><i>Fourth Mansions</i></b> (1969) is also richly theological and bizarre, drawing on Theresa Avila's mystical work <i>Interior Castle</i> and involving a bunch of weird psychic visionary stuff mixed with gumshoe news reporter stuff, almost like a comic strip meets medieval theology and the trippy 60s. I found it a little hard to get into on my first read, but most Lafferty fans think it's his best. I now think so too after subsequent re-reads.<br />
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<b><i>Space Chantey </i></b>(1968) is a very loose retelling of Homer's <i>Odyssey</i> in space, following the episodic adventures of planet-hopping astronaut-warriors (each chapter is basically a short story). It too reads almost like a comic strip or animated cartoon but, as with all of Lafferty's works, there's a richness (though lightness) of language and slyly buried philosophy that makes your back brain feel that there are deeper things going on. It's a deliciously fun romp.<br />
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<b><i>The Reefs of Earth </i></b>(1968) is perhaps the book most to my personal tastes out of the early novels, sort of Lafferty's take on a Southern Gothic novel (with the ostensibly s.f. premise of a family of aliens visiting earth) and featuring his characteristically Laffertian child characters, joyfully murderous and mischievous and yet somehow weirdly angelic. It's gleefully grotesque and just one of the weirdest things I've ever read (and surprisingly poignant on re-reads).<br />
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<b style="font-style: italic;">Arrive At Easterwine </b>(1971) throws absolutely everybody on a first read and can seem like a fairly incoherent tangle until you see its very clear pattern emerge from all the raucous details (usually on a re-read). It's the 'autobiography' of a 'Ktistec machine' (a supercomputer named Epiktistes) but it sounds more like a Southwestern mystical philosopher sitting in wise judgment of humanity, showing them themselves and the cosmos as these things truly are, which can only look like madness to our unenlightened eyes. Something like that! But, like all of the above, it's very comic as well as dark, almost like conducting unscientific pranks as a means of experimental theology. (Epikt and the members of the Institute for Impure Science, who make up the cast of this novel, also feature in a number of Lafferty's seminal short stories, most of them collected in <i>Nine Hundred Grandmothers</i>.)<br />
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<b><i>Okla Hannali </i></b>(1972) is a historical novel of the Choctaw nation in the 19th century, as seen by following the life of its central eponymous larger-than-life character. It has some admittedly 'dry' material that sticks close to historical reporting at times, but this is liberally interspersed with Lafferty's characteristic tall tale style and humour and some western adventure bits and some mystical passages and poignant reflections on the loss of the Native Americans' original way of life and it all adds up to a very, very rich read, one of the few novels that made me feel teary as I read the last word and closed the book. Very powerful.<br />
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<b><i>Not To Mention Camels</i></b> (1976) is Lafferty madness at full throttle. It's sort of his <i>Inferno</i>, very diabolically witty and sharp but also dense and impenetrable, involving movement between several worlds (or versions of the world) by a particularly nasty politician. It has some of Lafferty's best metaphysical scenes, a great satirical theme on 'Media Lords' and the like, and it alternates between the language of analytic philosophy and very colourful and grotesque poetic imagery. But it's very hard to follow and at times perhaps a little too hellish for some. (But see on <i>Aurelia</i> below.)<br />
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<b><i>Apocalypses </i></b>(1977) is actually two short novels collected in one volume and it's territory not terribly far away from <i>Not To Mention Camels</i>. The first novel, <i>Where Have You Been, Sandaliotis?</i>, is a detective adventure of sorts, but in a metaphysical strain with <i>lots</i> of weird happenings and a fair amount of grotesquery and a central speculative premise that I found pretty awesome: that a new land mass has suddenly appeared where there was only ocean before, contiguous with the known mainland, and it appears to have inhabitants and history. It's all about whether it's real or not and about 'consensus reality' and the like. The second novel, <i>The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeney, </i>is on the same theme about what's real or not but this time as relates to the 1st and 2nd World Wars (and a 3rd abrewing), which have somehow been wiped from the historical record (or we are in an alternate history in this tale) and are being brought (back) to the record by the eponymous character's Armageddon-themed operas. It's got some wonderful historical passages of the first half of the twentieth century, told punchily and amusingly, and some great metaphysical passages. I really, really liked it but it also made my brain properly hurt with its affirmation of mutually exclusive realities. Logic absolutely melts at points in this novel. Again, most Lafferty fans think it's one of Lafferty's greatest works.<br />
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The 80s novels go into freshly weird narrative territory for Lafferty. You can tell he'd gotten a second wind and was pushing his whole art practice forward to its final flourish. Most readers have dismissed them as too far off the deep end, but a few of us argue that they represent his mature expression.<br />
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<i><b>Aurelia</b></i> (1982) is sort of the gospel answer to the hellish <i>Not To Mention Camels</i>, again critiquing politics and media, but also offering a more compassionate and theologically rich <i>euangelion</i> and, as always, some great imagery and ideas. It's Lafferty's most overt treatise on Aristotelian-Thomistic Virtue Ethics and also his most overt work on a 'theology of monsters' since <i>Fourth Mansions</i>. We eventually get actual homilies from the teenage girl from another planet who is the protagonist of the novel, but it's a bizarre and bawdy ride (if a little difficult to follow), returning somewhat to the comic strip/cartoon s.f. quality of some of the early novels, though fusing this with new levels of weird philosophising.<br />
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<b><i>Annals of Klepsis</i></b> (1983) goes back to <i>Space Chantey</i> and <i>Past Master</i> interplanetary territory, but with heaps more colour and density and viscous metaphysical journeying (and those early novels weren't in short supply of these qualities so that's saying something). It's maybe my favourite Lafferty novel for its pure joyous riot of xenogeography (as well as being a quite serious meditation on historiography). Oh, and did I mention it takes place on a Pirate Planet?! I personally have never partaken of psychotropic or psychedelic drugs, but having read this novel twice, I'm pretty sure I never need to. (I say that with a big wink because I've argued from time to time that I think Lafferty's 'trippiness' is actually doing something quite different, and to my mind far better, than psychedelia.)<br />
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<b><i>Serpent's Egg</i></b> (1987) also returns to comic strip type writing to a certain degree, but with a Laffertian 'future history' type of tone (of a dystopian future mind you). It's language is more plain than some of Lafferty's work, but it's events and characters are anything but: it features a number of juvenile talking animals (and a juvenile robot and angel) as protagonists in a future where they've been augmented to this state and it's chock full of little myths and fables of wit and wisdom and it goes into wonderfully phantasmagorical territory late in the book when the whales are making monuments on the ocean floor (a dream ocean that's formed in the middle of Oklahoma), etching enigmatic mosaics on the huge stones by means of telepathically controlled sea lice. Yep, that happens. It's a fascinating update on the Rebellion Against Utopia theme of his first novel <i>Past Master</i>.<br />
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<b><i>East of Laughter</i></b> (1988) is an incredible network of tall tales threaded through a group of people's quest, yet again, to discover what's really real, including themselves. Like <i>Serpent's Egg</i>, it's perhaps not quite as linguistically rich as some of Lafferty's works, but again has a corresponding and compensating vivacity of wonderful characters and events. This one's another riot of garish metaphysics and mystery, but this time in the field of European fairy tale and classical mythology, albeit in a contemporary (or perhaps future?) setting on Earth. It has some of my all time favourite passages from Lafferty. (Then again, I could say that about every single book I've mentioned.) It also has some deeply woven theology in it, akin to how that's done in <i>Arrive At Easterwine</i>. Like the rest, it's <i>very</i> weird and <i>very</i> wonderful.<br />
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And there are a half dozen or more novels from early to late that I haven't even mentioned here! I hope people will augment this list with their own impressions and opinions about the novels in the comments section.Daniel Otto Jack Petersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278782665152906956noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5904298510069073946.post-68914939938929062102016-06-30T15:34:00.002-07:002016-07-01T05:45:07.053-07:00Reading the Argo Cycle part 3 - The Human Race is Made Up Entirely of Glowing Geniuses (some initial thoughts on the complete 'The Devil is Dead' trilogy)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Well, I finally read the very last words of the very last book (<i>Argo</i>) of the so-called <b>The Devil is Dead</b> trilogy, which is the novelistic centrepiece to Lafferty's <b>Argo Cycle </b>(the total cycle consisting of the three novels of this trilogy, <i>Archipelago</i>, <i>The Devil is Dead</i>, and <i>More Than Melchisidech: Tales of Chicago, Tales of Midnight, Argo</i>, plus a short novel, <i>Dotty</i>, plus a few novellas, plus a handful of short stories; and, as if all this weren't enough, the cycle tangentially connects to another short novel, <i>The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny</i>, and to a tetralogy known as the <b>Coscuin Chronicles</b>). <br />
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These last words of the trilogy that I've read were Lafferty's closing essay explaining the book's alternate endings. It's titled 'AN ESSAY EXPLAINING THE ALTERNATE ENDINGS OF THE BOOK OF ARGO In The Course of Which I'm Obliged to Explain The Detailed Workings of The World Itself' and it's nearly worth the price of the whole trilogy. We'll come to it another time, however.<br />
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But the final words of the first or primary ending of <i>Argo</i> (and really, to me, the true conclusion to the trilogy - the remainder is, though vital, meta) go like this:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
"The world is a kaleidoscope, ever-changing, ever-enchanting, did you know that, My Reflection? And one best strides happily laughing and singing through it. And the fact that one is striding through the hot ashes of Hell every step of the way is no reason to be less merry. If one looks down and sees that he is no more than ankle-deep in Hell, let him continue with a happy heart. But if he sees that he is more than knee-deep in Hell, then he must, then he must, what must he do then, pale reflection of me?" </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
"I don't know," said the creature with its paler face of Duffey. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
"Maybe that's when he should leave the land for a while and walk on the water," Melchisedech declared. "Remember, Reflection, that man in his original nature was able to walk on water. He is still able to do it, but sometimes he forgets that he is." Then Melchisedech Duffey turned and ran to the city singing happily. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
"I lied to him and I lied to myself," said the unhappy Angel who wore Duffey's face. "No, no, I'm not certain at all which one of them I serve. I'm afraid to be certain or even to think about it. Is it God or the Devil that I serve in my confusion and darkness?" </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
But Melchisedech Duffey, singing happily, was into the city in the bright morning. And he didn't hear the creature at all. (<i>Argo</i>, pp. 133-134)</blockquote>
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It's a mysterious, beautiful, and hopeful conclusion, yet fraught with a tension that is characteristic of the entire trilogy. You can easily see why it's often quite difficult to reflect on such a complex, ambiguous work. But reflect we shall!<br />
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I've read the essays by Dan Knight and Robert Whitaker Sirignano on <i>More Than Melchisedech</i> (collected in <i>Feast of Laughter</i> vol. 2) and an unpublished essay by Andrew Ferguson on the <b>Argo Cycle</b>. These each contain tasty tidbits of insight, but it seems to me that they also each skirt round really tackling the overall shape and theme(s) of <b>The Devil is Dead</b> trilogy (never mind the whole cycle). I'm not really going to buck that trend in this blog post. I'll mostly be skirting like the rest. But I do hope that at the end of this whole 'Reading the Argo Cycle' blog series, when I've had a chance to lay out lots of long bloody slabs of prose from each of the books and reflect on these passages, that I'll have acquired the courage to take a shot at something like a more comprehensive review that tries to grasp what in the world the trilogy's all about.<br />
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For now, let me sketch a few thoughts. First of all, I think it's worth noting that these books are examples of Lafferty's historical fiction. They're mostly set in middle America (USA) but there are recurring episodes abroad, mostly on islands and coasts, including Mexico, South America, Africa, Australia, and the South Pacific. They roughly take place from around the 1920s to the early 1950s. <i>More Than Melchisedech</i>'s first book, <i>Tales of Chicago</i>, dips into slightly earlier territory for the Bildungsroman-like moments of Melchisedech Duffey's early biography. And MTM's third book, <i>Argo</i>, dips forward into several possible near futures. But the bulk of the first two volumes of the trilogy, <i>Archipelago</i> and <i>The Devil is Dead</i>, take place in WWII and post-WWII eras, the 40s and 50s. After Duffey's early years are accounted for in <i>More Than Melchisedech</i>,<i> </i>the action, if I remember correctly, moves progressively through the 1920s, 30s, 40s, and 50s. (So if you wanted to read the trilogy in exact chronological order, I think you'd have to do something like start with <i>Tales of Chicago</i> and then alternate between chapters of <i>Archipelago</i> and <i>Tales of Midnight</i>, then read <i>The Devil is Dead </i>and then finish with <i>Argo</i>. Reading those latter two volumes directly together strikes me as an exciting prospect as they are the two most adventuresome.)<br />
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That said, the trilogy is decidedly a historical fantasy of sorts. Sometimes it hews closer to something like magical realism, where the marvels are woven closely into a 'mundane' narrative. Many pages can go by with little to no hint of the marvelous (aside from Lafferty's language or characters or sense of oddball farce and satire or poignant meditations on time and humanity). Other times it is closer to a 20th century myth or fable or legend, by turns soaring close to epic heroic fantasy only to slip, often suddenly, into something like the grotesqueries of the New Weird or Bizarro fiction. <br />
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In fact, it now strikes me that the trilogy progressively transitions from least fantastical to most fantastical. <i>Archipelago </i>is the most like magical realism (I'd rather call it mythical realism) and thus the furthest away from a work of fantasy per se. (I know some balk at the distinction between magical realism and fantasy, averring that the former is simply ashamed of being the latter. But I taste something different between the two modes, though both trade in the super-mundane.) <i>Archipelago</i> occasionally shifts into pure fable and at times it asserts preternatural qualities of time and personhood. But the bulk of it narrates, though oddly, the regular lives of (albeit unusual) people. <br />
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Specifically marvelous episodes are also sparse in <i>The Devil is Dead</i>, but its plot and premise are far more thoroughly fantastical, involving a separate race of quasi-human beings with preternatural powers (this could also, of course, be considered science-fictional). I seem to recall there is some body swapping and other normally impossible elements. Its narration also involves far more fabulistic language, where characters are referred to as mermaids and gargoyles and devils and so on in a way that hovers strangely between metaphor and myth and realism. Its plot mechanics are also overtly heroic and questing and quixotic. Thus the whole feels much more like a fantasy, even a high fantasy of sorts, but one peopled by 'low' characters, a working class heroic fantasy if you will. And quite charming for that. (I would add also that, though it's narratively the tightest book of the trilogy, it's also the most intentionally disorienting, having a sense of dark but often humorous mystery along the lines of something like David Lynch's <i>Twin Peaks.</i>) <br />
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<i>More Than Melchisedech</i> can exhibit both of its preceding volumes' modes, sometimes magically real for chapters at a time, describing rowdy urban merchant life among friends and colleagues in the first half of the 20th century with the occasional insertion of a monster man (Finnegan's father Giulio) or perhaps a bit of clairvoyance or the like in a manner similar to <i>Archipelago</i> (but coming across as less psychologically rich than <i>Archipelago</i> and in something more of an almost slapstick mode). When MTM is more in the quixotic mode of <i>The Devil is Dead</i>, it is also far more overtly a full-on fantasy. Events become utterly magical or miraculous, where Melchisedech can clap his hands together to produce gold coins or can summon black giants to his aid, sometimes seen by others and sometimes not, but effective nonetheless. And while <i>The Devil is Dead</i> is no stranger to the grotesque or uncanny, MTM ratchets this up even closer to borderline horror (but again in something closer to slapstick, hence the feel at times of something like Bizarro fiction). These fantastical and grotesque elements seem to increase in each book of MTM until the final book, <i>Argo</i>, is a complete science fiction/fantasy/horror tale.<br />
