Once I was crossing the Neva in a boat with my friend A., with whom, before this and later, I had many conversations on the subjects touched on in this book. We had been talking, but approaching the fortress we both fell silent, looking at the walls and probably thinking more or less the same thoughts. “There are factory chimneys too!” said A. And indeed from behind the fortress there rose brick chimneys with smoke-blackened tops. And suddenly, as he said it, I had an incredi

“I’m Marco Rixthaler,” the young man said. “I am the son of the eminent Melchior Rixthaler.” — Aurelia Thinking about Aurelia and her crash landing a few weeks ago put me in mind of one of Lafferty’s best translations, his version of a poem by Fernán Caballero, the pseudonym of Cecilia Böhl de Faber. She was one of the most important Spanish writers of the nineteenth century. Born in Switzerland, she became associated with Spain, especially Andalusia, whose customs, landscape

There are persons with a strong interest and affection for themselves and themselves alone. There are persons with a strong interest and affection for the world about them, and for its furniture and people. So far as I know, these are the only two sorts of people there are, and the difference between these two sorts is very deep. It would seem that the persons of the first sort, having no real interest in other persons at all, would not be interesting to those other persons e

I wish to argue here that the recurring pattern of descent and ascent, expressed mythically as katabasis and anabasis, and metaphysically in Neoplatonism as proodos and epistrophe, is not only a formal analogy to Christian theology. Rather, it is decisively reconfigured and fulfilled in the doctrines of kenosis and theosis. In Christianity, this pattern ceases to be merely narrative or purely metaphysical. It becomes Christological and participatory, thereby deepening and ful

Three special treats of this ‘Little Golden Age’ were Cordwainer Smith, J.G. Ballard, and Arthur C. Clarke. Well, Smith died and Ballard lost a bit of his fine hand after a bit, but these were still the great treats. There was a sort of magic winking and blinking in half-a-dozen places. It would be hard to extinguish all those new and elegant sources, though it would be attempted. — “The Case of the Moth-Eaten Magician” J.G. BALLARD A beach without an ocean yet, A cartless h

“You are a dozen or more from among the six thousand characters I have written to represent the six-billion persons who will have lived in the world after my death. You are sketches that I did not quite fill out, you are people in my still quite sketchy world of the future. And yet I did all of you as well as I was able to.” Summer teaching—one class on economics and culture, another on Dante—together with the usual department grind, has eaten into the spare time I can carve

I answer that, It must be said that every evil in some way has a cause. For evil is the absence of the good, which is natural and due to a thing. But that anything fail from its natural and due disposition can come only from some cause drawing it out of its proper disposition. For a heavy thing is not moved upwards except by some impelling force; nor does an agent fail in its action except from some impediment. But only good can be a cause; because nothing can be a cause exce

Yes, The Devil Is Dead was probably the most “haunting” of my thirty-or-so published books. I’ve had this “haunting” in a dozen or so of my short stories, but this is my only novel in which this is the case. The haunting has always been a long series of recurring dreams, and the only way to resolve them was to get them on paper. This has solved about ninety percent of the “haunting” but never all of it. I originally intended The Devil Is Dead to be one of three “Simutaneous N

It is like starting a big bird off to fly, and it all comes apart in your hands. — Archipelago When Lafferty titled his translations, he chose Vogelsprachenkund, a word that appears several times in his work and informs “Bird-Master,” one of his great stories. In Friedrich Rückert’s “Aus der Jugendzeit,” the phrase Vogelsprachekund means something like “knowing the language of birds” or “versed in bird-speech.” Rückert addresses the child’s mouth as full of unconscious wisdo

There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when he walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was his mirth.— G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy "But laughter is weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our flesh." — Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose [Advanced Lafferty. What follows supplements my earlier post on the Laughing Christ and what Lafferty does with it in East of Laughter. The argument, in brief, is that East of Laughter rejects three

