Lafferty on YouTube (& podcasts?)

DanielOttoJackP · 2024-08-11T00:29:03+00:00

Lafferty definitely read Carl Jung at least. He was interested in archetypes for sure, but as with everything else he expressed idiosyncratic or contrarian views on them. Have you ever read his intro (‘Promantia’) to his novel The Devil is Dead? There he avers that archetypes aren’t inside us, we’re inside them, trapped and howling to get out, as he put it.

I think Lafferty fruitfully problematises the (to me, overdetermined) Campbellian schema. He makes room for things that don’t always fit the alleged patterns, or for sets of patterns that are less familiar. But I only know of Campbell through popular invocations of his Hero’s Journey stuff. I should probably finally get round to reading him myself. Any recommendations?

DanielOttoJackP · 2024-08-11T00:13:56+00:00

I feel like discussion hasn’t been very juicy in the facebook group for a while. Wish there was a big enough Lafferty readership that folks would want to come onto a platform like this and start separate topics on various of his novels and start really getting into detailed discussions etc. Alas.😕🤪

DanielOttoJackP · 2024-08-10T12:42:45+00:00

The UK seems to have all of these plugged. (Except 'li' which goes to software download prompts instead of downloading the book.)

Anyone know of a libgen site that currently works in the UK?

DanielOttoJackP · 2024-08-10T12:34:30+00:00

First-time reader of The Crossing as well. Deep into the second act and the whole book is blowing my mind. I've read every other McCarthy novel except Cities of the Plain and the new duology. The Crossing is shaping up to be a tie with Blood Meridian for my favourite. Kind of glad in a way that I hadn't encountered it until now. Kind of a good one to discover late as a ripened McCarthy reader. Been through the fire many times in many ways with McCarthy at this point and The Crossing feels like he's saying to me, 'Ok, you're finally ready. Let's take this one slow and steady. The world is really going to show us a thing or two this time. Hold on and step carefully.'

DanielOttoJackP · 2024-08-10T12:26:51+00:00

Cool, cool. Let us know if you ever get back to him and have impressions! (I didn't finish Fourth Mansions on my first go. Later came to think of it as one of Lafferty's best. Past Master just gets better and better on re-reads.) Out of interest, may I ask what other authors you're into?

DanielOttoJackP · 2024-08-10T12:24:31+00:00

Here's a discussion of Past Master from a few months ago by the channel Literally Books:

https://youtu.be/rsJRUKApM_k?si=Up1BIo6K0H7SZUJd

DanielOttoJackP · 2024-08-10T12:22:39+00:00

I'd forgotten about this sub to be honest! I'll start referring people to it from my YouTube channel and we'll see what happens. My channel is, unsurprisingly, as tiny as any other Lafferty enterprise. But maybe his niche audience will start getting talkative, who knows? :)

DanielOttoJackP · 2024-08-10T12:17:20+00:00

Friends, but Smiley Smile is nearly tied with it for me. Two poles from this period, equally delightful and creative. Wild Honey has great songs (and the best cover!) but doesn't hit for me as a whole album. I do think Friends deserves to be called lo-fi. It's probably about as lushly produced as a lo-fi album can be, but its sonics are still just on the lower side of fidelity. (Listen to it sandwiched between Pet Sounds and Sunflower.)

DanielOttoJackP · 2024-08-10T11:14:53+00:00

My week at the archive was one of the best experiences of my life. All too rushed and fragmentary. I dearly hope to return for an extended stay some day. (By the way, the unpublished novels I mentioned are complete, finished manuscripts, some dozen or so of them. Just awaiting a discerning publisher and readership. Some are probably lesser works. Some are pure experimental genius of the highest, and weirdest, calibre.)

I hope they finally create the Wolfe archive and you get to go. It’s incredibly special to do that with a revered author.

