{"id":359,"date":"2002-03-20T12:54:09","date_gmt":"2002-03-20T20:54:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2002\/03\/20\/359.html"},"modified":"2002-03-20T12:54:09","modified_gmt":"2002-03-20T20:54:09","slug":"sadness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2002\/03\/20\/sadness\/","title":{"rendered":"Sadness"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Just read the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sfwa.org\/News\/lafferty.htm\">news bulletin<\/a> that R.&nbsp;A. Lafferty died on Monday.<\/p>\n<p>I was just thinking of Lafferty this past weekend, because we received a submission that reminded me of one of my favorite Lafferty stories.  I pulled out my battered copy of <cite>Nine Hundred Grandmothers<\/cite> and poked through it a bit, then did a search on the ISFDB and located the story in my illicit copy of Aldiss's <cite>Galactic Empires,<\/cite> vol. 1.  (Illicit because the cover is torn off; I bought it at a flea market, years before I learned that such books have been reported to the publisher as destroyed, and thus haven't ever been paid for.  If it were still in print, I'd buy a legitimate copy to make up for it.)  Lafferty was one of the great stylists; his voice was unique.  It would be impossible to mis-identify the authorship of a Lafferty story.<\/p>\n<p>Even his name was marvelous.  Rafael Aloysius Lafferty&#8212;a name to conjure with.  They don't make names like that any more.<\/p>\n<p>It's been a long time since Lafferty was well enough to write.  I saw him at a convention once; he was treated with great respect, but it seemed clear that he wasn't really up to being there.<\/p>\n<p>But half a dozen of his stories remain among my favorite stories in the world.  I'll miss him.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just read the news bulletin that R.&nbsp;A. Lafferty died on Monday. I was just thinking of Lafferty this past weekend,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}