I have added a new section to the blog called Lafferties , featuring quick synopses of stories along with a trivia game. The real dives are the notes, resources, and posts, but I wanted a convenient way to jog my memory on my iPad and jumping cables for when I flag, so I put this together. I have also added a Celestial Atlas  section for a future project.

By sámi artist Andreas Alariesto (1900-1989) Although the human race must be regarded as a unit intellectually and physically, there have existed and still exist differences which permit a classification into various groups and races. Even the most ancient remains of man, dating from the glacial period in Europe, show differences that justify the acceptance of at least two races. Remains of skeletons that certainly belong to the Quaternary age have been found in France, Germa

“In conceiving a story or inaugurating a plot which involves threads weaving with threads, if the thread A, or viewpoint character, should figure with the thread B in an opening incident of numerical order n  (with respect to the incidents in the conditions precedent) there must be invented a following incident n + 1  involving threads A and C; an incident n + 2  involving threads A and D; an incident n + 3  involving threads A and E; and so on up to perhaps at least n + 4  o

Where is Eden PHISON qui circuit omnem terram Hevilath ubi nascitur aurum[which circles all the land of Havilah where gold is born] . . . Layout Cappadocian Highlands and toward Ararat. The east fork of the big bend of the Euphrates was once stolen from the Tigris. — Lafferty, note on the back of Sommerville Map — Island — Treasure: Map Gives 16 S 118° 35' 18" E which is antipodal to 16° N 61° 24' 42" W. Map location would show about 700 miles south of East end of Java and n

He welcomed them as one of the rarest and heartiest foods ever. They entered into him. Ah, the salt and the sulphur of them would stand him well in his crux hour when it came. By eating its brains, he would always have a certain mastery over this enemy. Advanced Lafferty today. Reading The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Monsters  (2025) has me thinking again about Petersen’s idea of the ecomonstrous , which Petersen writes about in his dissertation. Lafferty fans who want to th

Over the last year of reading Lafferty, I’ve repeatedly found myself adjusting my assumptions about what he is actually saying. I thought I’d post something brief on three areas where my thinking has changed. What has me thinking about this is the Catholic American writer Donna Tartt . Someone once said that she liked Tartt more than O'Connor because O'Connor finds her artistic solutions in the catechism in a way that Tartt doesn't. Lafferty (he was, weirdly, O’Connor’s senio

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca But the high pageant would never be over for the four travelers. And as for reality, who is to say that the high road is less real than the low one? — Esteban I added a tool for reading Esteban that might be helpful if you want to think about this story . Many Lafferty readers know about the existence of Esteban . Lafferty mentioned it. Readers wanted it and didn’t get it. Diehards also know the short story connected to the novel, “Tongues of the M

When the Abebajos block had been removed from Human minds, people began to make decisions faster, and often better. It had been the mental stutter... Transportation and manufacturing had then become practically instantaneous. Things that had once taken months and years now took only minutes and hours. A person could have one or several pretty intricate careers within an eight-hour period. It had been a slow Tuesday night. A few hundred new products had run their course on the

The setting of "One at a Time," Galveston, TX (c. 1950s) It has been bedlam around here. One of my great enthusiasms is cooking, so I usually handle most of the Thanksgiving preparation. Then, this morning, my son had surgery, which is always tricky. He is non-verbal and profoundly autistic, so even a routine visit to the doctor comes with its own set of challenges, and there are many such visits. Still, I found a little time to update the blog, experiment with some code, and

“You will hear it for yourselves, and it will surely fill you with wonder.” — Marco Polo, The Travels “All the voyages, whether to the moon or to worlds ten million times more distant, take about the same time to complete," the sea captain said. "When you use anti-geodetic force for propulsion, all places are equally close, all places are really only “six leagues from Lop. Come. It is a great enjoyment if you have not traveled to far places before!" What an unusual story “Six

This is the crux of Herder’s thesis, that language is constitutive of reflection. And at the same time, this shows how a constitutive theory of language breaks out of the bounds of the enframing. We can’t explain language by the function it plays within a pre- or extralinguistically conceived framework of human life, because language through constituting the semantic dimension transforms any such framework, giving us new feelings, new desires, new goals, new relationships, an

"Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? may I not wash in them, and be clean?” So he turned and went away in a rage." (2 Kings 5:12) Part of The Men Who Knew Everything  cycle, “Rivers of Damascus” is one of Lafferty’s standout stories. It is also one of his great meditations on the nature of history. I view it as a spiritual sequel to an earlier and more accessible "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne" (1967). At this point, Lafferty h

Philosophical, unloved Lafferty this time. "Symposium" is not reader-friendly, so it is no surprise no one talks about it. As with the demanding " Buckets Full of Brains ," Lafferty is more interested in his ideas than in charming the reader. Summary without commentary is also unhelpful in its case, so let’s cut to it. Here is a metaphysical story about mechanical, chattering alphabet blocks in a child’s toy box. The blocks do not know the most important fact about their stor

“No one has ever really slaked his thirst in the bogus waters of reality. But almost everyone has imagined that he has. And the imagining is just as good. It was once said that subjectivity and objectivity were opposite sides of the same coin. Now we know that they are the same reverse side of the same coin, and the face of the coin is blank.” It would be fun to have a chrestomathy of Lafferty’s ideas about media with smart connections drawn to media studies for at least two

And Duffey, dipping into the Sebastian mind, found that there really was a countess and that she was now twelve years old. Duffey even extracted the information (not from Sebastian — he couldn't have known it — but from the fates somewhere) that he, Duffey, would someday make the acquaintance of this Countess and that she would be his close friend. – More than Melchisedech “They never take very long to make things anymore,” Oread was continuing, “not since that time, you know

Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585) They were very friendly little girls for about ten years, from the time they were eight or nine years old. — More Than Melchisedech " Ce premier jour de May, Helene, je vous jure " (“This first day of May, Helen, I swear to you”) — Pierre de Ronsard, Sonnets pour Hélène The effect of Eva was similar — and of Roberta and of Helen (who had three little daughters as like her as three golden apples) . . . . This post moves into tricky territory. Sign

What the Eleans call the pillar of Oenomaus is in the direction of the sanctuary of Zeus as you go from the great altar. On the left are four pillars with a roof on them, the whole constructed to protect a wooden pillar which has decayed through age, being for the most part held together by bands. This pillar, so runs the tale, stood in the house of Oenomaus.— Pausanias, Description of Greece  5.20.6 “Which Great God, yours or mine?” Porcellus grunted. “They aren't the same,

“The last story is always true until it is superseded.”— "Cabrito" (1957) “Gees, his eyes were bugged out when they cut him down. He wasscared to death by the ghost all right. That ghost made about a dozenmore hang themselves up there too.” “That many?” “Ghost in the Corn Crib” is an exciting piece of prenucleation period Lafferty, showing, in a nascent form, how his later preoccupation with consensus reality can be created, revised, and forked over a short period. It i

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’ spear from which water and blood fl

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 is in the way poetry remains a constant throughline in Lafferty’s artistic life. People like to say Lafferty wrote tall tales, but in a real sense he wrote prose poems. Before Lafferty turned to professional writing in 1957–1958, one of his hobbies was translating poetry. (I’ll include a list of his translations