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So the above thoughts are first attempts at plumbing the styles and modes and genres of the trilogy. What about themes or overall shape? That's a lot, lot tougher. You might well say that <b>The Devil is Dead</b> trilogy is Lafferty's most overt (albeit symbolic and emblematic) engagement with his own upbringing and pre-authorial years, an attempt to capture the half century that made him who he was; and then a transitioning into his most overt (and even more symbolic and emblematic) engagement with his life as an author, a creator of characters, a builder of worlds; and then finally, an engagement with his own mortality and hopes for immortality, both ontological and authorial. That seems like at least one legitimate way to interpret the trilogy. There's no doubt in my mind that Lafferty is essentially Melchisedech Duffey and that perhaps Finnegan is all that Lafferty hoped for his body of work and its best elements. He knew that both he and his art were split-off (to use his own term in the trilogy) and uncertain and wracked by self-doubt and shortcomings and yet totally special and unique and powerful and game-changing masterpieces, if only they could come to full light and full realisation. And as he reflects on the this trilogy of personal wrestlings in the form of universal yet idiosyncratic myth, he writes in his concluding essay that he has realised he has written the story of all persons whatsoever. Every single person is a haunted, torn genius and so overflowing and multi-faceted that no one account (perhaps no one lifetime or timeline or corporeality) could possibly capture him or her. And this resplendence and spectrality of character is what all people have in common. No exceptions. Their uncontainable and riven genius is what unites them across all times and locations. And Lafferty means this quite literally, even while he states it in semi-symbolic and semi-ludic language. I'll conclude this post with his own words:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
It is established that the human race is made up entirely of glowing geniuses. That's something. And it's pretty well established that the begeniused human race is totally ghostly in all the meanings of the word, that it is overflowing so that very often persons cannot be contained in a single body, that it runs pretty much on multiple and parallel tracks. It's agreed that every human person is really two or three different persons when in an overflowing mood. [...] In all meaningful moments a human may be seen in his multiplicity. [...] The people of the world are none of them common, are all of them geniuses, are all of them wonderful. So the power is always there, and the great overspilling of the multiplicity and the power. All the people are ghostly, and all of them are split or exploding people. They have rapport with all their fellows in time and in space, with all of them now in the world, with all of them who have been or will be in the world. (<i>Argo</i>, pp. 143-145)</blockquote>
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<br />Daniel Otto Jack Petersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278782665152906956noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5904298510069073946.post-10476973910313610932016-06-11T05:54:00.000-07:002016-06-11T05:54:15.422-07:00Lafferty's 80s novelsAcademia and family have obviously kept me far too busy to keep up with this blog over the past many months. (The last post was in late February!) I've got so much to share on various fronts, but I always find myself tucking away a blog post idea that gets buried into the deep geological layers of ye ol' To Do list. Today, I'm going to try to break that trend by posting here a comment I just made on a thread in the Lafferty Facebook group (East of Laughter: An Appreciation of R. A. Lafferty). I really want to write about LaffCon1, which I just attended in New Jersey last weekend, but that too will have to wait. (Spoiler: it was wonderful.)<br />
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Someone in the FB group asked when Lafferty's novel <i>Sindbad: The 13th Voyage</i>, published in 1989, was actually written by Lafferty. Here's my rather hearsay and anecdotal response:<br />
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I once saw <b><a href="https://macalester.academia.edu/AndrewFerguson" target="_blank">Andrew Ferguson</a></b> write that all of Lafferty's 80s/90s novels were written sometime in the early 80s - 80 to 82 I think. Possibly some as early as 79. I remember Andrew writing that this was Lafferty's second wind sort of period where he landed on a newfound inspiration and approach and became very productive for a while in some quite new directions. Andrew argues that these later novels are not the incoherent mess that some readers have thought them, but are rather Lafferty's maturation as a writer where he finally broke into the new ground that all his earlier novels were urging readers to break into. I.e. think of the 'cliff hanger' endings of <i>Past Master</i> (1968) and <i>Fourth Mansions </i>(1969). Lafferty's novels written in the early 80s are the next and continuing chapters as it were. These late novels are the new worlds that were birthed through the struggles of his earlier novels. These new worlds are, admittedly, just as embattled and yet-to-be-finished as those of the earlier novels, but there are definitely new levels of perception and narrative experimentation happening. I think this groundbreaking creative aspect is also why the late novels remain somewhat 'choppy' (as Lafferty said in an interview) in style. Sometimes even knottier than the earlier novels. Even less commercially viable. But I'm pretty convinced it was because Lafferty had entered uncharted territory, even for him! And as a trailblazer he was bound to look rather 'primitive' (nay, primordial) in his slashing and hacking at the undergrowth he'd entered with this fresh spate of novels. I know Andrew's gonna cover this period in his biography of Laff (due out late 2017 perhaps?) and I hope to pick up his argument after it's published, developing the idea that Lafferty's late novels represent some of his best and most important work, at least as regards their groundbreaking aspect.Daniel Otto Jack Petersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278782665152906956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5904298510069073946.post-74687824734659077152016-02-26T09:29:00.000-08:002016-02-26T09:41:48.664-08:00The Skokie Who Lost His Wife<blockquote class="tr_bq">
This is the way they tell it. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
A Skokie heard a Shelni jug flute jugging one night. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
‘That is the voice of my wife,’ the Skokie said. ‘I'd know it anywhere.’ </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The Skokie came over the moors to find his wife. He went down into the hole in the ground that his wife's voice was coming from. But all he found there was a Shelni playing a jug flute. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
‘I am looking for my poor lost wife,’ the Skokie said. ‘I have heard her voice just now coming out of this hole. Where is she?’ </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
‘There is nobody here but myself,’ the Shelni said. ‘I am sitting here alone playing my flute to the moons whose light runs down the walls of my hole.’ </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
‘But I heard her here,’ said the Skokie, ‘and I want her back.’ </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
‘How did she sound?’ asked the Shelni. ‘Like this?’ And he jugged some jug music on his flute. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
‘Yes, that is my wife,’ said the Skokie. ‘Where have you hidden her? That is her very voice.’ </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
‘That is nobody's wife,’ the Shelni told the Skokie. ‘That is just a little tune that I made up.’ </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
‘You play with my wife's voice, so you must have swallowed my wife,’ the Skokie said. ‘I will have to take you apart and see.’ </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
‘If I swallowed anybody's wife I'm sorry,’ said the Shelni. ‘Go ahead then.’ </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
So the Skokie took the Shelni apart and scattered the pieces all over the hole and some of them on the grass outside. But he could not find any part of his wife. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
‘I have made a mistake,’ said the Skokie. ‘Who would have thought that one who had not swallowed my wife could make her voice on the flute!’ </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
‘It is all right,’ said the Shelni, ‘so long as you put me together again. I remember part of the way I go. If you remember the rest of the way, then you can put me together again.’ </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
But neither of them remembered very well the way the Shelni was before he was taken apart. The Skokie put him together all wrong. There were not enough pieces for some parts and too many for others. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
‘Let me help,’ said a Frog who was there. ‘I remember where some of the parts go. Besides, I believe it was my own wife he swallowed. That was her voice on the flute. It was not a Skokie voice.’ </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The frog helped, and they all remembered what they could, but it did not work. Parts of the Shelni could not be found again, and some of the parts would not go into him at all. When they had him finished, the Shelni was in great pain and could hardly move, and he didn't look much like a Shelni. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
‘I've done all I can,’ the Skokie said. ‘That's the way you'll have to be. Where is Frog?’ </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
‘I'm inside,’ said Frog. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
‘That's where you will have to stay,’ the Skokie said. ‘I've had enough of both of you. Enough, and these pieces left over. I will just take them with me. Maybe I can make someone else out of them.’ </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
That is the way the Shelni still is, put together all wrong. In his wrong form he walks the country by night, being ashamed to go by day. Some folks are startled when they meet him, not knowing this story. He still plays his jug flute with the lost Skokie Wife's voice and with Frog's voice. Listen, you can hear it now! The Shelni goes in sorrow and pain because nobody knows how to put him together right. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The Skokie never did find his lost wife. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
This is how it is told.</blockquote>
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~R. A. Lafferty, "Ride a Tin Can" (1970)<br />
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Art (fromthe story's original publication in IF Magazine) by Jack Gaughan.<br />
Image found here: <b><a href="https://archive.org/details/1970-04_IF" target="_blank">https://archive.org/details/1970-04_IF</a></b><br />
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What's interesting about isolating this passage (and two other similar passages I recently blogged from this story) is that it shows, simply by virtue of its authentic indigenous voice, how naturally sympathetic Lafferty was with the aboriginal imagination. These micro-stories genuinely sound like tribal folk tales from around the world. But, just as interestingly, what isolating such a passage <i>doesn't </i>show is that in this story Lafferty is actually writing overall in the voice of a rather traumatised anthropologist who is watching an indigenous people being wiped completely out. Lafferty shows real knowledge of this 'soft science' in the larger story as well, and of how the researcher on the ground must compete, often unsuccessfully, with larger stronger forces such as the scientific establishment and powerful commercial concerns. It's a prime example of how Lafferty holds in one head a genuine 'native' sort of perspective as well as that of a 'modern' educated perspective, and one highly sensitive to 'post-colonial' issues at that. The story is very dark and poignant beneath its rather joyful and rambunctious prose style. That exuberance is authentic though, not mere style. It is the joy of the oppressed refusing to die even if their bodies are slain (and eaten!) by the corporate cannibals. The story is grim, and yet this indomitable joy (though it can be silly in some respects, leading even to an undeserved credulity and trust that leads to death) is somehow crucial, a refusal to give the oppressor the very last inch of his conquest - your own bitterness. That's how it's striking me at the moment anyhow. It's one of his more complex tales in a way and will require further rumination and analysis.<br />
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<br />Daniel Otto Jack Petersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278782665152906956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5904298510069073946.post-1857616855730999662016-02-24T13:06:00.001-08:002016-02-25T09:58:23.374-08:00Reading the Argo Cycle part 2 - Archipelago Ch. 1: Hans & Marie & the Poetry-Eating SquirrelsWell, I've begun reading the last book of the so-called The Devil is Dead Trilogy. That is, I'm reading <i>More Than Melchisidech Book III: Argo</i>. I will say this: whatever the trilogy's ups and downs, strengths and weaknesses, mysteries and marvels and madnesses, it makes me want to re-read not only the trilogy itself but the entirety of Lafferty's oeuvre in light of it. The Argo Cycle seems to be some kind of metaphysical template or manual or schema by which to better grasp what Lafferty's doing in everything else. At times, in certain respects, it almost lacks substance in and of itself while seeming to promise to flesh out everything else, like a spirit or soul or ghost that is elusive and ephemeral in itself but utterly animating when inhabiting a body. Lafferty said that he thought the entirety of his body of work kind of added up to one long unfinished novel that he called <i>A Ghost Story</i>. The Finnegan/Melchisidech Trilogy (as I'd prefer to call it) and the Argo Cycle more generally seem to be something of the ghostly animus/anima of that Ghost Story.<br />
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Though there is some kind of elusive and insubstantial quality to this series in some ways, it nevertheless sparkles and flashes reasonably frequently with fulsome style and imagery and philosophy. Take the following for example. I quote the entire passage - which is part 6 of Chapter One of <i>Archipelago</i> (1979), the first book of the trilogy - so that you can see absolutely all that Lafferty's doing and layering in an extended scene like this. Neil Gaiman, when recently asked what sticks out to him about Lafferty's writing, responded that first of all it is the <i>sentences</i>. I couldn't agree more. Even mere clauses within sentences can effervesce, delight, or gore in Lafferty. That's why I have a whole <b><a href="https://twitter.com/RALaffertyTweet" target="_blank">Twitter account of Lafferty quotes</a></b>. I think he works wonderfully at the micro level. But the following shows how you have to see him at larger, longer levels as well to catch all of his genius. <br />
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Hans Schulz is one of the mystical 'Dirty Five', a group of post-WWII army buddies whose lives and times (told in idiosyncratic Lafferty fashion) are the subject matter of this novel. Each of the guys pairs off with a gal, most of them eventually marrying. What would young love feel like to the Laffertian mind? You need wonder no longer. But this passage is so much more than romantic. Lafferty's remarkable linguistic and cultural erudition are on full display here, interwoven with several micro tall tales tucked inside a larger one, and rustic local colour (by which enters Lafferty's ubiquitous ecology, in this case flora and fauna). All this juxtaposes high and low registers very amusingly. There's also narrative experimentation with voice and structure, an instance of Lafferty's frequently exemplified 'metafictional' habit (long before that word was hot and in a way that's on the opposite end of douchey; it's clever, but it's fun - not boring or snobbish or detached). There are several wee punchlines to laugh out loud at, as well as the whimsy of the whole segment. And, of course, there's one preternatural or paranormal aspect very casually asserted in an almost sleight of hand manner. For my money, this is Lafferty firing on all cylinders.<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: center;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
Hans was in love. He was in love with Marie Monaghan. This had come swiftly to him who usually made up his mind slowly on important things. </div>
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Marie might not have seemed exceptional to anyone else. She had regular, nice features, but her hair was too red and her face was too freckled. She was chubby by contemporary standards, though divine by classical. Hans’ feelings were classical. Marie's eyes were green, but were green eyes classical? Were any of the goddesses green-eyed? You couldn't trust Homer with colors. </div>
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“—my uncle Homer Hochheimer,” it was Marie speaking in Hans’ mind, “he had a fortune but he missed it because he was color-blind. He had a purple cow and he thought she was black. He kept her till she was fourteen years old and then sold her to the butcher. ‘Man, you're throwing away a fortune,’ the butcher told him when the sale was consummated. ‘You've the only purple cow in the world and you've sold her for a pittance. I'll have a million pounds for her,’ and he did.” </div>
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But to the green eyes, this would have to be solved. The paint is gone these two thousand years from the Greek statues that were colored in their prime, but they were still painted when Pausanes had seen them. Did he call any of them green-eyed? How would he call them green-eyed? Not <i>chloros</i> surely. <i>Chloros</i> was light yellow-green. Nobody would have eyes that were <i>chloros</i>. <i>Prasino</i> was a nice green, but was it classical? What was the Greek word for eyes the color of Marie's? In Romany it was <i>sheleno</i>, Gypsy green. And once in French <i>vair</i>, the green they sang: </div>
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Nicolette had eyes of vair,</div>
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Something, something, yellow hair— </div>
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But <i>vair </i>had become <i>vert </i>with the disintegration of the French soul, and it was no longer the green of the Troubadors: ignorant wise men even said that <i>vair</i> was a shade of gray. </div>
