Monday, May 9, 2016

Links Links Links

Posting this here to remind myself that I have a Lafferty blog.

Discoveries this morning...

---Among Lafferty's surviving personal papers:
"Photo-reproduction of an illustration featuring goats and ducks, and a helicopter flying upside down."
http://www.lib.utulsa.edu/speccoll/collections/lafferty/series3.htm

---Michael Dirda was on the World Fantasy Committee that awarded Lafferty his Lifetime Achievement Award.
"I'm a great fan of R.A. Lafferty -- in fact, I was on the World Fantasy Awards committee that got him a Lifetime Achievement Award."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2007/04/05/DI2007040500845.html

---Jo Walton's L shelves begin with Lafferty.
"You know how you sometimes get medication that says “do not exceed 4 tablets in 24 hours”? Lafferty is like that for me. The best way to read him is to keep a collection on your bedside table and read one story every night."
http://www.tor.com/2010/06/27/ok-where-do-i-start-with-that-l/

---A man named George Barlow wrote a significant intro to Laff in '73. FoL should translate and publish this.
"Ce qui m'a toujours gêné chez Eliot, ce qui me gêne aussi chez Lafferty, c'est la conjonction d'une extrême érudition et d'une extrême désinvolture : chez l'un comme chez l'autre, la plus grande richesse dans le plus grand désordre exige du lecteur des efforts d'autant plus difficiles que ni la raison (claire perception d'un enchaînement logique) ni la sensibilité (identification à des tribulations humaines) ne sont mobilisés pour les soutenir."
http://www.noosfere.org/icarus/articles/article.asp?numarticle=172

---More French Lafferty stuff here:
http://www.noosfere.org/icarus/livres/auteur.asp?NumAuteur=311

---Paul Cook gives Lafferty some love in a sf history lecture:
"I would equate in spirit many of R.A. Lafferty's short stories with those of magical realist Jorge Luis Borges. They are that good. Lafferty, however, has more humor than does Borges."
http://www.public.asu.edu/~paulcook/Fifth%20Lecture.htm

---Lafferty gets some love from The Believer.
"2015 saw a spate of reissues (including these deluxe editions) of the wonderfully odd stories of long out-of-print wunderkind R.A. Lafferty. Another writer whose work has been classed as science fiction but whose true metier was ideas stretched to their greatest possibilities, Lafferty wrote in imitable laser-blasts of prose equal parts playful and transfixing. These collections are an affirmation for an enduring cult of devotees for whom Lafferty is the American equal of a Borges or Cortázar."
http://logger.believermag.com/post/137218978340/our-favorite-books-2015

---Anthony has been posting wonderful "illustration notes" on his blog. Start with this one, then read through them all.
"Since I've started making art again, everything I have created has been for Feast of Laughter."
http://arr-illustrator.blogspot.com/2016/04/santuario-de-chimayo.html

---Not Laff-related, but I'll sign off with this great Percy quote:
"Who says I despair? That is to say, I would reverse Kierkegaard's aphorism that the worst despair is that despair which is unconscious of itself as despair, and instead say that the best despair and the beginning of hope is to be conscious of despair in the very air we breathe, and to look around for something better. I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?"
http://www.doubletakemagazine.org/int/html/percy/

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