But one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water. John 19:34 “Your name is ape,” the man said, smiling in his pain. There are elements of sourness in Lafferty that surface in his thinking about eschatology, and I haven’t worked out how to understand them. “And Name My Name” is bleak and beautiful. It denounces humanity. A figure who is certainly Christ—still bearing the wound from Longinus’s spear from which water and blood f

The aim here is to create a record of Lafferty’s translations and an episodic account of Dotty, so what follows is inevitably a bit disjointed. If it has a center, it’s in the way poetry remains a constant throughline in Lafferty’s artistic life. Before Lafferty turned to professional writing in 1957–1958, one of his hobbies was translating poetry. (I’ll include a list of his translations at the end of this post.) For something that so clearly captured his imagination, he giv

“We will show you the back of the tapestry. What you see now is not the true face of Astrobe, not all of it. The other side of the tapestry is shaggier, but it is a real picture also, and a much more meaningful one than the world you look at now. […] Have you never had the feeling, Thomas, that you were looking at everything from the wrong side? You have been.” Thibking again about Ouden and wanted to put together some thoughts about how it works in Past Master . It seems hel