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The Blessed Virgin was red-headed and green-eyed in early Flemish Annunciations. Witches were green-eyed. Lilith who was before Eve was a witch and therefore green-eyed. This would give primogeniture to the green-eyed women of the world. </div>
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Belloc wrote the only stanza to green eyes, this little bit out of all the game-legged verses that have walked on anapest and pentameter on all the lesser subjects. </div>
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“—Belloc? I mean my uncle Biloxi Brannagan. They called him that because he went ashore then. From his window he could see the top of an old piling and he thought it was the mast of his ship. ‘There's no hurry, she's still there,’ he would say. My aunt Gertrude, she's a Biloxi girl, never did tell him any different. He's still there. He never did catch his ship.’ Marie talked so in Hans’ mind as he waited for her at the Lotus Eaters. Then she came in person and sat down with him. </div>
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“What are you doing, little Hans?” she asked. </div>
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“I'm writing a poem about you. You can't see it. You won't scan and you won't rime; that's the trouble with you.” </div>
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“Shakespeare had the same trouble, Hans dear.” </div>
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“He did not.” </div>
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“My uncle Shakes Pearson had the same trouble. We called him that because he always had them. He entered a jingle contest once. It was put on by a chewing tobacco company and he had to write a limerick. He drank pop-skull whisky and he shook all the time. His verse would go like this:—‘There was an old lady from Gacko—Who doted on chewing tobacco—’, then Shakes would get the shakes after so much effort and have to go after more pop-skull. When he got back the squirrels would have eaten what he had written. They lived so far back in the boondocks that they didn't have any paper and he wrote on bark with oak-ball juice.” </div>
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In the company of Shakes Pearson, Hans did not feel so incompetent, so he let go with one of the stanzas he had written: </div>
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“The muses sang when Eve was small,</div>
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And they were but diurnal;</div>
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But you were long before them all,</div>
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For you're at least eternal.” </div>
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“You make me seem old,” said Marie. “Am I the eternal one? Well, Shakes would get another piece of bark and start again: ‘There was an old farmer who grew it—And never had leisure to chew it—’, then Shakes would get them again and go off for more pop-skull. And when he came back it would be as before: the squirrels would have eaten his epic.” </div>
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So Hans read again: </div>
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“I dreamed of you before we met,</div>
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I never was without you;</div>
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And all the masters praise you yet,</div>
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For they all wrote about you.” </div>
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“I thought they were referring to me, Hans, but I didn't know that anyone else knew. Well, Shakes would start another one (all our family are very persevering): ‘There was an old farmer named Glugg—who was always cutting a plug—He'd whittle and whittle—till it was too little—’, then Shakes would go off for more of the same before he got to the last line.” </div>
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So Hans read more boldly: </div>
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“But here the brighter pearls are strung</div>
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And rings for all your fingers:</div>
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I'll sing you as you ne’er were sung</div>
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By all the Minnesingers.” </div>
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“That's nice, Hans. So Shakes would start another one: ‘When I was a cocky young Jacko—we made our own chewing tobacco—We chopped up old sacks—and boots and boot-jacks—’, then he'd go off for more of it, and what do you think the squirrels did to his opus while he was gone?” </div>
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“Ate it up. We poets have a hard time.” He continued: </div>
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“And though the globe become a shell</div>
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You still will be the leaven,</div>
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And I'll remember you in Hell</div>
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When you forget in Heaven.” </div>
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“That's Swinburnish, which is the next thing to swinish, and untrue, dear,” said Marie. “We shall be together: I have decided that. Well, Shakes killed himself. His is the only blot on our escutcheon. And the only note he left said ‘Miriam’ (I'm name after her), ‘You've got to do something about those damned squirrels.’ She never did know what he was talking about or why he killed himself. I'm the only one in our family who understands these things.” </div>
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“Why didn't the squirrels eat that last note too?” </div>
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“Naturally when they read it they were frightened and ran away.” </div>
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“Are there squirrels in Australia, Marie?” </div>
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“Not that I know of. Are you trying to trap me? If I'd said wallabies I'd have had to explain what a wallaby was. And besides, wallabies can't read, so there goes the story. I have a letter from Loy to Finnegan. I stopped by the house to kiss the boys good morning. They weren't up yet so I brought their mail to them.” This was the letter: </div>
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Cambeltown, New South Wales</div>
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Thursday, February 11, 1943 </div>
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John Solli:</div>
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Dear Finnegan: </div>
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Margaret and I will be in town tomorrow. If you haven't any more girls, we'll see you and have a big picnic. And if you do have some more girls, bring them, and we'll get two more boys and join you and Marie and Hans. And bring the other Dirty Fiver that we didn't meet and we'll get him a girl too. No news. The garden I planted in November is all weeds. Papa wouldn't hoe the damned thing. But he killed the fatted calf for his prodigal daughter yesterday. </div>
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Meet us at the train at 7:45 AM (yes, I said AM). I know that you think it's decadent to get up in the morning and I know that you're right. But it isn't necessary that you be wide awake; I like you better the way you are. </div>
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Margie says to tell you that she loves you too. She wants you too now. She switched to you just because I did. But tell Vincent we both still love him also. We love Hans, we love Marie, we love your friend Casey whom we haven't yet met. Meet us tomorrow. </div>
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Love— Loy Larkin</div>
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Me too— Margaret Murphey</div>
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The passage is somewhat the classic 'I wish he'd stop writing verses about me long enough to kiss me' act, but it also shows a male-female dynamic that Lafferty visits again and again in the couples that frequently cross his fiction, where the man is a bit of an over-theoretical windbag while the woman is wry, witty, insightful, sensible, and cheeky. Lines that sneak up on me and make me smile, chuckle, or guffaw (thanks especially to what precedes them) are: 'Hans’ feelings were classical'; 'Something, something, yellow hair'; 'I thought they were referring to me, Hans, but I didn't know that anyone else knew'; 'We poets have a hard time'; and, of course, 'Naturally when they read it they were frightened and ran away'. And what a wonderful phrase: 'out of all the game-legged verses that have walked on anapest and pentameter'. The ending of their conversation exemplifies Lafferty's recurring investigation of what makes storytelling storytelling, tall and otherwise. And I left in the transition to the letter because that's how Lafferty ends his numbered chapter segment, creating yet more formal stylisation, appending a written personal letter to a scene of dueling love poetry and tobacco jingles and tall yarns all nested inside a dialogue that was preceded by a linguistic rhapsody. I'm almost glad that the entire novel's not written this way. It might (<i>might</i>) be too much. But there are plenty more interwoven experimentations and styles and registers in the remainder. To more of which we'll turn next time.Daniel Otto Jack Petersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278782665152906956noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5904298510069073946.post-62884869467037500842016-02-13T10:44:00.002-08:002016-02-13T10:52:16.314-08:00The Shelni Who Turned into a TreeThis is how they tell it.<br />
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There was a woman who was neither Shelni nor Skokie nor Frog. She was Sky Woman. One day she came with her child and sat down under the Shelni tree. When she got up to go she left her own child who was asleep and picked up a Shelni child by mistake. Then the Shelni woman came to get her own child and she looked at it. She did not know what was wrong but it was a Sky People child.<br />
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‘Oh, it has pink skin and flat eyes! How can that be?’ the Shelni woman asked. But she took it home with her and it still lives with the Shelni and everyone has forgotten the difference.<br />
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Nobody knows what the Sky Woman thought when she got the Shelni child home and looked at it. Nevertheless she kept it, and it grew and was more handsome than any of them.<br />
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But when the second year came and the young Shelni was grown, it walked in the woods and said ‘I do not feel like a Sky People. But if I am not a Sky People, then what am I? I am not a Duck. I am not a Frog. And if I am a Bird, what kind of Bird am I? There is nothing left. It must be that I am a Tree.’ There was reason for this. We Shelni do look a little bit like trees and we feel a little bit like trees.<br />
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So the Shelni put down roots and grew bark and worked hard at being a tree. He underwent all the hardships that are the life of a tree. He was gnawed by goats and gobniu; he was rough-tongued by cattle and crom; he was infested by slugs and befouled by the nameless animal. Moreover, parts of him were cut away for firewood.<br />
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But he kept feeling the jug music creeping up all the way from his undertoes to his hair and he knew that this music was was what he had always been looking for. It was the same jug and tine music that you hear even now.<br />
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Then a bird told the Shelni that he was not really a tree but that it was too late for him to leave off growing like a tree. He had brothers and sisters and kindred living in the hole down under his roots, the bird said, and they would have no home if he stopped being a tree.<br />
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This is the tree that is the roof of our den where we are even now. This tree is our brother who was lost and who forgot that he was a Shelni.<br />
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This is the way it has always been told.<br />
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-Excerpted from R. A. Lafferty's short story “Ride a Tin Can”, first published in <i>Worlds of IF</i>, 1970; also collected in <i>Strange Doings</i>, 1972<br />
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<br />Daniel Otto Jack Petersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278782665152906956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5904298510069073946.post-73093406068812064012016-02-13T10:16:00.003-08:002016-02-13T10:16:35.832-08:00The Shelni Who Lost His Burial ToothIt is told this way.<br />
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There was a Shelni who lost his burial tooth before he died. Every Shelni begins life with six teeth, and he loses one every year. Then, when he is very old and has only one tooth left, he dies. He must give the last tooth to the Skokie burial-person to pay for his burial. But this Shelni had either lost two teeth in one year or else he had lived to too great an age.<br />
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He died. And he had no tooth left to pay with.<br />
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‘I will not bury you if you have no tooth left to pay me with,’ said the Skokie burial-person. ‘Should I work for nothing?’<br />
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‘Then I will bury myself,’ said the dead Shelni.<br />
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‘You don't know how,’ said the Skokie burial-person. ‘You don't know the places that are left. You will find that all the places are full. I have agreement that everybody should tell everybody that all the places are full, so only the burial-person may bury. That is my job.’<br />
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Nevertheless, the dead Shelni went to find a place to bury himself. He dug a little hole in the meadow, but wherever he dug he found that it was already full of dead Shelnis or Skokies or Frogs. And they always made him put all the dirt back that he had dug.<br />
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He dug holes in the valley and it was the same thing. He dug holes on the hill, and they told him that the hill was full too. So he went away crying for he could find no place to lie down.<br />
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He asked the <i>Eanlaith</i> whether he could stay in their tree. And they said, no he could not. They would not let any dead folks live in their tree.<br />
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He asked the <i>Eise</i> if he could stay in their pond. And they said, no he could not.<br />
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They would not allow any dead folks in their pond.<br />
<br />
He asked the <i>Sionnach</i> if he could sleep in their den. And they said, no he could not. They liked him when he was alive, but a dead person has hardly any friends at all.<br />
<br />
So the poor dead Shelni wanders yet and can find no place to rest his head.<br />
<br />
He will wander forever unless he can find another burial tooth to pay with.<br />
<br />
They used to tell it so.<br />
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<br />
-Excerpted from R. A. Lafferty's short story “Ride a Tin Can” (1970)<br />
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Daniel Otto Jack Petersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278782665152906956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5904298510069073946.post-44972565614436959782016-02-08T06:55:00.001-08:002016-02-08T16:59:29.247-08:00Lafferty News (Issue 5)The biggest Lafferty news of late is that he is finally being published again. Only e-books for Kindle are available so far, and only in the U.K., but rumour has it that this announcement will be followed by further announcements of physical books, USA releases, and also a brand new Best Of Lafferty. I'm guessing these developments will happen within the year, but that's just a guess. The electronic 'covers' of the new releases seem like fairly slapped together stock art, and I think they'll tend to be misleading to potential readers. It seems as if the publishers are just trying to reach out to common denominator SF/Fantasy fans and such folks are likely to be disappointed, or at least confused, when they start to read what's 'under' these covers. The artwork should reflect the oddity and idiosyncrasy of the product. These images are certainly indicative of Lafferty's cosmic themes, but you'd never guess from these covers that those cosmic themes are going to be narrated in the folksy, 'outsider art', experimental, oral tall tale sort of way that Lafferty has. Here's hoping the physical releases will feature something more original and appropriate to each book's content. You can see the blurbed book descriptions <b><a href="https://www.orionbooks.co.uk/books/detail.page?isbn=9781473213609" target="_blank">HERE</a></b>. <br />
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Japanese Lafferty fan and scholar, Kenji Matsuzaki, shared on the East of Laughter Lafferty Facebook group the following information: 'According to the LOCUS February issue, "R. A. LAFFERTY’s new collection The Best of R.A. Lafferty sold to Malcolm Edwards at Gollancz, along with classic SF novels Space Chantey, Past Master, and Fourth Mansions; another 18 books were resold to Edwards for e-book publication as part of Gollancz’s SF Gateway intiative, all via Eddie Schneider at JABberwocky Literary Agency in association with John Berlyne at Zeno Agency."'<br />
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Next in news is that the long awaited third volume of Lafferty's complete short stories, <b><i><a href="http://centipedepress.com/sf/manunderneath.html" target="_blank">The Man Underneath</a></i></b>, is out from Centipede Press.<br />
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Thanks to photos shared by Felipe Guerrero in the Facebook group, I think we can see that this is the most beautiful edition they've made yet. I'm waiting with baited breath to get my copy (which takes a few months longer to get in the UK). <br />
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The story selection is a very good one, but it still has that overly random feel to it that each of the TOCs has had in this series. It feels as if it's not curated at all, having no sensitivity for how stories might sit side by side with one another or how the experience of reading them straight through the book might be enhanced by some selection of which flows into which. Oh well.<br />
