Subject: (urth) OT: R.A. Lafferty GA links

From: Gwern Branwen <gwern at gwern.net>
Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 01:39:02 +0000

- http://antsofgodarequeerfish.blogspot.com/2014/08/lafferty-news-thats-right-news.html
- http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/aug/13/ra-lafferty-secret-sci-fi-genius-poised-for-comeback
"RA Lafferty — the secret sci-fi genius more than ready for a
comeback: A reissue of the US science fiction writer RA Lafferty's
stories sold out rapidly this year, and his fans, including Neil
Gaiman, hope to see his novels reprinted"

    > There's something of the Irish comic tradition in there, the
absurdity and surreality of Flann O'Brien, author of The Third
Policeman. "I agree," says the author Neil Gaiman. "And there's
kinship with the American tall tale tradition, and with GK Chesterton.
But they are all only cousins. There's nothing close to Lafferty —
nobody with the gravitas about things that were light, and the
antigravitas about important heavy things."...Gaiman has been a
Lafferty enthusiast since he was nine, and discovered the writers'
work in various anthologies. He attempted a story in Lafferty style —
Sunbird, in his collection Fragile Things — which he said proved to
him "mostly how much harder" the style was than it looked. "What drew
me to his work? The narrative voice, I think," says Gaiman. "The way
he'd construct a story — unlike the way anyone else did it. The
peculiar rightness of his worldview, and the topsy-turvy nature of it.
The sentences." A few years after his initial discovery, Gaiman struck
up a correspondence with Lafferty. He remembers: "I sent him a
Lafferty pastiche I had written, and he was not rude about it. But he
was encouraging, and informative, and took me very seriously, which is
good, because I was about 20 and took myself very seriously as well."
    >
    > ..."Lafferty himself said his short stories were better, but his
novels had more to say," says Andrew Ferguson. "The stories are always
worth going back to, but it's the novels on which his long-term
literary reputation will rest."Ferguson is a PhD candidate at the
University of Virginia, and along with Gaiman's championing he's one
of the reasons Lafferty is perhaps being pulled back from the brink of
total obscurity — he's writing a biography of the author for the
University of Illinois Modern Masters of Science Fiction series, and
will chair a panel on Lafferty on 14 August at Loncon, the World
Science Fiction Convention, being held at London's Docklands. Ferguson
says: "It may be a bit of a cliche, but there's really nothing else
out there comparable to him. He's one of the distinctive prose
stylists in the genre: you can tell a Lafferty story within a
sentence. He's a very funny writer, in a field that has often taken
itself way too seriously." Curiously, though largely out of print in
the west, the writer is big in Japan, says Ferguson, where "Lafferty
has remained popular for decades ".
    >
    > [This surprises me; I read a lot of Japanese stuff but I've
never seen R.A. Lafferty come up.]
    >
    > ...Ferguson says: "I'm hoping the Centipede Press editions get
licensed for a more affordable edition eventually. I think there'd
definitely be readers for a big best of Lafferty retrospective."
That's something Gaiman would like to see, too : "I'd love to see a
Complete Lafferty in print. I used to give people his short story
collection Nine Hundred Grandmothers, until one day it was out of
print and gone."
    >
    > It's hard to say why, if Lafferty was so brilliant — which he
was — he's virtually unknown. David Langford, the noted
science-fiction commentator, wrote in his regular SF news bulletin
Ansible, after Lafferty's death in March 2002: "The World Fantasy
Convention belatedly did the decent thing and honoured RA Lafferty
with its lifetime achievement award in 1990. But the SF world never
honoured him enough. Major publishers abandoned him in the mid-80s:
Lafferty was just too dementedly brilliant for them."

-- 
gwern
http://www.gwern.net

---

From: Auspex Rex <auspexrex at icloud.com>
Date: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 07:03:49 +0000

I’d never heard of Flann O?Brien or The Third Policeman, but reading the synopsis on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Policeman) made me think again about The Land Across. Someone else pointed out the connection to The Third Man already: Grafton mentions Hotel Sacher. Lots of missing, presumed-dead, actually dead, ghost third persons? and TLA’s third border-guard who is sometimes invisible, sometimes not, and looks like the leader of the country, and also looks like Grafton’s father...

