R.A. Lafferty

 

R.A. Lafferty (1998)

R.A.  Lafferty writes linguistic sci fi, fantasy worlds made out of words. In his "Narrowing Valley," (The New Yorker, October 24, 2022), a homage to a Lafferty story entitled "Narrow Valley," Jonathan Lethem comments, "The past is huge, and real, but you are small. To reenter the valley of the past is, properly, to grow tiny, and to vanish." The "vanishing past" is the kind of idea Lafferty perpetrates. "In Our Block," a character named Art Slick says, "Girl, do you know how the fellow on the corner can ship a whole trailer load of material out of a space that wouldn't hold a ten of it?" "Sure. He makes it and loads it out at the same time. That way it doesn't take up space, like if he made it before that." Relativity showed how gravity was the warping of space and time. For Lafferty space takes on a life of its own, remanding the reader to a verbal blackhole. In "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne," Lafferty writes, "Along about sundown in an unnumbered year, on the road from Nowhere to Eom an Avatar fell dead with a slippery elm dart in his heart." And in the eponymous "Narrow Valley," Willy McNilly asks his friend Clarence "what did one flat-lander say to the other?" "Dimension of us never got around," Clarence replies. Lafferty takes you not to a different, star or planet and or even coordinate in the space/time continuum. His is a universe of twisted sentences that like a carnival house of mirrors, turns perception upside down.

read Jonathan Lethem's "Narrowing Valley" by Francis Levy in

The Screaming Pope

and listen to "Short People" by Randy Newman

Mind-boggling

"The Phrenologist" by A.S. Hartwick (1895)

 
Imagine if life were all Mind--including dead souls. Trump who seems so real would be that headache above your consciousness's left eye that never seems to go away. Isn't that a benign way to look at this extended reality show? Unfulfilled pleasure and hope would manifest as a free-floating hunger, the rushing water of an impressionistic Debussy piece, filling the ether of one's pre-frontal cortex. This condition might provide fodder for eugenicists, enamored as they are by phrenological speculation. It may sound like a stretch, but just consider the whole world and even the galaxy in which it resides, the Milky Way as part of the brain. That would not only explain dark energy and matter, but the delusive everlastingness one experiences, up until "The Age of Finitude."  When someone said they were depressed and you responded casually "it's in your own head," you would be right.

read the Kirkus review of The Kafka Studies Department

and listen to "Putting the Damage On" by Tori Amos

Silence

John Cage's famed piece is just that 4'33 (of silence). "The rest is silence" says Hamlet. "Whereof one cannot speak, there of one must be silent." Take God. Here the inability to speak doesn't  imply andence. Silence is hyperbole in fact. The fact that that you can't speak about something means there's too much to be said. It's like talking with your mouth full. There are two situations in which silence is a particularly effective tool. Thd first is in a potential argument. By not weighing in, you are able to hear the other (a powerful weapon in itself) and most importantly one's as yet unexpressed thoughts. The second is less passive. Silent is an advocate. Most people don't like being moved from their inertial state but silence has the power of negative energy, which magnetically draws its object in.

and listen to "The Tortured Poets Department" by Taylor Swift

and also listen to Joan Baum's NPR review of The Kafka Studies Department

Publix

Purgatory is Florida. Or is it hell? Striptease by Carl Hiaasen and Harry Crews's Karate is a Thing of the Spirit  both take place in Florida. Publix is Limbo, the First Circle. Hot August day crossing Acheron, Christmas trinket concession on Military decaying high-rises and pensioners on Collins Avenue, Miami. The stink of spoiled meat left on the counter of retiree who unsuccessfully dashed across the median to get a potato,  solitary stripper on stage at club in back of Palm Beach International airport, shaded by lone Palm. Florida is a holding cell. Prete a porter...or prone. You can't have hell or purgatory without Paradise. Imagine a world without pleasure or temptation! Desire is but the beginning of suffering. You'll know you've achieved Buddha mind, when there's nothing left to relax about.

read the review of The Kafka Studies Department in Booklife (PW)

and listen to "Putting the Damage On" by Tori Amos

The Writer As Pastry

photo of profiterole: Tamorian

The writer who proliferates at a level that becomes profligate becomes a pastry--in particular a profiterole, which makes your mouth water when you spot it in a pastry shop window. There have been lots of brazenly profligate writers from Rimbaud, to Henry Miller, Mailer, Roth (taken to task by his former wife Claire Bloom) and V.S. Naipaul whose mistress was disfigured by his beatings. Doris Lessing left her husband and two children to pursue her career. Patricia Highsmith was predatory, sexually. Joyce Carol Oates is a furiously prolific novelist. She also writes mysteries under a pseudonym and also book reviews. However, of prolific writers Stephen King, particularly due to his breadth of vision. The Shining is only surpassed by Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge--as an essay on alcoholism. If it were a choice between Joyce Carol Oates and Stephen King, you'd probably ending up picking SK out of the pastry shop window. Too bad Napoleon wasn't a writer.

read the review of The Kafka Studies Department in Booklife (PW)

and listen to "Nothing's Too Good For My Baby" by Stevie Wonder

Let's Say You Were Tolstoy?

Tolstoy in l908

Even Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky would likely feel deflated by each other's company in the unlikely event they were at the same party. The only things that can happen when you reach the top of Mount Olympus is to either become one of the gods or fall off. Every kid dreams of growing up to become Zeus though the likely realization, about even their own hero, is that he is only a god amongst gods. Monotheism was created to deal precisely with this "constitutional" problem. God is not bidden to play by any rules since he lords it over all of us and is the ultimate maker. 

read Mark Segal in The East Hampton Star on Hallie Cohen's "Mi Ricordo" and see the show which is in it's last week!

and listen to "Everybody is a Star" by Sly and the Family Stone

Finality

How to absorb the notion that someone is completely out of existence? That you can't add something you forgot to say or  explain. Everyone wants to have the last word. Life is an extended argument, comparable to Dickens' Jaryrdyce v Jaryrdyce in Bleak House, until of course there are no more plaintiffs, defendants or case! "Get off of my case" is an expression that's used by those who don't like to be nagged. They will unfortunately get their wish when either the accuser or respondent is no more. It's, of course, true that there are those who carry on the conversation talking to the dead, still insisting on their wishes. It's indeed very human to court such impossibilities.

read Mark Segal in The East Hampton Star on Hallie Cohen's "Mi Ricordo" and see the show which is in it's last week!

and listen to Wagner's Liebestod played by the Berlin Philharmonic under Daniel Barenboim