Comments on: Thomas Disch is dead

By: J Thomas

J Thomas — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:18:22 +0000

Good! I didn’t want to dampen an amateur literary critic. I don’t want to be just having fun when somebody else thinks I’m peeing on them. ;-)

By: roac

roac — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:11:00 +0000

I didn’t mean to criticise you for saying you saw it with the first sentence.

No apology called for. I figured your tongue was in your cheek, as was mine. I hate emoticons but there’s something to be said for them.

By: Nigel

Nigel — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 12:01:43 +0000

Have you read Black Alice by Disch and Sladek? (Sometimes as by Thom Demijohn?) Wicked, wicked kidnap thriller set in the American south. Brilliant.

By: J Thomas

J Thomas — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 04:15:09 +0000

Sorry, I didn’t mean to criticise you for saying you saw it with the first sentence. I wasn’t even certain it was the same story. Gaiman could have done more than one Lafferty pastiche. Gene Wolfe has done at least one.

By: MR Bill

MR Bill — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 22:09:36 +0000

I always wondered if the character “Droney Laffety” (an necrophiliac with a job related means of getting, uh, ‘dates’) in Alfred Bester’s Golem 100 was supposed to be R. A. Lafferty.

By: Henry

Henry — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 17:07:11 +0000

By the way, how would you explain Gaiman’s affinity for Catholic reactionaries (Chesterton being the other instance)?

Not to mention Gene Wolfe (whom he’s actually collaborated with). I suspect it isn’t an affinity so much as a reflection of the fact that for whatever reason, a disproportionate number of the really good writers in this genre are Catholics or ex-Catholics (the subject of this post; Paul Park).

Matt – I miss Sladek too. Recently re-read Tik-Tok – that is one funny book. His non-fiction, The New Apocrypha is a brilliant take down of cultish nonsense (I have his two James Vogh books on my shelf, but haven’t had the courage to read them).

By: roac

roac — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 16:31:36 +0000

OK, OK. I guess it probably took me the whole first paragraph. Nothing is more dampening to the amateur literary critic than being taken literally all the time.

Certainly by the time you get to Zephaniah T. Crabcrustle there is no longer any doubt.

By the way, how would you explain Gaiman’s affinity for Catholic reactionaries (Chesterton being the other instance)?

By: J Thomas

J Thomas — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 16:19:56 +0000

“Neil Gaiman has an excellent Lafferty pastiche in one of his story collections.”

Fragile Things “Sunbird” is one.

I’m not sure I would have known it was Lafferty from the first sentence.

“They were a rich and a rowdy bunch at the Epicurian Club in those days.”

That’s suggestive but I wouldn’t have been sure. I wouldn’t have been sure until the beginning of the fourth sentence.

“There was Augustus Two-Feathers McCoy, ….”

By: roac

roac — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 15:02:36 +0000

Neil Gaiman has an excellent Lafferty pastiche in one of his story collections. It is a measure of the man’s uniqueness that I read the first sentence and said “Lafferty!”

By: bob mcmanus

bob mcmanus — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 01:34:11 +0000

17:While the novels were idiosyncratic to opaque, Lafferty was just funny as hell in dozens of short stories. I have no problem recomending “Continued on Next Rock” or “Slow Tuesday Night” or the collections.

By: Gary Ostertag

Gary Ostertag — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 01:22:37 +0000

I only know Disch through his poetry and his criticism, not through the novels. In 1990 I saw an unforgettable performance of his blank verse monologue “The Cardinal Detoxes” at the RAPP theater in New York City’s East Village. (The Archdiocese of New York attempted, unsuccessfully, to close the play, since they owned the building housing the theater.) This work was included in The Best American Poetry 1994 and once again in Harold Bloom’s “Best of the Best” (1988-97) collection. His book of criticism “The Castle of Indolence” was pretty illuminating about the state of poetry in the 80’s and 90’s.

By: Matt McIrvin

Matt McIrvin — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 23:53:38 +0000

…As for Disch, the one book of his I’ve read was 334, which was masterfully written but kind of forbidding—maybe best taken as a long, mostly gloomy futurist essay with character sketches rather than a novel as such. I can easily see that it wouldn’t be that commercial.

Of the guys Bob mentioned, I think the one I actually miss the most is John Sladek.

By: J Thomas

J Thomas — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:00:48 +0000

Science fiction really has changed.

A generation ago Samuel Delany could write a quick 200 pages and publish it with Ace or DAW and get a quick $300 to $500, equivalent to maybe $1500 to $3000 today. He could write pretty much whatever he wanted and they’d publish it. Science fiction was whatever paperback was on the shelves with a picture of a bug-eyed monster on the front.

Now there are a lot of readers and a lot more writers. A clear sense of what style is acceptable. Far more gets published than any one person could possibly read, and the community is large enough that word of mouth won’t help an unknown book much before it’s out of print.

New ideas now wind up being so unfamiliar that people boggle at them.

Aliens like intelligent cats: not new.
Aliens like intelligent oak trees: hard to understand.

War using space armadas and planet-busters: not new.
War using genetically-modified humans who will cause genome collapse in 20 generations: hard to understand.

Maybe the new ideas were just as hard to understand back then, but the stories didn’t have to introduce them smoothly while following interesting characters having interesting believable social interactions in a believale society that feels familiar while being fundamentally different and also exploring deep philosophical dilemmas.

The field has matured. It’s hard for a writer to be good at everything at once. But to get out of the slush pile, he needs to write well and have interesting characters first. Originality is on the list but it’s pretty far down.

So the writers who’re particularly original will tend to move on. Science fiction isn’t so attractive for them any more.

By: jre

jre — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:21:48 +0000

I hear he has thousands of pages that will never be published even in small press.

Undoubtedly, but that is the perversely delightful aspect of a hunt for Lafferty. I have, probably, dozens of these weird little Lafferty chapbooks, and I know I have found only a small fraction of what there is.
Gene Wolfe once said something to the effect that, while most writers struggle to be original, Lafferty could no more have been unoriginal than he could have stopped breathing. True, and (for me at least) Lafferty’s unflinching originality made it more than worthwhile to put up with his stylistic quirks and often impenetrable personal vision.
With Budrys and Disch shuffling off within a month, it feels like we are leaving the age of titans. But I guess it always feels like that after you pass a certain age.

By: J Thomas

J Thomas — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:04:48 +0000

PKD was kind of unpretentious. He was willing to be a moderately-bad writer telling a good story, and he had whole books where no character was in control of much.

I kind of liked reading Disch but somehow when I finished a Disch story I usually felt kind of dirty.

Malzburg was uneven, I read some of his work that wasn’t very good first and never got around to the better stuff.

Lafferty was a seminal genius, but he wrote for himself and for the people who were willing to take him on his own terms. He couldn’t get real popular that way.

I dunno. I’m glad they all got published. Too bad Lafferty became unpublishable. I hear he has thousands of pages that will never be published even in small press.