{"id":12640,"date":"2014-11-07T13:09:50","date_gmt":"2014-11-07T18:09:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/?p=12640"},"modified":"2014-11-07T13:16:04","modified_gmt":"2014-11-07T18:16:04","slug":"anti-gravitas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/anti-gravitas\/","title":{"rendered":"Anti-gravitas"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today is the centenary of the birth of possibly the most original and imaginative writer of the twentieth century, R.A. Lafferty<\/a>. I’ve been collecting his books ever since I read “Continued on Next Rock” in one of the Carr\/Wollheim anthologies back in ancient times. I could try to explain why Lafferty is extraordinary, but it’s easier just to refer you to the short stories that are available online.<\/p>\n

Slow Tuesday Night<\/a><\/p>\n

Guesting Time<\/a><\/p>\n

The Transcendent Tigers<\/a><\/p>\n

Narrow Valley<\/a><\/p>\n

Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas<\/a><\/p>\n

Hog-Belly Honey<\/a><\/p>\n

Nine Hundred Grandmothers<\/a><\/p>\n

The Six Fingers of Time<\/a><\/p>\n

Nearly everything Lafferty wrote is long out of print, which is a scandal. If you ever spot one of his collections in a used book store, grab it.<\/p>\n

Some websites devoted to the cranky old man from Tulsa:<\/p>\n

Continued on Next Rock<\/a><\/p>\n

I want a death and resurrection of the thing<\/a><\/p>\n

The Ants of God Are Queer Fish<\/a><\/p>\n

Yet Another Lafferty Blog<\/a><\/p>\n

The R.A. Lafferty Devotional Page<\/a><\/p>\n

R.A. Lafferty.org<\/a><\/p>\n

Lafferty, incidentally, is partly responsible for the career of Neil Gaiman<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Lafferty was his favorite author in the world, he said. \u201cHis stories brimmed with ideas that no one had ever thought before. The use of language was uniquely his own\u202f\u2014a Lafferty sentence is instantly utterly recognizable,\u201d Gaiman wrote of Lafferty, in an introduction to the story in Martin H. Greenberg\u2019s My Favorite Fantasy Story. \u201cThe cockeyed, strange, and wonderful world he painted in his tales often seems nearer to our own, more joyful and more recognizable than many a more worthy or more literal account by other authors the world stopped to notice.\u201d
\nWhen he was 19, Gaiman dug Lafferty\u2019s address out of the back of a library book and wrote to him, asking for advice on becoming an author. Tulsa, thanks to Lafferty, is for him a place of literary magic. \u201cHe told me how to become an author, and his advice was very good advice, and so I did. It left me quite certain that the finest literary advice in the world came from Tulsa, Oklahoma, for it did in my case,\u201d Gaiman said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today is the centenary of the birth of possibly the most original and imaginative writer of the twentieth century, R.A. Lafferty. I’ve been collecting his books ever since I read “Continued on Next Rock” in one of the Carr\/Wollheim anthologies back in ancient times. I could try to explain why Lafferty is extraordinary, but it’s … Continue reading “Anti-gravitas”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,29,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-and-anti-culture","category-sf-and-beyond","category-words"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4xam3-3hS","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12640"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12653,"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12640\/revisions\/12653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}