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Finally in Lafferty publishing news, volume 3 of <b><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Feast-Laughter-Appreciation-R-Lafferty/dp/0692586512" target="_blank">Feast of Laughter: An Appreciation of R. A. Lafferty</a></i></b> has hit the streets as well. It's available on Amazon for a number of countries. For a list of those, plus a link to the free pdf, see <b><a href="http://www.feastoflaughter.org/">http://www.feastoflaughter.org/</a></b>. It's longer than ever and packed with goodness: more reprints of essays on Lafferty from years past, academic and otherwise; new essays, also academic and otherwise; new stories, poems, and artwork; more reflections from Lafferty translators; an interview with Harlan Ellison about Lafferty; letters between Lafferty and Alan Dean Foster (who, incidentally, wrote the new <i>Star Wars: The Force Awakens</i> tie-in novel); a rare and excellent Lafferty non-fiction piece, 'Tell It Funny, Og', and one of my all-time favourite short stories by Lafferty, 'Configuration of the North Shore'. I once again contributed an essay (on Lafferty and monsters) and a short story. </div>
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<b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Swanwick" target="_blank">Michael Swanwick</a></b> kindly wrote about our efforts with <i>FoL</i> on his <b><a href="http://floggingbabel.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/lafferty-lafferty-lafferty.html" target="_blank">blog</a></b>:</div>
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<b style="background-color: #fff3db; color: #29303b; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><i>Feast of Laughter</i></b><span style="background-color: #fff3db; color: #29303b; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> has to be one of the most extraordinary fannish feats of recent years. It's a full-length book/zine containing new and reprint essays, appreciations, letters, whatevers pertaining to the man who was easily the most original science fiction writer of the Twentieth Century --</span><b style="background-color: #fff3db; color: #29303b; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Raphael Aloysius Lafferty</b><span style="background-color: #fff3db; color: #29303b; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">.</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: #fff3db; color: #29303b; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">R. A. Lafferty, "Ray" as his friends called him, was, during his lifetime, recognized as one of the giants of the field. Now, alas, he's close to forgotten.</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: #fff3db; color: #29303b; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">But not quite! Some of the great man's friends and admirers have been working hard to reignite Lafferty's reputation. This volume of </span><i style="background-color: #fff3db; color: #29303b; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><b>Feast of Laughter </b></i><span style="background-color: #fff3db; color: #29303b; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">is the third collection of Laffertiana and it is a must for all serious Lafferty fans.</span></blockquote>
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<i>Feast of Laughter</i> volume 4 is now underway and the content we have so far promises to be just as amazing. The most exciting feature in the forthcoming volume for me is definitely that we obtained permission and rights to include a never-before-published short story by Lafferty, 'The Rod and the Ring'. It's a great one too. There is the usual open call for submissions, but with a special emphasis this time round on what our editor in chief, Kevin Cheek, is calling 'Lightning Essays': around 300 to 600 words 'About Lafferty's writing, life, legacy, influence, or a personal reminiscence about your experience reading Lafferty'. Again see <b><a href="http://www.feastoflaughter.org/">http://www.feastoflaughter.org/</a></b> for details and where to send your submissions.</div>
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Lastly, if you haven't heard, the first ever 'LaffCon' is being held in New Jersey this June. Michael Swanwick also kindly mentioned <b><a href="http://www.laffcon.org/" target="_blank">LaffCon1</a></b> in his blog post above, at which he will be the Guest of Honor. I hope to make it myself if I can garner travelling funds from my university. We shall see.</div>
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Note the hilariously clever 'Join us' paragraph at the bottom of the flyer - better image <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJJmxlI-sKuK4r1wF6_rCLg5FMra6F50kLQCUyhH7j9KUuWraFyeMr3wjz2ByltjFjyC41kvLINKormUhDKkJ1OVTnY_y4SwN2VSU7H8sWHvqwFXzmEaeAU5xcR4O0V8nsgVashX9h6RTv/s1600/Laffcon+1+-+Poster_Color_V3+%25281%2529.jpg" target="_blank"><b>HERE</b></a> (art by Anthony Ryan Rhodes, wit by John Owen). </div>
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Welp, that's all for now! Very exciting times for all things Lafferty.</div>
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Daniel Otto Jack Petersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278782665152906956noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5904298510069073946.post-82912967032392811922016-02-07T09:24:00.001-08:002016-02-07T09:24:35.963-08:00Reading the Argo Cycle - part 1There's lots of Lafferty news afoot, but I'm not up for cataloguing it all in a Lafferty News post today. Most of you will probably be aware of it anyway. Regardless, I will come back to that in a different post on a different day. As you can see, with post-graduate work underway I have a lot less time to blog. So with a spare moment today I'm going to talk about the Lafferty I've been reading.<br />
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I managed to get hold of physical editions of the complete Argo Cycle or Argo Mythos (well, all the novels anyway - the short stories in the cycle I only have piecemeal in print and the rest electronically). This includes the so-called The Devil is Dead Trilogy: <i>Archipelago</i> (1979), <i>The Devil is Dead</i> (1971), and <i>More Than Melchisidech</i> (1992). The last novel of the trilogy was released in three volumes: <i>Tales of Chicago</i>, <i>Tales of Midnight</i>, and <i>Argo</i>, each amply illustrated with some pretty wonderful art from Ward Shipman. And there is one standalone novel in the cycle, <i>Dotty</i> (1990), which I was also lucky enough to obtain. Except for <i>The Devil is Dead</i>, which was released widely as a mass market paperback back when Lafferty was actually recognised as a giant among his peers, the rest is in very limited small press editions that are all but unavailable now, and what is available normally costs more than I'll probably ever be able to afford. But a very generous long time reader of this blog, whom I hadn't corresponded with before, gave me a great, affordable deal on all five books. I was able to move on the kind offer thanks to the generosity of those who contributed to my PhD fundraising campaign, which exceeded its goal.<br />
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So, I've now read <i>Archipelago</i>, and cracked straight into <i>The Devil is Dead</i> to try to get the feel of reading the books as a series. This is my second read of <i>Devil</i> (the first was over a decade ago) and I'm nearly finished. I'll then head straight into the first volume of <i>Mechisidech</i>: <i>Tales of Chicago</i>. I hope to do a number of posts on <i>Archipelago</i>, with copious quotes since it's unavailable to most Lafferty fans out there. <br />
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First impressions: the opening made me think this was going to be Lafferty's <i>Ulysses</i> or <i>Finnegans Wake</i>. But after a handful of fairly dense pages, the novel settles into a more straightforward style, if not a conventional narrative. Here's how Chapter One, 'In a Southern City', begins:<br /><br />
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All this begins in a southern city and at nine o’clock in the morning, the same hour at which the world was made. It was a Thursday when originally man was not. </blockquote>
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Indeed, in these latter days there were few people in the streets and not many in the pubs. But beer was available (barley and hops had been made on the third day), and the morning had a freshness as in the earliest weeks of the world, as the older people remember them. A fast wind was driving the clearing clouds, and the pavements were wet. (When the world was first made it was as though it had just rained.) </blockquote>
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The first man in the world was drinking the first beer. He was Finnegan (not in name, but in self), and he looked at himself in the bar mirror. He saw for the first time that first face, and this was his appearance: he had a banana nose, long jumpy muscles along cheek and tempora, and a mouth in motion. He was dark and lean, like a yearling bull. His eyes had a redness that suggested a series of stormy days and nights, were not previous days and nights impossible. He was a little more than half Italian and a little more than half Irish, as was Adam his counterpart in a variant account. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
His mind was clear but not of a pattern. He was rootless and renegade. A moment before this, he had been in the Garden. Then he raised his eyes from the drink. The Garden was gone, and he was in the middle of the World. Finnegan looked at the World with new-made eyes, and he doubted that he would ever find a place in it.</blockquote>
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It makes me feel as if Lafferty is signalling that he's setting up a very epic work in both narrative and philosophical scope. The book of Genesis from the Hebrew canon is, of course, a key 'intertext' here. But there is a deep sense of amnesia and cyclical recurrence not found in the founding narrative of the Bible. This is very much a post-creation scenario, in the thick of an old and weary world, and yet the sheer freshness of the Genesis account is intruding in the introduction to this strange man Finnegan. The antidiluvian world feels as if it were there just yesterday; the Garden of Eden has just slipped from view as Finnegan looks up from his drink. To see this fallen world as suddenly appearing from its unfallen state only a moment before is certainly to see it 'with new-made eyes'. Even though I've heard that Lafferty was very much not a fan of James Joyce, it's hard not to hear echoes of the 'riverrun' opening of <i>Finnegans Wake</i> here. They're either totally unintentional resonances, showing like minds in spite of themselves, or it's Lafferty taking on Joyce directly to somehow combat and/or subvert him if he was indeed no fan.<br />
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At any rate, this opening filled me with wonder as well as the obvious confusion and tension it exhibits, especially with this man who already doubts he'll ever find a place in the world as it is. (The physical description of Finnegan is wonderful too.) The sense of dialectic continues:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
But he was not alone. He had a companion named Vincent. Vincent, however, was neither rootless nor renegade. His mind, not so clear not so deep as that of Finnegan, did have a pattern. He had not known the Garden. He was born in the World, and he would always have a place in it. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“<i>In principio</i>,” said Finnegan, “<i>creavit Deus masculum et feminam</i>, that is to say, God made the first pair a man and a woman.” </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“But the earliest stories always begin ‘There were these two guys in a bar,’ ” Vincent contradicted. “I'd say it in Latin if I knew how.” </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“The two versions cannot be reconciled, and I worry about it,” Finnegan said. “But, every time the world begins, it does begin with two young men in a pub. All things else are subsequent to this.”</blockquote>
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Two guys in a bar vs. 'male and female he created them'. Interesting. And funny. Lafferty is, of course, doing his usual exploration of just how storytelling and stories work. How do you start them? How do you do a Beginning, when really everything's always already in the Middle? He seemed genuinely obsessed, vexed, and impassioned by how narratives work and his whole career seems to be a philosophical exploration and explication of the puzzle, Lafferty's exploration itself being in story form since this was the natural apparatus with which he was endowed. <br />
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But after this enigmatic introduction things start to get a little more pedestrian. This is appropriate, of course, for Lafferty wants the mundane world to take over this supra-mundane entrance into it. The tale transitions nicely this way:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Beer before breakfast, and you'll have sudden luck all day. Toohey's, Tooth's, K. B. Lager, the same beers they had in Paradise: it hadn't all been a dream. The boys left the pub but they didn't leave the pubs; there were many of them to visit.</blockquote>
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After this the tale is one of war buddies playing drinking pranks in their time off. Then it moves episodically to the events of the war buddies leaving the war and returning home, and then their lives back in the States. We'll come to that in time. But suffice it to say that many more moments of philosophy, etymology, and philology, peppered with some wonderful moments of myth and folklore, feature throughout the ostensibly mundane main narrative.<br />
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Before concluding this post I want to note that moving in to <i>The Devil is Dead</i> was very much an experience of moving into a very different kind of narrative. <i>Archipelago</i> is a rather meandering account of the lives of five friends (the Dirty Five) and their associates, somewhat centred on the task of theological zine-making - yep! Whereas <i>Devil</i> is a tight, fast-paced adventure narrative through and through. <i>Archipelago </i>does its philosophising directly in long-ish asides, digressions, and dialogue. <i>Devil </i>does most of its philosophising through the strange events of the narrative itself and the reeling psychology of those experiencing the events. <i>Devil</i> does totally work as a standalone. <i>Archipelago</i> is not needed as a 'prequel' or anything like that. But you do understand a number of the references in <i>Devil</i> more if you've read <i>Archipelago</i>, though knowing the people and events referred to does not necessarily illuminate the central and unresolvable mysteries of <i>Devil</i>. I'd say <i>Archipelago</i> is crucial to the Lafferty completist or scholar or truly geeked out fan of Lafferty. Such people would not want to miss some of the passages and themes in <i>Archipelago</i>. I'd also say it's crucial to understanding the very, very strange and fascinating character of Finnegan (as I'm sure the rest of the cycle will prove to be as well). In fact, that's my favourite aspect of <i>Archipelago</i> on this first go: further insight into Finnegan, one of Lafferty's greatest creations I'm beginning to think. <i>Archipelago</i> doesn't always follow Finnegan's POV or life. He's off stage for a lot of it. But when it does feature him it's always fascinating and illuminating, at the same time only deepening the mystery of just what or who he is. <br />
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More to come.<br />
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(photos by my wife, who also supportively suggested I spend the overflow of funding on rare books - the gal's a keeper!)</div>
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Daniel Otto Jack Petersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278782665152906956noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5904298510069073946.post-71388557688373511502015-09-29T07:20:00.001-07:002015-09-29T13:37:18.788-07:00Excerpt from 'Boomer Flats'<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'm studying Lafferty's short story 'Boomer Flats' right now for my forthcoming essay for <em><u><a href="http://www.yetanotherlaffertyblog.com/2015/08/yet-another-feast-call-for-action.html" target="_blank">Feast of Laughter volume 3</a></u></em>. Just had to share the following excerpt. Up to this point in the story, the style has been fairly plain (but Lafferty's prose at its plainest still tends to be graceful, taut, and often lyrical - even if the difficult concepts and narrative experimentations sometimes obscure his generally mellifluous style). I suspect the sudden change in style here reflects the new and strange and heightened setting the characters have suddenly found themselves within, for they have entered a sort of 'shadow' town not shown on maps, in search of monsters. </span><br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Dr. Velikof Vonk twinkled his deep eyes in their orbital caves: perhaps he cogitated his massive brain behind his massive orbital ridges: and he arrived, by sheer mentality, at the next step. </span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“Have you a menu, young lady?” he asked. </span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“No,” she answered simply, but it wasn't simple at all. Her voice didn't go with her prettiness. It was much more intricate than her appearance, even in that one syllable. It was powerful, not really harsh, deep and resonant as caverns, full and timeless. The girl was big-boned beneath her prettiness, with heavy brindled hair and complex eyes. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“We would like something to eat,” Arpad Arkabaranan ventured. “What do you have?” </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“They're fixing it for you now,” the girl said. “I'll bring it after a while.” </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There was a rich river smell about the whole place, and the room was badly lit. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“Her voice is an odd one,” Arpad whispered in curious admiration. “Like rocks rolled around by water, but it also has a touch of springtime in it, springtime of a very peculiar quality.” </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“Not just a springtime; it's an interstadial time,” Willy McGilly stated accurately. “I've noticed that about them in other places. It's old green season in their voices, green season between the ice.” </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The room was lit only by hanging lamps. They had a flicker to them. They were not electric. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“There's a lot of the gas-light era in this place,” Arpad gave the opinion, “but the lights aren't gas lights either.” </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“No, they're hanging oil lamps,” Velikof said. “An amusing fancy just went through my head that they might be old whale-oil lamps.”</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“Girl, what do you burn in the hanging lamps?” Willy McGilly asked her. