“Mr. Hamadryad” is a wonderfully weird Lafferty story. It follows a traveling coconut salesman who has three encounters with an eccentric cosmologist whose explanations of ancient monuments lead to a disturbing account of the world’s past and future. Meeting in Dongola, Oklahoma City, and Easter Island, the two figures discuss fallen races, faith that moves mountains, and, a topic that Lafferty explored quite a few times, the approaching replacement of our muddled human world

[T]he image realized in pictorial form is not a garden-variety product but, on the contrary, the response to an intuitive vision whose invisible substance it seeks to realize and communicate in visible form. Far from contriving some idolatrous appearance or other, the true image attests to the fact that the visible scene or face it depicts has found the iconographer or artist. —Thomas Pfau, Incomprehensible Certainty: Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Image (2022) The mount

Lign in drerd un bakn baygl! There is already something like a Jewish monopoly in high finance. There is a growing tendency to Jewish monopoly over the stage for instance, the fruit trade in London, and to a great extent the tobacco trade. There is the same element of Jewish monopoly in the silver trade, and in the control of various other metals, notably lead, nickel, quicksilver. What is most disquieting of all, this tendency to monopoly is spreading like a disease. —Hilair