Anyone familiar with The Third Policeman and The Land Across have thoughts on how the former might help us interpret the latter?

-Jeff

On Aug 17, 2014, at 9:39 PM, Gwern Branwen <gwern at gwern.net> wrote:

> Policeman. "I agree," says the author Neil Gaiman.

---

From: Antonin Scriabin <kierkegaurdian at gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 13:17:41 +0000

I haven't read The Third Policeman,  but have read At Swim-Two-Birds and
can vouch for the fact that O'Brien is a genius. Lots of meta fictional
hijinks.
On Sep 14, 2014 3:04 AM, "Auspex Rex" <auspexrex at icloud.com> wrote:

> I’d never heard of Flann O?Brien or The Third Policeman, but reading the
> synopsis on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Policeman)
> made me think again about The Land Across. Someone else pointed out the
> connection to The Third Man already: Grafton mentions Hotel Sacher. Lots of
> missing, presumed-dead, actually dead, ghost third persons? and TLA’s third
> border-guard who is sometimes invisible, sometimes not, and looks like the
> leader of the country, and also looks like Grafton’s father...
>
> Anyone familiar with The Third Policeman and The Land Across have thoughts
> on how the former might help us interpret the latter?
>
> -Jeff
>
> > -
> http://antsofgodarequeerfish.blogspot.com/2014/08/lafferty-news-thats-right-news.html
> > -
> http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/aug/13/ra-lafferty-secret-sci-fi-genius-poised-for-comeback
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
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From: entonio at gmail.com <entonio at gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 14:59:17 +0000

Anyone who hasn't read Flann O' Brien / Brian O' Nolan / Myles, then do. Besides great, it's hysterical.

No dia 14/09/2014, ?s 14:17, Antonin Scriabin <kierkegaurdian at gmail.com> escreveu:

> I haven't read The Third Policeman,  but have read At Swim-Two-Birds and can vouch for the fact that O'Brien is a genius. Lots of meta fictional hijinks.
> 
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From: Marc Aramini <marcaramini at gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 16:34:11 +0000

I read it years and years ago ... didn't really remind me of Wolfe at
all. Definitely reminded me of a bit of Beckett's Molloy trilogy/Waiting
for Godot and RA Lafferty (though much closer is At Swim Two Bird's, with
its very similar parallels to the Lafferty canon in The Devil is Dead, but
it could just be the "Irishness" of it all.) Maybe I will read it again
some day. I am thinking there are parts of Lanark that resonate with The
Third Policeman as well.  There is this sense of phantasmagoric mistaken
identity and a blurring between the living and the dead held forever in a
holding pattern that all those works seem to have in common.

I think Wolfe and Lafferty are actually very different, with Wolfe being
more rigorously logical in structure and Lafferty's stuff often not
adhering to strict ordering - more like dream logic.

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From: Gerry Quinn <gerry at bindweed.com>
Date: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 17:48:46 +0000

On 14/09/2014 17:34, Marc Aramini wrote:
> all. Definitely reminded me of a bit of Beckett's Molloy 
> trilogy/Waiting for Godot and RA Lafferty (though much closer is At 
> Swim Two Bird's, with its very similar parallels to the Lafferty 
> canon in The Devil is Dead, but it could just be the "Irishness" of it 
> all.) Maybe I will read it again some day. I am thinking there are 
> parts of Lanark that resonate with The Third Policeman as well.  There 
> is this sense of phantasmagoric mistaken identity and a blurring 
> between the living and the dead held forever in a holding pattern that 
> all those works seem to have in common.
>

I always reckoned Martin Amis's _Other People_ was to some degree 
derivative of _The Third Policeman_.

- Gerry Quinn

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From: David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
Date: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 18:00:07 +0000

Haven't read Land Across yet (I know, I know), but IIRC, T3P has a 
(spoiler alert) ghost narrator. And the dead behave in a Beckett-like 
manner, unable to perceive their condition or do anything about it.

I can very easily see Wolfe doing something with that.