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“Catfish oil,” she said in the resonant voice that had a touch of the green interstadial time in it. And catfish oil burns with a clay-colored flame. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“Can you bring us drinks while we wait?” Velikof of the massive head asked. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“They're fixing them for you now,” the girl said. “I'll bring them after a while.” </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Meanwhile on the old pool table the Comet was beating the hairy man at rotation. Nobody could beat the Comet at rotation. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“We came here looking for strange creatures,” Arpad said in the direction of the girl. “Do you know anything about strange creatures or people, or where they can be found?” </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“You are the only strange people who have come here lately,” she told them. Then she brought their drinks to them, three great sloshing clay cups or bulbous stems that smelled strongly of river, perhaps of interstadial river. She set them in front of the eminents with something like a twinkle in her eyes; something like, but much more. It was laughing lightning flashing from under the ridges of that pretty head. She was awaiting their reaction.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Velikof cocked a big deep eye at his drink. This itself was a feat. Other men hadn't such eyes, or such brows above them, as had Velikof Vonk. They took a bit of cocking, and it wasn't done lightly. And Velikof grinned out of deep folk memory as he began to drink.</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">~R. A. Lafferty, 'Boomer Flats' (1971) </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I think it's a pretty good example of Lafferty's odd yet robust prose when he really lets it out of its cage (though he can wax even richer and wilder than this). The dialogue sparkles, humour abounds, yet the language becomes injected with imagery of the huge and redolent, hinting at a dark, green, muddy, deep vitality beneath the effervescent chatter. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This exchange between the 'eminent scientists' and Crayola Catfish (the waitress) is followed by plenty more fearful wonders and laughing horrors in 'Boomer Flats', but the high-ish prose style here starts to crack and recede, probably to reflect one of the characters' stubborn unbelief in the redemptively monstrous nature of the place and people they've encountered (and which they discover is in themselves as well).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The description of Velikof's eyes here also reminds me of some passages in Cormac McCarthy's <em>Blood Meridian</em> where men's eyes are described similarly, as caves and the like, but I'm not going to go hunt up the exact references right now. Here too the woman's voice is said to call forth deep geological time, green spring times between ice ages - deep geology being another theme dear to McCarthy also, especially in <i>Blood Meridian</i>. Both McCarthy and Lafferty share a tendency to describe human features - soulish as well as bodily - in the imagery of landscapes (as well as other aspects of ecology). Another example from Lafferty that springs to mind is the enthralling description of a man's large and contoured hand at the opening of his short story 'Hands of the Man' (1970). </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Here in 'Boomer Flats' you can see the clear connection Lafferty is making between ecology and people, between the non-human and human, troubling a complete disjunction, re-enfolding subjects into objects. Notably in this story, outside of the excerpt above, Lafferty folds regional fauna and humanity together as well, especially catfish and bears. These kinds of anthropo-eco boundary blurrings and hybridities are part of what I mean by the 'ecomonstrous' and what I'm researching in Lafferty's writing. (The PhD is now 100% funded by the way, thanks to the generosity of a lot of kind and supportive folks out there.)</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">('Boomer Flats' was first published in <em>IF </em>magazine, then the collection <em>Does Anyone Else Have Something Further To Add?</em>; but I'm obviously not the first to see the story's eco implications as it was also later included in this 1994 anthology)</span></div>
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<br />Daniel Otto Jack Petersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278782665152906956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5904298510069073946.post-52052034536299494302015-09-07T08:52:00.001-07:002015-09-07T08:52:48.556-07:00A Prelude to Lafferty's Weirder TalesI want to review Lafferty's short story 'For All Poor Folks At Picketwire' (1975) next, but I feel compelled to try to get this off my chest first. It's probably completely unnecessary for a lot of readers, but it's something that puzzles and intrigues me. Feel free to demur from or expand on the view expressed below.<br />
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Since I first started publicly writing about Lafferty in 2009, I've claimed that Lafferty is weird, odd, strange, experimental, and bizarre in a way that the first-time reader is just not going to expect. Nothing will have prepared you for how Lafferty goes about being offbeat, even 'crazy'. I know that people often hear about 'the Lafferty madness' (as the likes of Harlan Ellison and Samuel Delany called it when Lafferty's fiction emerged on the scene in the 1960s) and they understandably think of the experimentations of the likes of Captain Beefheart perhaps, or the paranoid but fascinating open and subversive universe of the likes of Philip K. Dick perhaps. Or you name it. Whatever your background makes you think of when you hear the claim that someone is utterly original and 'insane' and the like, that thing you're thinking of, it's almost guaranteed to not be an apt comparison or preparation for Lafferty. <br />
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Even as I say all this - that no one is like Lafferty, nothing can prepare you for his brand of weirdness - you're getting the wrong idea! Why? Because when we hear such encomiums we generally think of one of two things (or both). We think either of something crazy in a really <i>cool</i> and 'hip' sort of way, something experimentally-minded college students might get into maybe, or something a well-(if-defiantly-)dressed 'alternative' crowd of one variety or another might champion. I get that. I was a teenage punk rocker and never grew out of it. When I think of crazy and original, I think of bands like The Birthday Party or The Fall (or in an alterna-metal direction, Mike Patton and his projects Mr. Bungle and Fantomas). If you're thinking speculative literature, you might think Neil Gaiman or China Mieville. If film, maybe David Lynch or the wackier and wilder aspects of the Coen brothers or Tarantino. But Lafferty's work is not (or not immediately) like all this, not soaked in these kinds of aesthetic assumptions and expressions.<br />
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On the other hand, the 'crazy-original' claims might make us think of really 'out there' bizarro examples like maybe Daniel Johnston or the aforementioned Captain Beefheart. If film, then maybe the likes of Terry Gilliam or John Waters. This impression is closer to the mark. But in most of these cases there can still be an aura of (usually countercultural) 'coolness' about the weirdness. <br />
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Now don't get me wrong. I often exclaim 'Cool!' in response to what I read in Lafferty. But I mean it the way I meant it as a kid in the 80s - an expression of sheer enthusiasm for something that strikes me as in some way excellent. Not as a confirmation of something's 'hipness', something's trendy now-ness, even by 'alternative' or 'indie' standards. Nor do I mean to deny that Lafferty is deeply countercultural in his own way (indeed, he's probably better called counter-<i>ontological </i>so reality-bending is his work and perspective). Lafferty was indeed what he called a 'queer fish', swimming crankily but joyously against the mainstream.<br />
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I also don't want my denial that Lafferty is 'cool' to give the impression that his weirdness is 'geeky'. Lafferty isn't comic-con weird either. Lafferty can, in certain respects, fit in both worlds - the geeks and the hipsters. Yet he is a misfit in both as well. That was seen to be the case when the 1960s/70s New Wavers of U.S. science fiction - Harlan Ellison, Roger Zelazny, Samuel Delany, and the like - championed Lafferty. They never lost their love of Lafferty's work, but they eventually didn't know how to categorise him as he was clearly not of or in the fold. All in all, Lafferty is by turns too literary, too genre, too experimental, too dark, too comic, or too difficult for various groups. That's why his work has tended to generate its own category of literature (what Theodore Sturgeon called 'lafferties') and its own following of Laffertyans or Laffertians, a diverse fan base comprised of all schools and allegiances, the unifying commonality being that they are struck and captured by Lafferty's unique genius.<br />
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So what <i>should</i> you think of when you hear that Lafferty is 'a genius, an oddball, a madman' and 'a genre in himself' (Neil Gaiman) or that 'Lafferty has the power which sets fires behind your eyeballs' (Zelazny) or that Lafferty 'bends or breaks normal story restrictions apparently at will' and has 'the most unfettered imagination' (Terry Carr) or that 'Lafferty is fun, sophisticated, and utterly insane', 'a madman, a wild talent' (<i>Reader's Guide to SF</i>)?<br />
<br />
Well, maybe start by thinking of the likes of <u><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amos_Tutuola" target="_blank">Amos Tutuola</a></u> or <u><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Elk" target="_blank">Black Elk</a></u>. Like them, Lafferty is a native primal force, an individual that grows out of the fecund soil of an ancient communal worldview and speaks the cosmic magical vision of a people, stamped with his own idiosyncrasy, sure, but overflowing with more than what one individual could ever imagine or convey. Yet Lafferty had more than one soil to grow out of - not only his family's Irish-Catholic soil, but also the Southwestern American Frontier and the lives and lore of his Native American neighbours. If you cut Lafferty, he bleeds all three.<br />
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Further complicating this possible resonance, Lafferty was classically educated in Augustinian and Thomist traditions, well-read in history and theology and philosophy, knowledgable of the hard and soft sciences, abreast of some major 20th-century developments in thought such as Jungian psychology and Teilhardian cosmology. Lafferty was a largely self-taught but impressive polymath. So his weirdness is going to be not only primally visionary like Tutuola and Black Elk, but also inevitably book-learned (albeit inclusive of some cranks and conspiracy theorists). So maybe when you hear about Lafferty's mad experimentation you should be thinking also of Joyce's <i>Ulysses</i> and <i>Finnegans Wake</i>. Or in a slightly different register, the wildnesses of Chesterton's buoyant dialectics and carnivalisations. (The weirdest parts of Kafka might be appropriate here too, but minus the unmitigated bleakness.)<br />
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Yet Lafferty is even more than the above hybridity of Mystic and Man-of-Letters (+ a pinch of crackpot) suggests, for he also embodies regional and class (Oklahoma and blue-collar) dialects, dictions, and perspectives that liberally salt his visions and sophistications with homespun wit and wisdom. And these perspectives puncture a whole helluva lot of pomposity and intelligentsia-speak along the way (though they don't foreclose Lafferty's own arcane and sesquipedalian theorisings, which are frequently embedded into his stories). I suppose Lafferty might be a bit of a Mark Twain in his knowing and humorous use of colloquialism, except that he comes across as more thoroughly <i>from</i> these classes, child of an extended frontier family as he was. This sincere rusticism is one crucial way in which Lafferty will surprise many a reader expecting The Cool Weird from him.<br />
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Now, all that said, once you've encountered and immersed yourself in Lafferty a while, it's not altogether unlikely that you will indeed end up thinking of him as a literary-yet-rustic Beefheart or Lynch, an 'outsider artist' and auteur in one. And dammit, Lafferty's weirdness <i>is</i> cool! So utterly cool, what would've made us 80s kids exclaim with approbation: 'Bad!' And it does get crazy weird and beautifully bizarre and sometimes disturbing. And its weirdness is deep, because Lafferty, like Lovecraft, is playing for keeps. This is a cosmic view of things that gets beneath the surface into the ontic architecture of existence.<br />
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All right, let's get back to reading these stories one by one.Daniel Otto Jack Petersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278782665152906956noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5904298510069073946.post-35855170671052187372015-09-05T07:46:00.002-07:002015-09-05T07:52:53.427-07:00Short Story Review # 8: Heart Of Stone, Dear (1983)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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3/5<br />
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This is a rare one, existing only the Chris Drumm booklet of the same name (and now in a nicely made electronic <u><a href="https://sites.google.com/site/thebooksofsand/the-man-who-talled-tales---r-a-lafferty" target="_blank">'pirated' collection</a></u>). To me, this is one of Lafferty's tales full of singular and memorable elements that nevertheless doesn't quite hold together as an all round solid story. It is definitely of interest in that it is woven of many fibres that overlap with the rest of Lafferty's fiction. For example, it features a central and likeable Syrian character as do a number of Lafferty's other stories and novels (e.g. 'Funnyfingers' and <i>Fourth Mansions</i>). (The relevance of this Syrian character for current news is not lost on me. See my comments about this at the end of this review.) It features a heist as do many Lafferty stories in one form or another (again 'Hands of the Man' comes to mind). It includes a giant livestock-eating bird as does the, to me, superior story 'Oh Tell Me Will It Freeze Tonight'. And it mentions the failure to reach the Second Age of Benevolent Magic, a phrase which ties it to 'In Deepest Glass' and perhaps other stories. It deals with a magical Islamic <u><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Stone" target="_blank">relic</a></u> and is also a Philosopher's Stone story (I'm not sure how much these overlap with similar elements elsewhere in Lafferty's fiction). And it's another of Lafferty's stories of youthful unrequited love, again connecting it to 'Funnyfingers' as well as 'Eurema's Dam' and others. Makes you wonder what Laff's own youthful experience was with the amorous.<br />
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The other central character introduced in the second half of the story, Alfred Freck, a 'thin little boy with red hair' and 'colorless gray eyes', is interesting as well. Alfred embodies the general geologophilia permeating all of Lafferty's fiction, but also more specifically the ideas of living and 'remembering' stones that Lafferty broaches in various stories such as 'From The Thunder Colt's Mouth', 'Love Affair With Ten Thousand Springs', and 'Bank and Shoal of Time'. This gives Lafferty and opportunity to make one of his many, many rhapsodic lists of erudition:<br />
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He was very lucky in his collecting. He said that the special stones called to him to come and get them. He had hundreds of garnets, red and orange (his red hair was the exact color of orange garnet) and black and green and almost colorless gray. This latter is the gray that sometimes clarifies; it is mostly found in spherical or ‘onion’ crystal. It is the ‘Crystal Ball rock’, and is also the exact color of Alfred Freck's gray eyes. </blockquote>
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Alfred had garnets that were more than a foot in diameter. He had emeralds and rubies, jade-stones and opal-stones. He understood the stones and could recognize all of them when they were still imbedded in their clay. Some of them were remembering stones and some of them were whispering stones. They told him about the big stone that is the Emperor of all the stones on the Earth.</blockquote>
There's a lot of other delightful and magical imagery. It's a work of fantasy proper by Laff, I'd say, which is slightly rare in his body of work it seems to me. Most things he writes can either very roughly fit into some kind of broadly science-fictional scheme or are more historical fiction in nature, with elements of folklore and magical realism (not quite the same thing as fantasy in my opinion). But this 20th century Arabian-American wonder story is solidly fantasy. (It goes nicely with 'Phoenic' in that regard I'd say.) <br />
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One last thing I want to say. With this week's news about refugees ringing in my ears, I can't help but be struck that I'm reading a story by an Oklahoma Catholic Irishman, which features a sympathetic <i>Syrian</i> character - as I've said, it's a recurring phenomenon in Lafferty's fiction. It is just such curious and generous portraits of our racial others that can widen our empathies, preparing us for just and compassionate attitudes and actions toward our global neighbours. May this kind of racially empathetic imagination increase and may our hearts of stone be replaced with hearts of flesh (a <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ezekiel%2036:26" target="_blank">biblical allusion</a> of which I doubt Lafferty was unaware).<br />
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* <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/496480423843058/" target="_blank">'Heart of Stone, Dear' discussion on Facebook</a><br />