“It almost seems that we are no more than characters in a big sprawling novel that Atrox and perhaps some of his friends are writing,” Gorgonius hazarded. “It’s an idea that I try to chase away by throwing rocks at it, and it squawks and flies right back to me.” “It is more likely that we are all no more than characters in a big sprawling novel that God is writing,” Mary Brandy said, “and perhaps Atrox and some of his friends are permitted to write a phrase or two in it now a

A short post on a few essential works for a Lafferty reader. 1532–1564 — François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel. Rabelais, François. Gargantua and Pantagruel, five comic novels first published between 1532 and 1564. The Penguin Screech is the one I would recommend. Screech takes a scholarly stance against the view of Bakhtin and others (going back to the early 20th century) that Rabelais was a crypto-atheist. A comic, earthy Renaissance satire centered on the giants Garg

History is not false but true when it is put dramatically. It is not true but false when it arrives anyhow, proceeds at random like an unconsidered run of nature, and ceases unravelled without the gathering of the threads into a conclusion. — Hilaire Belloc, "The Historian" In 1955, Hollis and Carter published a volume of Hilaire Belloc’s uncollected essays under the title One Thing and Another. Lafferty was an avid reader of Belloc, so it is unlikely that he did not know the

A late-night thought. The readers I think of most often when working on Lafferty are Andrew Ferguson, Daniel Otto Jack Petersen, and Gregorio Montejo. Ferguson’s archival work is essential. His chief readerly contribution, so far, is to ask how fiction makes worlds. I think his main philosophical argument cuts off Lafferty from Catholic ontology. A subsidiary question, important to SF scholars and fans, concerns genre history; that is often where Ferguson’s readings come to r

Telez: Obviously, you know men, how evil they are. Only God is good. Cambreau: But the good in man is God, Telez. Telez: Only God is good. Only God can forgive. They stole my crucifix, Cambreau. Without it, I’m lost. I’m afraid. Cambreau: A crucifix is a piece of wood, Telez. Only a piece of wood. The miracle is not in the wood, but in the heart. — Strange Cargo (1940) Time after time mankind is driven against the rocks of the horrid reality of a fallen creation. And time af

And the story FAITH SUFFICIENT is tied in with the Ministry business. I am a strongly believing Catholic myself, and one sentence of Christ that I never forget is "Other sheep I have that are not of this flock." He also says (through Saint Paul) that we should preach the faith 'in season and out of season.' But the manner of the preaching is left to each one. There is lots of grotesque preaching done, and I believe that it may be a subject of humor. And John Salt and his frie

But the extended Group of Twelve did begin to get a grasp on reality that afternoon and night. They learned, from sources not completely suspect, that the world is indeed built on a substratum of reality, that there is a genuine and ringing reality beneath all things, that there are favored places and circumstances where everything is endowed with detailed reality, even the interiors of atoms. They also learned that they themselves were outside of reality, that they had never

“We already had the World of Fact. Oh, the poor, dingy, hopeless, small-minded World of Fact! It didn’t deserve much, but it deserved at least to have its nakedness clothed with metaphor and mythology. The World of Computers is bearable. The old World of Fact was ceasing to be. “Even the Quest for Reality of the talented but diminishing Group of Twelve has now changed (without their knowing it) into the Quest for Acceptable World Metaphor.” East of Laughter buries the lede, s

Giulio Romano, The Fall of the Giants, 1532–1534. Fresco, Sala dei Giganti, Palazzo Te, Mantua, Italy. "No, Atrox, you are wrong," Denis Lollardy said firmly. "You did not bury him in the ground, you buried him in your mind. And I found him there, for all of us can raid into your mind as you can raid into ours. And then I carved him out of fine travertine marble. He was one of my greatest forgeries, forgeries for which there was no physical original. Then I buried my magnific

That photo is of Knight with his friends Terry Bisson and R. A. Lafferty. In my office at the college, I keep it pinned to a corkboard. Someone once said, "Is that your dad?" Then I got to talk about Dan and RAL. Dan Knight is one of the heroes of Lafferty's publication history and one of my favorite people. I count him a dear friend. Without him, we would not have Dotty. We would not have More Than Melchisedech. We would not have many important Lafferty pieces. Knight was bu