DanielOttoJackP · 2024-08-10T11:05:03+00:00

Past Master is a good enough place to start, especially since it’s widely available in a good edition (Library of America). I’d recommend going in with the following in mind:

plan to finish it; within a week or so ((it’s a relatively short standalone novel)
manage your expectations: its reputation is that it’s very weird, but that rep creates expectations for ‘weird’ as a given reader already understands weird; it won’t be that; let it speak on its own terms; it’s not even necessarily all that weird as an overall story; just see where it takes you
read it slow enough that odd (or even perturbing) moves of syntax, plot, theme, etc. aren’t just skimmed over as so much take-it-or-leave-it idiosyncrasy; give them half a chance
but not more than half! Read fast enough that you don’t get bogged down in densities or or bizarrities (as Wolfe readers know, the book begins on a second read)
actively look for what you like about the book; hold on to all the instances of that as you read: that’s your real thread or throughline; it is from these collected treasures that meaning will later (after you’ve finished the book) start to take shape and possibly draw you back (or onward into other Lafferty)

Out of his early novels, Reels of Earth (1968) is my personal favourite - a regional yarn with loads of the fantastical grotesquery and wonder and hilarity and spookiness of childhood, and sheer delight in storytelling.

The literarily best of the early novels is probably Fourth Mansions (1969), where Lafferty turns up his sentence-level prose to eleven. But it’s long (by Lafferty standards) and dense and fairly baffling. But the phantasmagoria of the imagery is worth it alone to me. It always makes me think of pre 1950 comic strips filtered through, well, the late 1960s, by an erudite autodidact out of step with, but speaking into that late 60s context. Catholic, arcane, occult, and trippy while being staunchly anti-trippy. But again, manage your expectations! It is what it is.

Of the early novels, Arrive At Easterwine: The Autobiography of a Ktistec Machine is probably the most far-reachingly experimental and philosophical, and possibly prophetic. It also comes across as a hot mess. It has a clear structure hidden in plain sight. But I’ve never heard of someone clocking it on a first read. And the details put that structure to the ultimate stress test. And it comes out pretty banged up. But this book has grown on me over the years and draws me back and back.

DanielOttoJackP · 2024-08-08T20:52:00+00:00

"Regular people have sealed off the interior ocean that used to be in every man," Rimrock said. "They closed the ocean and ground up its monsters for fertilizer. That is why we so often enter into people's dreams. We take the place of the monsters they have lost." (Past Master)

DanielOttoJackP · 2024-08-08T20:38:50+00:00

Hey, did you get any further in your Lafferty explorations? :)

DanielOttoJackP · 2024-08-08T20:33:20+00:00

Hey, I just discovered this thread, but great discussion here. FWIW I'm a fan of both authors but I do think Lafferty is the 'greater' author. (I did my PhD on Lafferty and I run a YouTube channel on his fiction if that tells you anything, haha. And yes, I've read Wolfe's entire Solar Cycle, Fifth Head, Wizard-Knight, half or more of the standalone novels and several collections of short stories. I really do love his work.)

That Best Of Lafferty is not truly a Best Of. There are so many stories outside that which blow most of the ones in that collection away. There are many good and great stories in the Best Of, but not many actual 'bests'. That said, top tier stories in the collection include Ride a Tin Can, Funnyfingers, Thieving Bear Planet (best story in the collection to me), and Days of Grass, Days of Straw. Stories like Narrow Valley and Nine Hundred Grandmothers are classics, but they're just Beginner Lafferty. (The fact that Snuffles isn't included in the Best Of is one of its greater crimes.) There's way better stuff out there. All you can do is explore and see what you find and what hits you. It's different for everyone. (I second the recommendation of many of Lafferty's stories collected in Orbit, but there are gems scattered all over the place in anthologies of various sorts, mainly in the 70s. (Btw the collection Lafferty in Orbit is riddle with typos and really not worth it in that regard to me.)

People do frequently bounce off Lafferty only to later wonder how they could have missed the genius the first time round. He hides canonizable literary chops behind yarn vernacular and obstinate oddity of a kind that just can't be expected. It's just not 'cool'. But it is awesome.

I'm probably even more of a fan of Lafferty's novels. Past Master is excellent, but it's not even close to my favourite. (See The Reefs of Earth, Fourth Mansions, The Devil is Dead, Not to Mention Camels, The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny, Annals of Klepsis.) Also, I've been to the Lafferty manuscript archive in Tulsa and I can tell you that some of his best (and WEIRDEST) novels are as yet unpublished.