<br />Daniel Otto Jack Petersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278782665152906956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5904298510069073946.post-77721398867463214682015-09-01T10:13:00.000-07:002015-09-01T10:24:20.326-07:00Offering a few of my extra copies of Lafferty as perks...<div dir="ltr" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6666666666667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: 1.2; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Well, I'm offering a few of my extra copies of Lafferty books as perks for contributors to my Indiegogo PhD campaign: </span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6666669845581px; line-height: 14.0799999237061px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ecomonstrous-phd"><b>www.indiegogo.com/projects/ecomonstrous-phd</b></a>. I was writing up a wee piece about it to put on that site, but found it didn't really fit there. So I'm putting it here! It's always fun for a rabid Lafferty fan to have an excuse to sum up the genius of Lafferty and his works. Here it is:</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’ve suggested that what makes this PhD unique is not only the idea of the ‘ecomonstrous’ itself, but also that one of the main authors being researched is the largely unknown R. A. Lafferty (1914-2002). Despite his obscurity, Lafferty has some famous and influential fans among his cult following. </span><a href="http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2001_12_01_archive.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Neil Gaiman</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, </span><a href="https://vimeo.com/127990267" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Harlan Ellison</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, </span><a href="http://antsofgodarequeerfish.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/its-great-to-be-young-and-in-danger.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Gene Wolfe</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and even the actor Bill Hader have all gushed about how Lafferty was a literary ‘mad genius’. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Take Gaiman’s </span><a href="http://www.mulle-kybernetik.com/RAL/obit.html#5" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">obituary</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> for Lafferty in the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Washington Post</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">‘</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">R.A. Lafferty [...] was undoubtedly the finest writer of whatever it was that he did that ever there was. He was a genius, an oddball, a madman. His stories [...] are without precedent [...] comparisons are pointless. The world only got one Lafferty. [...] Funny, wise and odd, his tales are unique. [...] He was a genre in himself, and a Lafferty story is unlike any story by anybody else: tall tales from the Irish by way of Heaven, the far stars and Tulsa, Okla.’</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Or take Bill Hader’s characteristically funny comments about Lafferty’s fiction in the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">New York Times</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><a href="http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/its-so-incredibly-tulsa-bill-haders-book-picks/?_r=0" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">in 2008</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">:</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-right: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">‘</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s hilarious, incredibly funny and at the same time it’s insanely dark. [...] You get such a sense of joy and boundless imagination in every sentence – even if the story doesn’t totally cohere, you feel like it’s about something. It’s so incredibly Tulsa. You get that feeling when you see a Flaming Lips show. It’s not like we’re dark and hurt and twisted. It’s like, “I’ve got blood on my face – come on, y’all, this is awesome.”’</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Alas, Lafferty is almost totally out of print these days, except for expensive limited edition print runs. Used copies of his books from the 60s to the 80s can be very expensive. Lafferty’s odd genius is probably most easily encountered in the hundreds of short stories he wrote, but the only extra copies I have available are of a few of his novels. They’ll throw you in the deep end with Lafferty, but I’ve heard of quite a number of fans first encountering him through his novels and becoming hooked. So for the more daring among you, here’s your chance to give it a go! (Or for the Lafferty fans already out there, a chance to pick up a title or two you may not’ve managed to obtain yet.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Past Master</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (1968) - x 2 - Utopia in the future, on another planet: time travel, monsters, androids, aliens, spaceships - but in a way only Lafferty could do! Bizarre journeys, sardonic homilies, gory battles, and weird wonders! Philosophies and grotesqueries galore! And more! (Plus, you gotta love the pulpy cover of this 1970s mass-market paperback edition.) </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Not To Mention Camels</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (1976) - This is truly one of Lafferty’s WEIRDEST works. It makes </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Past Master</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> look like a conventional novel. It’s about multiple worlds, written in a highly analytical and yet bloody way as only Lafferty would write it. A bit of a brain-melter to be honest. Its anti-hero is a particularly unlikable politician jumping from one version of himself to another in different versions of the worlds - and sometimes the utterly freakish places between worlds. It gets pretty gruesome and dark at moments, but its biting satire of personality cults and media lords can be kind of wickedly funny, and its wilder passages provide their own grotesque pleasures. If you read it, you definitely have to round it out with some of Lafferty’s more redemptive works. (This copy’s a print-on-demand paperback from 2000 by Wildside Press, but I actually kind of like this cover art.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Okla Hannali </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(1972) - This novel is a different kettle of fish from the previous two. It may well someday find its place in the canon of 20th century American Literature alongside other classics of the American frontier. It’s the only book of Lafferty’s that has actually never gone out of print. It’s a work of historical fiction about the 19th century Choctaw tribe, especially one Paul Bunyan-esque leader and his family, but it mixes in elements of ‘tall tales’ and folklore in such a way that makes it something of a rare example of ‘magical realism’ from the USA. It is tragic, poignant, comic, thrilling, consciousness-raising, and historically astute by turns. I found that its cumulative effect stirred me with both melancholy and wonder. It genuinely deserves to be more widely known. (This is a fairly sturdy print-on-demand paperback from the University of Oklahoma Press.)</span></div>
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Daniel Otto Jack Petersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278782665152906956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5904298510069073946.post-62289965050617800382015-08-31T08:54:00.000-07:002017-03-21T10:20:04.014-07:00Short Story Review # 7: The Transcendent Tigers (1964)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
4.5/5</div>
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First off, I want to say that I’ve been reliably informed that Lafferty’s own title for this story was ‘Needle’ and that a magazine editor chose its present title. Once you’ve read the story, Lafferty’s own title seems far more powerful to me and I hope it will be restored some day.</div>
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<i>(First published in Worlds of Tomorrow, 1964)</i></div>
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This is, among Lafferty readers, one of his better known and loved tales among the stories about precocious and preternatural children for which he is justly renowned. Lafferty’s children seem quite unique in literature and are not to be missed. Lafferty doesn’t see children as innocent, but often as almost amoral; and even more so as just wildly plastic with capacity for sheer power, which he portrays them as wielding in a very unwieldy fashion for good and ill at once. He often refers to children and adolescents as ‘poltergeistic’ in his fiction. Lafferty sees all humans as having a crucial ghostly element, but seems to see children as closer to that numinous quality, and thus… well, spookier. Carnadine Thompson (the central seven-year-old girl of this story) is one of Lafferty’s most memorable child anti-heroes, along with Clarissa Willoughby of ‘Seven-Day Terror’ (1962) and the Dulanty kids of <i><u><a href="http://mporcius.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/the-reefs-of-earth-by-r-lafferty.html" target="_blank">The Reefs of Earth</a></u></i> (1968). <br />
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<i>(Also collected in the 1972 anthology </i>Young Demons<i>)</i></div>
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‘The Transcendent Tigers’ is kind of a story about what precocious little kids would do with the planet if they had power to do whatever they wanted to with it at the largest and most complete scale, thus being able to treat the Earth as no more than a toy or an anthill. Indeed, the kids do in this story exactly what many of us have done with our toys and with little architectures of nature: poke holes in them, mutilate them inch by inch, for no particular reason, just to see what happens, just to watch the destruction; hell, just to break things.<br />
<br />
In the opening gambit of the story, Lafferty’s sympathies are clearly with the smart flexibility of the mother and daughter over against the father’s inflexible intellectualism. This comes out in a way that quite literally makes me laugh out loud every time the story comes to a certain point. After the husband has already been bloviating to his fellow male for a few paragraphs about how ‘impossible’ it is to work the wire model of an ancient puzzle he has given his daughter for her birthday (ignoring his wife's interjection that the girl had already worked and unworked the puzzle just a moment before), we get this:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Carnadine,” said her mother, “let me see you work that again.”<br />
Carnadine worked it again.<br />
“The reason it is unworkable,” said Tyburn…</blockquote>
And I can't repress a chuckle, even before I hear whatever shape he gives his absurd reasoning. So this is a story about possibility as well, and our rationalisations by which we try avoid such open possibilities. (To some degree, this is a central element in all of Lafferty's fiction - it certainly is in the previous story I reviewed, '<u><a href="http://antsofgodarequeerfish.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/short-story-review-6-narrow-valley-1966.html" target="_blank">Narrow Valley</a></u>', which also featured a mother and her children accepting wilder ontologies than the father of the family was prepared to grant or experience. One begins to wonder what the dynamic was with Lafferty's own parents.) <br />
<br />
In many 50s/60s American homes the dynamic might well have allowed for the way Tyburn treats his wife when he says to her: 'Stop chattering, Geraldine. I am explaining something to Horn' (the neighbour man). But Lafferty clearly and amusingly subverts such uneven and demeaning gender and marriage dynamics (in this story and many, many others). And it isn't that Lafferty views women as merely intuitive creatures while men are hidebound rationalists. His men and women vary on such attributes throughout his fiction, but here Geraldine is quite rational as well as canny in accepting what her eyes see her daughter doing (even if she 'had been looking pop-eyed for a long time' because of such ontic antics). When she asks her daughter how she can do such wonders (note her intellectual curiosity and innate sense of the need for causal order), we get this exchange between daughter and mother:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“There has to be a first time for everything, mama.”<br />
“Maybe, but there has to be a first-class explanation to go with that first time.”</blockquote>
Geraldine's no intellectual slouch.<br />
<br />
As to the pop-eyed impossible, the daughter Carnadine had already performed a feat more immediately spectacular than solving the 'unsolvable' puzzle: she several times instantaneously turns her white rubber ball inside out and then back again without tearing it, turning its colour from white to red and back to white again because the ball is 'red on the inside' as she informs her mother when asked about it. These little miracles are just the prelude to terrifying and gargantuan marvels to follow. That's one of the things that made this a favourite story of mine from the first time I read it: the opening ropes you in with the oddity and humour, but you have no inkling of the tall-tale or wonder-story heights (and physical depths!) to which the story is about to leap. It's one of the things Lafferty does best, setting out a little whizzer and then suddenly and swiftly stacking a gigantic whopper right on top of it, delightfully defying all sense of balance.<br />
<br />
Here Lafferty takes a characteristic structural turn and inserts a series of what we might call para-narrations: first an aside about the kids' club Carnadine has formed (and presides over) with her little brother and two other boys younger than her; then an excerpt from an article in a French academic journal (the article's in English) about powers and visitations coming to the Earth; and then the main event. This last is a fairly swift but amazing description of the peculiar mass destruction of various rural and small towns of the USA that most people have never heard of (I verified the existence of all but two by googling them). That these, beginning with Kearney, Nebraska, are mostly midwestern and southern towns (with a few from New England) is also characteristically Laffertian and the listings of them, to my ear, make up little snatches of Weird Americana poetry: <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Hanksville, Utah, Crumpton, Maryland, Locust Bayou, Arkansas, and Pope City, Georgia. [...] Highmore, South Dakota, Lower Gilmore, New Hampshire, Cherryfork, Ohio, and Rowesville, South Carolina. </blockquote>
Lafferty also performs his characteristic juxtaposition of the high and the low, the academic and the homespun, when he first refers to a farmer's report of the unbelievable size of the thing ('more than a mile thick, and a hundred thousand miles long') that came from the sky and caused the destruction. Lafferty wryly and exaggeratedly heads off the reader's incredulity at such a report from such a source:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Did he know how to judge distances? Certainly, he said, I know how to judge distances. It is ninety yards to that windmill. That crow is flying at right onto eighty yards above the earth, though most would guess him higher. And that train whistle is coming from a distance of five and one-quarter miles.</blockquote>
Then he inserts the writings of yet another theoretical academic, cited only as 'Winkers' (wink wink); a longer and more abstruse passage this time, but elucidating further on the Power and Visitation that the specialists are claiming has come to the Earth. After several paragraphs it breaks into this pile-on of jargon and theory:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The characteristics of the Power, the Visitation, as projected by these methods (and always considered in the Oeg-Hornbostel framework) is that it is <i>Aculeiform</i>, <i>Homodynamous</i>, <i>Homochiral</i>, and (here the intelligence reels with disbelief, yet I assure the lector that I am deadly serious) <i>Homoeoteleutic</i>.</blockquote>
Yowza! The italics are Lafferty's and all the terms are real, meaning respectively (and roughly): 'like a prickle'; segmented; a substance where 'all the constituent units are molecules of the same chiral form'; and 'having the same or similar endings'. Just when we might be tempted to think Laff is splashing some pseudo-academic nonsense our way merely for the sake of its amusing contiguity with the previous banter from the farmer, the article continues:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
For there is a Verbal Element to it, incredible as it seems. This raises old ghosts. It is almost as if we hear the returning whisper of primitive magic or fetish. It is as if we were dealing with the <i>Logos </i>- the word that was before the world. But where are we to find the logic of the <i>Logos</i>?</blockquote>
(Again, the italics are his.) Any reader of Lafferty's 1971 novel <i>Arrive At Easterwine</i> will know that he is not likely to invoke the concept of the Logos only for arcane laughs. There is buried in this simultaneously funny and disturbing story (a simultaneity Lafferty achieves very frequently) some real philosophical concerns of the author. But they remain mostly buried, to be linked up by the attentive reader with their reappearance in many other passages across his body of work. But the academic extract here does nevertheless serve to hilariously over-explain the very simple ritual by which Carnadine is presently seen to be wreaking all this gargantuan havoc.<br />
<br />
The narration returns to an amusing exchange between Carnadine and her mother where her mother asks how Carnadine, who had previously been a poor reader, now knows how to say the names of the towns that are being reported as destroyed in the newspaper:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Oh, it's no great trick, mama. You just tie into the stuff and let go. Crumpton! Locust Bayou! Pope City! Cherryfork! Rowesville!"</blockquote>
Lafferty's definitely reveling in the odd poetry of listing out these towns that I mentioned above.<br />
<br />
True to the patchwork narrative structure the story has taken, we then observe a scene of a wholly different nature than all these earthly happenings: 'Far out, very far out, there was a conversation.' The subsequent description of these somehow spherical yet non-physical intelligences is to me a very comic take on Lovecraftian Old Ones or Elder Being types of super-cosmic entities. Contra Lovecraft, such ultra-beings are not necessarily out to eat us and make us subservient - indeed, they might even be out to 'bless' us with new powers and potentialities. Yet we are indeed so ontically inferior to them that they wouldn't have any qualms about casting us aside into the cosmic rubbish heap if we prove unworthy or incapable of receiving and properly utilising their blessing. (For a somewhat similar, though more poignant, take, see Stephen Graham Jones's short story 'Catch and Release', collected in his 2013 <i><u><a href="http://ridethenightmare.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/zombie-sharks-with-metal-teeth-2013-by.html" target="_blank">Zombie Sharks With Metal Teeth</a></u></i>.) <br />
<br />
The lampooning of human failings and frailties from a superior alien perspective in this scene is perhaps somewhat standard fare of 1960s sf - with Lafferty panache, certainly - but the ideas also fit into larger explorations about the kind of 'confidence to con' (my phrase, not Laff's) that these beings expound on here, a theme which Lafferty repeatedly plumbs across his body of work with characteristic tension and ambiguity. (The very dark <i>Not To Mention Camels</i> and the more redemptive <i>Aurelia </i>come to mind as novels by Lafferty that explore this theme; the Wreckville con men of the story '<u><a href="http://ralafferty.tumblr.com/post/45008960505/6-hands-of-the-man" target="_blank">Hands of the Man</a></u>' come to mind as well.) The scene also, of course, serves to juxtapose yet another vast greatness with comparative smallness: the picture of these meta-cosmic super-intelligences towering over human understanding resonates with the giant holes in the cities next to the tiny holes on the globe or the verbose academic articles next to the childish, badly rhyming couplets of the kids' club.<br />
<br />
The penultimate scene of the kids making their rhymes and jabbing needles into the globe in order to destroy major cities is a fantastic coup de grâce. It gives us Laffertian children in full ferocity,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
And Carnadine stuck it in with full assurance of her powers, red cap atilt, eyes full of green fire.</blockquote>
the chuckling silliness of the rhymes -<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>“Peas and Beans—</i><i>New Orleans!”</i>[...]<br />
<i>“Candy store—</i><i>Baltimore,”</i>[...]<br />
<i>“Fatty's full of bolonio—</i><i>San Antonio.”</i>[...]<br />
<i>“Eustace is a sisty—</i><i>Corpus Christi.”</i>[...]<br />
<i>“Eggs and Batter—</i><i>Cincinnater.”</i>[...]<br />
<i>“Hopping Froggo—</i><i>Chicago.”</i></blockquote>
- and the stunning summaries of the jagged destructions they thereby wreak:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“He rhymed and jabbed, manfully but badly.<br />
“That didn't rhyme very good,” said Carnadine. “I bet you botched it.”<br />
He did. It wasn't a clean-cut holocaust at all. It was a clumsy, bloody, grinding job—not what you'd like.<br />
[...]<br />
“I do wish that you people would let me handle this,” said Carnadine. “That was awful.”<br />
It was. It was horrible. That giant needle didn't go in clean at all. It buckled great chunks of land and tore a ragged gap. Nothing pretty, nothing round about it. It was plain brutal destruction.”</blockquote>
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<i>(Also included in Lafferty's 1972 collection </i>Strange Doings<i>)</i></div>
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The story ends as many Lafferty stories do, with a fourth-wall-breaking call to participate. Usually, however, his readers are called to participate in the <i>creation</i> of worlds, not destruction. So this ending is clearly meant to disturb. It's quite a nasty trick because you absolutely cannot fail to add in your own ending. Just reading the prompt - the final three words of the story - will automatically put the corresponding two words in your head. The story finishes - or rather, Lafferty's part of the story finishes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>“Knife and Fork—</i></blockquote>
And we have no choice, given the pattern that's been effectively planted into our heads from previous pages, but to supply: 'New York!' <br />
<br />
I suppose it probably seems like nothing more than an amusing little ending until you delve further into Lafferty's narratology. But even if you don't, Lafferty's fiction has a way of working on you beneath the surface whether you consciously take note of it or not. As I said at the beginning of this review, would we have done any different if we had been the kids endowed with such power? <br />
<br />
And more generally, Lafferty's fiction is always probing us, pricking us like a needle, goading us to wonder: <i>have</i> we been endowed with Powers, and what creations or destructions are we unleashing with our gifts? (Admittedly, the destruction here, as <u><a href="https://macalester.academia.edu/AndrewFerguson" target="_blank">Andrew Ferguson</a></u> has argued about Lafferty's works in general, can actually be a necessary part of the creation of new worlds, and I do think that valence is in play here. But the satire on humans that the alien conversation performs requires that we also feel troubled by our participation in this destruction. Was it really making way for new worlds or was it just a brutal botch job that only served our cruel and callous desire to see things break for no good reason?)<br />
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Note: one of the elements I still don't grasp about this story is the name Carnadine and the crucial red cap. Is the emphasis on red an allusion to blood, another theological element alongside the mention of the Logos? Please enlighten me with your thoughts on this.<br />
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* <u><a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/1606403712932414/" target="_blank">Facebook thread on 'The Transcendent Tigers'</a></u><br />
* <u><a href="http://ralafferty.tumblr.com/post/65026598841/75-the-transcendent-tigers" target="_blank">Entry on 'The Transcendent Tigers' at Andrew Ferguson's blog</a></u><br />
* <a href="http://www.ralafferty.org/works/stories/the-transcendent-tigers/" style="text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank">'The Transcendent Tigers' thread at RALafferty.org</a><br />
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Daniel Otto Jack Petersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278782665152906956noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5904298510069073946.post-52687606456143943742015-08-18T01:44:00.002-07:002015-08-18T01:52:17.668-07:00Ecomonstrous Lafferty/McCarthy PhD on IndiegogoOk, folks, I'm stepping out from behind the blog and showing my face to introduce my forthcoming PhD and the crowdfunding campaign we've launched for it. I share it here because I genuinely think that some Lafferty fans may want to get behind the academic study of his work. I believe that is one more crucial way that awareness and appreciation of Lafferty's art and thought can find traction and permanence in the world. It comes first from readers, then readers enthusing with fellow readers, then popular forums and writings, then academic study - and through that last step the cycle begins again and in an ever widening radius as culture begins to be impacted by both critical and popular engagement with an artist. It's not that neat and tidy, of course, but that's a rough sketch of what I hope will happen and what I do actually believe is already happening as the likes of <u><a href="http://ralafferty.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">Andrew Ferguson</a></u> do professional theoretical work on Lafferty, and bloggers like me, <u><a href="http://www.yetanotherlaffertyblog.com/" target="_blank">Kevin</a></u>, and <u><a href="http://failingevenbetter.blogspot.co.uk/" target="_blank">John</a></u> blog about him, and the <u><a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/eastoflaughter/" target="_blank">Facebook</a></u> Lafferty group discusses him, and the folks contributing to <u><a href="http://www.feastoflaughter.org/" target="_blank">Feast of Laughter</a></u> write about his work, and so on. It's happening!<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'This is beginning, this is happening! Let no least part of it ever forget the primordial tumble that is the beginning!'</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
-R. A. Lafferty, 'Symposium' (1973)</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<br />
Neil Gaiman kindly retweeted about the campaign already (see below video) and it's about 23% funded as I write this. A great start for which we're thankful.<br />
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So, thanks for taking a look at the video below (don't worry, there are plenty of images too, not just my talking head!), and I hope you'll have a wee gander at the perks on the <u><b><a href="http://igg.me/at/ecomonstrous/x/11738696" target="_blank">Indiegogo site</a></b></u> as well. (You can follow the campaign on <b><u><a href="https://twitter.com/EcomonstrousPhD" target="_blank">Twitter </a></u></b>and <b><u><a href="https://www.facebook.com/ecomonstrousphd" target="_blank">Facebook</a></u></b> as well.)<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="281" mozallowfullscreen="" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/136219209" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="500"></iframe> </div>
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<a href="https://vimeo.com/136219209">ECOMONSTROUS PHD</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/user18519333">Boxdog Inc</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.<br />
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Daniel Otto Jack Petersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278782665152906956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5904298510069073946.post-52511121454520412782015-08-15T08:16:00.000-07:002015-08-15T08:16:15.135-07:00Lafferty News (Issue 4)I've missed passing on a whole lot of Lafferty news since the previous issue (in January!). Some of it is now frustratingly misplaced or forgotten. So I'm just going to dive in, starting with the most recent:<br />
<br />
It's extremely rare that I get an R. A. Lafferty Google Alert, but I got one this week:<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.google.com/url?rct=j&sa=t&url=http://www.ardmoreite.com/article/20150810/NEWS/150809811&ct=ga&cd=CAEYACoTOTcxNjMxMjA0ODgwNDMxNDYwOTIaOTMxYTc4OWEyMDlkNjQ3YTpjb206ZW46VVM&usg=AFQjCNGQNZbrSwWOoxelklrxbAMiPGAa_g" style="background-color: white; color: #427fed; display: inline; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; line-height: 20px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Let's Talk About It, Oklahoma continues with <b>Lafferty's</b> 'Okla Hannali'</a><br />
<br />
Lafferty's Choctaw novel is the 'second book in the Let’s Talk About It, Oklahoma series “Many Trails, Many Tribes”' we're informed. Second book! It's being presented by one Dr. Greenstreet, 'a former professor of Communication Studies at East Central University'. So it's great to see both a popular and academic engagement with Lafferty's material. I also enjoy the news article's quick description of <i>Okla Hannali</i>: 'Part historical novel and part tall tale, European descendant R.A. Lafferty gives another perspective on Native Americans with an interesting twist on the Western genre.'<br />
<br />
It seems that Oklahoma has really begun to take on her native son since the <b><a href="http://thislandpress.com/11/05/2014/lafferty-lost-and-found/" target="_blank">This Land Press article</a></b> on Lafferty last year. In March of this year he was inducted into the Oklahoma Writers Hall of Fame, though this fact was mainly carried as a Neil Gaiman news item (e.g. <b><a href="http://www.tulsaworld.com/scene/artsandentertainment/author-neil-gaiman-calls-tulsa-magical/article_e0a42308-0cbf-5699-a383-8784134d2df4.html" target="_blank">here</a></b> and <b><a href="http://www.tulsaworld.com/blogs/scene/arts/arts-neil-gaiman-shares-stories-with-tulsa-crowd/article_6b0d721e-8e1d-5702-a730-04c185376700.html" target="_blank">here</a></b>). Still, the tone of Gaiman's wonder and joy at being involved in the recognition of his childhood hero is just right. “I get to tell you something which makes me ridiculously happy,” one blogger <b><a href="http://www.milemarkerreview.com/evening-neil-gaiman" target="_blank">reports</a></b> Neil saying. “Lafferty has been inaugurated into the Oklahoma Writers Hall of Fame.” The same reporter notes that Gaiman's reading of Lafferty's story 'Seven-Day Terror' made quite an impact on the packed audience: 'By the end of it, I imagine that anyone who hadn’t read Lafferty before, including me, was going to find one of his books as quickly as possible.' Quite a number of people were tweeting similar responses to the reading as well. The Zarrow Center for Art and Education also displayed Lafferty's wonderful office door collage <b><a href="http://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/113693850246/in-tulsa-town" target="_blank">during Gaiman's visit</a></b> as well (and some of Lafferty's <b><a href="http://orgs.utulsa.edu/spcol/?p=3495" target="_blank">papers</a></b> were also exhibited as part of the events).<br />
<br />
Last week on <b><a href="https://soundcloud.com/okie-geek/okie-geek-ep-10" target="_blank">Episode 10</a></b> of the Okie Geek Podcast, Lafferty was given a brief mention (from about 42:15) as a great short story writer (again on Gaiman's recommendation - the podcasters hadn't read Lafferty). They listed him on their <b><a href="http://okie-geek.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/blog-post.html" target="_blank">blog post </a></b>about that episode as well. <br />
<br />
This is a much better ongoing regional ripple effect than seems to have happened when some in Oklahoma honoured Lafferty back in <b><a href="http://newsok.com/tulsa-writer-recognized-by-book-center/article/2495865" target="_blank">1995</a></b>. <br />
<br />
In other developments: back in June Andrew Mass revealed another <b><a href="https://vimeo.com/127990267" target="_blank">snippet </a></b>from the Lafferty <b><a href="http://laffertydoc.blogspot.co.uk/" target="_blank">documentary</a></b> he's putting together: a slice of a much longer interview with Harlan Ellison (of which I've seen a bit more, and it's wonderful). Andrew writes about the interview <b><a href="http://laffertydoc.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/srchttpsplayer.html" target="_blank">here</a></b>.<br />
<br />
Michael Swanwick <b><a href="http://floggingbabel.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/when-lafferty-insulted-harlan.html" target="_blank">wrote a bit</a></b> about Lafferty's and Ellison's one-sidedly stormy relationship back in May, concluding: 'if you want to insult Harlan Ellison and get away with it, it's the simplest thing in the world: You just need to have earned enough of his respect to pull it off.'<br />
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That's it for now, except to furnish some <b><a href="https://twitter.com/jeffvandermeer/status/593606488540585984" target="_blank">proof </a></b>for a statement I made a few posts ago that the award-winning, bestselling author Jeff VanderMeer is now a Lafferty fan.<br />
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Please let me know of anything you think is newsworthy about Laff that I've neglected to mention here.<br />
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Daniel Otto Jack Petersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278782665152906956noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5904298510069073946.post-68581277237212287772015-07-31T12:30:00.000-07:002015-07-31T12:31:18.190-07:00Short Story Review # 6: Narrow Valley (1966)4.5/5<br />
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This story genuinely deserves to be included in anthologies of the American (USA) short story. It is a regional yarn of post-colonial irony, highly amusing, its wonders deftly described, and a narrative richly layered with allusive material for class discussions and the writing of essays. May the day speed on when we see this title listed next to stories by Flannery O'Connor, Mark Twain, Jack London, Charlotte Gilman, Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, Langston Hughes, and so on.<br />
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I wrote a very short section about this story in my recent <b><a href="http://antsofgodarequeerfish.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/ecomonstrous-environments-in-fiction-of.html" target="_blank">dissertation</a></b>. It was only in doing this that I properly realised just how many themes and elements Lafferty folded into this one short, seemingly light, tale. In the dissertation, I could only talk a tiny bit about the land itself as a sort of character in the story. It pained me not to even touch on the other elements. If I could have done so, it would have strengthened even the discussion of the land because all the elements of the story reinforce each other (as well as leading off on individual tangents). <br />
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The story's three main themes that seem most central to me are: 1) the delightfully portrayed marvel of the valley's anomalous spatial-perceptual behaviour (with its political as well as ontological implications); 2) the wry lampooning of white reductionist views of Native Americans; 3) the equally wry lampooning of 'scientific' explanations and our modern psychological need for them in order to keep a mysterious universe at bay. <br />
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But these don't exhaust the story's charms and riches. The dialogue, for example, is some of the funniest and sharpest in all of Lafferty's output. One of my favourite instances is the exchange between the Rampart children and the Indian Clarence Little-Saddle when they're down in the valley together. For example:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Is there any wild Indians around here?” Fatty Rampart asked.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“No, not really. I go on a bender about every three months and get a little bit wild, and there's a couple Osage boys from Gray Horse that get noisy sometimes, but that's about all,” Clarence Little-Saddle said.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“You certainly don't intend to palm yourself off on us as an Indian,” Mary Mabel challenged. “You'll find us a little too knowledgeable for that.”</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Little girl, you might as well tell this cow there's no room for her to be a cow since you're so knowledgeable. She thinks she's a short-horn cow named Sweet Virginia; I think I'm a Pawnee Indian named Clarence. Break it to us real gentle if we're not.”</blockquote>
</blockquote>
This badinage carries on, disabusing the children of their ethnic stereotypes. Mary asks Clarence where his war bonnet is if he's a real Indian. He in turn asks her why she's not wearing the Crown of Lombardy if she's supposed to be a real white girl. After a little more back and forth, including asking where his bow and arrows are and him admitting he only did archery once and poorly at a range in T-Town, we get this: <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Hey, you old Indian, you lied!” Cecilia Rampart shrilled from the doorway of the shack. “You <i>do </i>have a war bonnet. Can I have it?” </blockquote>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“I didn't mean to lie, I forgot about that thing,” Clarence Little-Saddle said. “My son Clarence Bare-Back sent that to me from Japan for a joke a long time ago. Sure, you can have it.”</blockquote>
</blockquote>
An example of other elements buried in the story is the very occluded reference to the Rampart matriarch's own possible non-white ethnicity. Her name is Nina, and she confesses to sometimes having an urge to disappear to Mexico forever. This might be another reason why she and the children, unlike Robert Rampart the patriarch, are able to enter the fun and humour of the recalcitrant valley and thus 'play along' and experience its true dimensions. At least for a little while. <br />