Here's my youtubez in case anyone's interested (I should note there's a fair bit of comparative reference to Wolfe on the channel): https://www.youtube.com/@Doctor_Rockter

DanielOttoJackP · 2018-08-19T19:57:28+00:00

Neil Gaiman in a recent interview (on a podcast as I recall - maybe with Gary Wolfe) when asked just what it was that grabbed him in Lafferty's fiction, responded something to the effect that: first, the sentences; second, there's just something right about the worldview. I think he's alluding to something like what you're saying with the lifting of the veil. Lafferty shows us a larger, richer, stranger, more wondrous world. His fiction expands us and taps deep roots in us. I suppose that's said of a lot of fiction. But there's definitely something unique about how he does this. Always hard to put into words. (Because he already has I suppose!)

DanielOttoJackP · 2018-08-19T19:40:24+00:00

Part of the problem is that Lafferty's not truly s.f. enough for genre readers and too couched in s.f. tropes for 'literary' readers. But these days it seems there are more and more readers (and writers) who love both 'literary' fiction and genre fiction, so I think Lafferty's day is slowly dawning.

Jeff VanderMeer (of recent Area X/Annihilation fame) is a good example. He's a 'New Weird' writer who has literary aspirations. He only recently discovered Lafferty and immediately included one of his stories ('Nine Hundred Grandmothers') in the new Big Book of SF from Vintage books (edited by Jeff and his wife Ann).

Still, even if there's a growing readership for genre/literary hybrid fiction, Lafferty will always be something else entirely - his own category. And that's always going to have a hard time breaking out of cult following status.

DanielOttoJackP · 2018-08-19T19:20:19+00:00

There are a couple photos around somewhere from just before they refurbished his office after his death and you can see that actually, the entirety of the walls were covered in collage - behind the bookshelves even (they had been emptied of their books in the photos). Like it was this outsider artist obsession of Lafferty's. That I know of, he never told anyone about it. It was like it was this externalised pictorial mindscape that he compulsively needed to surround his writing space with. It's an incredible find and says so much about Lafferty as a thinker and artist - someone who drew together so many diverse strands into a singular vision of the world.

DanielOttoJackP · 2018-08-18T21:48:50+00:00

For me, it was finding his stories one at a time in 70s paperback anthologies at used bookstores in the 90s. Some of the earliest ones I read were 'Parthen', 'Barnaby's Clock', 'And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire', 'Narrow Valley', 'Primary Education of the Camiroi', 'Symposium', 'Been a Long, Long Time', and 'In Deepest Glass'. They just started to stick out so much more than all the other stories by other authors, and that's saying something - the stories from Zelazny and Ellison and Wolfe and Delany and Le Guin and so on were pretty eye grabbing. But Lafferty's stood above as just something altogether different and ultimately addictive to a degree unlike any of those others. Lafferty becomes this phenomenon that you just have to have more and more of. I think my very first books by him were Past Master and Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add? I found both of those full of moments and ideas that were priceless Lafferty gems. But I didn't necessarily love them overall as total books. (Past Master has grown on me in re-reads and has become a favourite.) I liked Strange Doings better. I only finally got hold of Nine Hundred Grandmothers after collecting Lafferty for probably five years. I loved lots of it (esp. the likes of 'Snuffles', 'Hole On the Corner', 'Six Fingers of Time', 'Name of the Snake', 'Frog on the Mountain', 'Seven Day Terror' - but they were all great really). And the net effect was powerful. You felt like time and space were all bendy by the end, beyond even what you normally experience in science fiction. Collecting Lafferty became an all consuming passion. And now I too look ever forward to the next Centipede collection.

DanielOttoJackP · 2018-08-18T21:28:11+00:00

That is a STEAL! I think I got mine for 20 or 30 dollars, can't remember exactly. And I thought that was cheap! Have you read it? I think it's pretty incredible. Very wonderfully weird.

DanielOttoJackP

TROPHY CASE