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I suppose that's a fourth central element: humans having or lacking true dimensionality, which determines their ability to experience the true dimensionality of the world in which they exist (and the true dimensionality of one another, especially across racial lines). Cue the concluding punny joke between Clarence and the ever-popular Lafferty stalwart, Willy McGilly the 'eminent scientist':<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Did we overdo it, Clarence?” Willy McGilly asked. “What did one flat-lander say to the other?”</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Dimension of us never got around,” Clarence said. “No, I don't think we overdid it, Willy.”</blockquote>
</blockquote>
It's an all round great tale of magic, theory, repartee, and subversion of Manifest Destiny, supplying a variety of pleasures only truly appreciated on repeated readings. It also, along with the other American Indian short stories Lafferty wrote, is deepened by (and deepens) a reading of Lafferty's historical novel of the Choctaw people <i>Okla Hannali </i>(1972). There are various interesting resonances, but the poignancy only lightly implied in 'Narrow Valley' gets full voice in <i>Okla</i>, along with plenty more wonders and horrors and hilarities.<br />
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<b style="background-color: #fefdfa; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;"><a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/473984486101241/" style="color: #7d181e; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">* Discussion of 'Narrow Valley' on Facebook</a></b><br />
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<b style="background-color: #fefdfa; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;"><a href="http://www.ralafferty.org/works/stories/narrow-valley/" style="color: #7d181e; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">* 'Narrow Valley' on ralafferty.org</a> (including many links to other blog reviews of this story)</b><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpg6h3l47nsjCyHuZxfgWfKEcRTFI6v_cIKP2dJWebM-9aFo7eDtSi9_zediOszTovRhF6kV2LEsd0Ay2OFKry2hqoYyJSIh6P2vHzz0vJpU4jDkO2oZaivrDdrlcMTTth6j3hPzOU9XM/s1600/STPTSDRMND1969.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpg6h3l47nsjCyHuZxfgWfKEcRTFI6v_cIKP2dJWebM-9aFo7eDtSi9_zediOszTovRhF6kV2LEsd0Ay2OFKry2hqoYyJSIh6P2vHzz0vJpU4jDkO2oZaivrDdrlcMTTth6j3hPzOU9XM/s1600/STPTSDRMND1969.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #fefdfa; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">'Narrow Valley' appeared in this anthology among several others, as well as being included in Lafferty's seminal short story collection<i> Nine Hundred Grandmothers </i>(1970)</span></span></div>
Daniel Otto Jack Petersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278782665152906956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5904298510069073946.post-52536207343021098542015-06-23T15:00:00.002-07:002015-06-23T15:01:47.806-07:00'Ecomonstrous Environments in the Fiction of R. A. Lafferty and Cormac McCarthy' (dissertation uploaded!)Here it is at last, folks:<br />
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<a href="https://www.academia.edu/13205984/Ecomonstrous_Environments_in_the_Fiction_of_R._A._Lafferty_and_Cormac_McCarthy" target="_blank">https://www.academia.edu/13205984/Ecomonstrous_Environments_in_the_Fiction_of_R._A._Lafferty_and_Cormac_McCarthy</a><br />
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Feel free to tear it to shreds with incisive criticism. It's definitely only the first stab at a longer project. I'm pleased to be able to say the dissertation received an 'A'. It's just an undergraduate paper, but I hope it points in some helpful directions for seeing Lafferty's place in American and world literature as well as philosophy. Works mentioned, either at length or briefly, are 'Narrow Valley', 'Smoe and the Implicit Clay', 'Snuffles', and <i>Okla Hannali</i>. The only work by McCarthy engaged in the paper is <i>Blood Meridian</i>. (The PhD research I hope to begin in October will delve into the rest of their respective bodies of work.) <br />
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The main theorists engaged in this paper are Timothy Morton ('dark ecology'), Graham Harman ('object-oriented ontology'), Alphonso Lingis ('imperatives in things'), and a bit of Lawrence Buell (pioneer of contemporary ecocriticism in literary studies). Large swathes of the paper should be pretty readable even to those not familiar with any theory. Other parts may seem a bit impenetrable! At any rate, the whole thing is only ten thousand words. To those further down the academic road than me, all I can ask is your patience and charity! (But don't hold back much-needed critique either!)<br />
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There's lots of other Lafferty stuff happening and I still plan to get back to reporting on that, so stay tuned! (Here's a quickie: Jeff Vandermeer is a huge Lafferty fan now, a recent convert, and he'll be including Lafferty's story 'Nine Hundred Grandmothers' in the forthcoming <i>Big Book of SF </i>he and his wife Ann Vandermeer are editing for Vintage Books.)Daniel Otto Jack Petersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278782665152906956noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5904298510069073946.post-81661389616102406452015-06-10T10:26:00.000-07:002015-06-11T00:09:35.545-07:00Short Story Review # 5: Parthen (1973)4.5/5<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'Peggy had put her tongue on the crux.'</blockquote>
This one is one of my faves and one of the first Lafferty stories I ever <b><a href="http://antsofgodarequeerfish.blogspot.co.uk/2009/12/laffertian-travelogue-part-4-never-was.html" target="_blank">blogged</a></b> about some six years ago. All that I said in that earlier post still stands. The story still strikes me as exquisitely taut in its prose and plot, it still tickles my funny bone, and the poetic passage describing the (probably projected) beauty of the alien women is still unique and brilliant. I would add to what I originally wrote about reading it over and over in the early days that I also used to read it out loud to family and friends every chance I got, and I also photocopied it and thrust it into the hands of a number of people. ('Configuration of the North Shore' is another one I've done that with frequently over the years, but usually just loaning the person Gardner Dozois's <i>Modern Classics of Fantasy</i>, which contains that story in a nicely printed format amidst good authorial company. 'Configuration' has won over a lot more people than 'Parthen' ever did.) <br />
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But I guess I also still have the same qualifications: that this is <i>potentially</i> a great intro to Lafferty if someone's likely to be won over by a well-written, humorous, semi-twisty, lightly satirical Twilight Zone type of tale. But it doesn't give a whole lot of indication of the depths, heights, and bizarrities to which Lafferty frequently rises. (His story 'The Six Fingers of Time' is similar in this respect to me - a great, funny, wowing piece of speculative fiction, but only hinting at the full Lafferty effect.)<br />
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Three things stuck out to me on this read: one is the line quoted above, delivered by Peggy Ronsard, the wife of Roy the protagonist. I feel as if I never even read that line before. This time it leapt right off the page and enthralled my eyes. What does it mean? It seems suggestive, and in one of the comment threads on the discussion of this story on Facebook we got into some very graphic detail trying to spell this out! Basically, it was suggested that this was a double entendre, which would fit with the subplot of the men no longer being sexually hungry or active because of the 'higher values' they have euphorically embraced. And that diminishing of actual sexual activity is what is narrated after the arresting sentence. 'The goats among the men had become lambs and the wolves had turned into puppies.' Such sexual goatiness and wolfishness is keenly missed by the wives of the men for they have not been visually seduced into the body-denying 'higher values' by the new beautiful women (aliens) in town. Well, if this is a double entendre, there's also no doubt in my mind that Lafferty would not be unaware of the phrase's allusion to the Catholic practice of kissing the crucifix. (I'd love to hear from any of you theologically minded folks on this.) That's quite risqué of Lafferty! And potentially a really complex move. <br />
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This leads me to the next thing that stuck out to me on this read, especially since we had just read <b><a href="http://antsofgodarequeerfish.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/short-story-review-4-maybe-jones-and.html" target="_blank">'Maybe Jones and the City'</a> </b>the week before (a yarn with an emphasis on a bawdy bodily afterlife): 'Parthen' is bitingly anti-gnostic. I've always grasped that it was generally satirising 'higher ethics' that ignore or sublimate truly good actions. But I hadn't quite as viscerally grasped how much the story portrays the cessation of conjugal physical affection and lovemaking as a grave and terminal social evil. <b><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/01/sawfish-escape-extinction-through-virgin-births-scientists-discover" target="_blank">Parthenogenesis</a></b> may be great for some biota, but not for humans, Lafferty seems to say. This made me see that I'd missed the story's thematic connection to other of Lafferty's stories like 'Ishmael Into the Barrens', 'Try to Remember', and 'Heart Grow Fonder'.<br />
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Lastly, I was freshly struck that Peggy Ronsard is the real hero and centre of this story, even though she only features on a few pages of it. (Then again, it's a very, very short tale). She is the most truly drawn character of the story, bursting with vim and vigour, wit and wisdom, all of which is evinced with only a few masterful strokes from Lafferty. (And this freshly confirms my impression that this is just such a tightly written story craftwise). Indeed, Peggy's few lines have always stuck with me over the years, almost more than any other character in Lafferty's body of work - not only her incisively sarky comment that Jack the Ripper would be better than the sexless creatures their husbands had become, but also her lively lusty love of male attention, both her husband's and his friends! (Lafferty's recurring theme of men sitting on women's laps is broached here.) It's a cheeky tale to be sure. A minor classic in his oeuvre. <br />
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<b><a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/1452100751751655/" target="_blank">* Discussion of 'Parthen' on Facebook</a></b><br />
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<b><a href="http://www.yetanotherlaffertyblog.com/2014/01/ringing-changes-1-parthen.html" target="_blank">* A review of 'Parthen' on Yet Another Lafferty Blog</a></b><br />
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<b><a href="http://www.ralafferty.org/works/stories/parthen/" target="_blank">* Comment thread for 'Parthen' on ralafferty.org</a></b>Daniel Otto Jack Petersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278782665152906956noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5904298510069073946.post-77095043806271905672015-06-07T11:50:00.000-07:002015-06-07T11:50:03.242-07:00Short Story Review # 4: Maybe Jones and the City (1968)3/5<br />
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This one gets a little richer and deeper every time I think about it. It's easy to think it's merely an entertaining 'idea story' with some connections to other fuller explorations of similar themes elsewhere in Lafferty's works, but not much more. Then you try to pick apart why this is so and it gets more complex as you do so. In the East of Laughter Facebook group, the ratings ranged from 2 to 5, the broadest we've seen so far. I think it's a typically Laffertian take on themes like <b><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sehnsucht" target="_blank">Sensucht</a></b> and the <b><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_desire" target="_blank">'argument from desire'</a></b>. And 'typically Laffertian' here means that Lafferty has put so many tensions and carnivalisations into this embodiment of those ideas that the theology of it becomes downright confusing and perhaps disturbing. It's definitely designed to be a story you have to wrestle with. I'm thankful for that because, as I said, it's forcing me to get much more out of it the more I wrestle with it. <br />
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'Maybe Jones' is one of my favourite Lafferty names (out of probably a hundred more favourites - he is the king of character names). It captures perfectly the essence of the story: the ambivalent longings of the everyman. Its theme of yearning specifically for the 'perfect place', which one has visited but forgotten the location of, connects it to other Lafferty stories such as 'Configuration of the North Shore' and 'Land of the Great Horses', which also explore themes of peoples and landscapes, psychogeography, the sense of a homeland, and so on. The fact that these longings are focused on a long lost perfect <i>city</i> (rather than, say, an edenic pastoral setting) connects it to Lafferty's repeated explorations of utopia and his many excursions into competing ideals of the urban (e.g. <i>Past Master</i>, 'The Will as World and Wallpaper', 'Interurban Queen', etc.).<br />
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The more I think about it the more I think this story could be a brief Laffertian take on the whole <i>Pilgrim's Progress</i> type of narrative, but instead of the straightforwardly linear 'Pilgrim' or 'Christian' wending his dangerous way to the 'Celestial City', Lafferty gives us Maybe Jones searching and searching the universe for what he's lost, the perfect place with the perfect 'high old time'. Bunyan's pilgrim struggles to be sure, and is waylaid and whatnot, but Lafferty's pilgrim is in a perpetual cycle of amnesia and ambiguity. It's as if Lafferty felt spiritual pilgrimage had to be cast in these terms in modern/postmodern times. <br />
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Lafferty's idea of 'perfection' in this tale is what I found slightly troubling, mainly in that it involved a hefty dose of prostitution. Lafferty wasn't at all down with the 'sexual revolution' into which his writing emerged in the 1960s and because of that it's easy to miss some of his very saucy references to sex scattered throughout his works. Here he calls a brothel a 'bang-house' and calls his acquaintance Susie-Q 'the prettiest trick on Sad-Dog planet'. Since it's a crucial element of the perfect place in this story, I can only assume that Lafferty is here taking prostitution in the carnivalesque way that he often takes binge eating and drinking, bloody brawling, and the like, using these 'vices' as grotesquely humorous ways to shock us awake to the wildness of the 'virtues'. That's maybe a stretch, but it's the best I've got for now. The Vaudeville, Music Hall, bawdy, rowdy ideal of a 'high time' in this story relates it to still more stories in Lafferty's oeuvre such as 'One At a Time' and 'Golden Gate'. The fact that it's set in a planet-hopping context put me in mind of <i>Space Chantey</i> also (and, as it turns out, it shares a few characters, including Maybe himself, with that novel). Indeed, 'Maybe Jones and the City' feels like a bit of a run up to, or run off from, both <i>Past Master</i> and <i>Space Chantey</i> (both of which novels were published the same year as this short story).<br />
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Despite some potential confusions, this tale is definitely about false and true (or less true and more true) versions of perfection, paradise, afterlife, eternity, a blessed state, heaven, and so on. An old friend of mine recently told me he couldn't imagine there being art in heaven since art requires struggle and heaven is the cessation of all struggle, the answering of all questions, and the like. I did my best to tell him he had a flawed view of heaven, that it was a place not of instant, total, final knowing and consequently of flat static 'tranquility', but rather it was place and level of existence finally freed from the inhibiting chains of hubris and self-centredness so that one can quest forever in the ecstatic adventure of knowing the divine in ever rising alternations of dark and light as one moves into new unveilings, which are always dark at first sight, until one's eyes grow used to the glory - an existence that will most certainly require the struggle of art to experience it (hence all the <i>praise</i> in biblical visions of heaven - someone has to <i>write</i> those songs, <i>make</i> the instruments, etc.). Something like that. It's all just finite pictures of a reality that is unpictureable to mere mortals. Lafferty in this story pictures it far, far better than I did, if equally oblique. Lafferty confesses in this story that one person's idea of heaven is another's idea of hell, but he still thinks imagined eternities of mere 'peace' (in a bland, static sense) are not on the right track and that rowdy, bodily, and pleasure-filled pictures are more on the right track, more in keeping with that historical bodily resurrection which is the centre of his church's faith. It's not a flawless eternity Lafferty pictures, but one for those with, as he puts it in this story, 'the golden flaw' - namely, the inability to settle for a sanctimonious idea of heaven. Anything too 'peaceful' would become unbearably boring if it went on for all eternity. Heaven must be something so potent that we will quite literally <i>never </i>tire of it. As the story says of the perfect place, in one of Lafferty's most memorable lines: 'At night they took the sky off just to give it more height.'<br />
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Another clue Lafferty gives us about how such an eternity could actually satisfy real flesh-and-blood humans is that, as with so much of his fiction, he breaks the fourth wall and calls upon the reader directly to participate in world-building. 'Hey, get in on this if you're going to. They're building it now!' All we have to do, he informs us, is post our suggestions to the 'Bureau of Wonderful Cities. Old Earth.' We are part of the making of heaven, if we're willing. The story closes: 'That's all you need, but get with it. They're building our place now.'<br />
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<b><a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/388065878066692/" target="_blank">* Discussion of 'Maybe Jones and the City' on Facebook</a></b><br />
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<b><a href="http://www.ralafferty.org/works/stories/maybe-jones-and-the-city/" target="_blank">* 'Maybe Jones and the City' comment thread on ralafferty.org</a></b>Daniel Otto Jack Petersenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278782665152906956noreply@blogger.com4