Two opposite points on the rim of a rolling wheel cannot both be on the top at once: this is taken as an almost reasonable postulate. But they could both be on top at once if one of them were suppressed by Amnesia. —Matthew Woodbine Junior, in The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny is difficult to discuss, even for those of us who know how magical it is. The difficulty lies in how much Lafferty packs into it. That informational

Even with Nipkow, his “spirally apertured rotating disc that provided, at both sending and receiving ends, a simple and effective method of image scanning”, I wish I had an illustration of it. I can't quite figure what the damned thing looked like. — Handwritten note On November 18, 1992, Lafferty wrote to Patrice Duvic about his story “Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies.” Some handwritten notes about Nipkow also survive. In the letter, he wrote, “Paul Nipkow got his p

Posed and “Injun’d up” in war bonnets. “Your analogy is a little strained,” Mary Mabel said. “Those Indians we saw in Florida and the ones at Atlantic City had war bonnets, and they couldn't very well have been the kind of Sioux you said. And just last night on the TV in the motel, those Massachusetts Indians put a war bonnet on the President and called him the Great White Father. You mean to tell me that they were all phonies? Hey, who's laughing at who here?” You can tell a

“I came ashore, swimming and wading through turbulent water. It was early morning. The shore was muddy with engendering mud, and full of promise. It was the year 1923, and I was a young man of no more than a quarter of a century of physical years. I went up that muddy shore and entered into the green and burgeoning years of my life. If I remember to do it, I can come back to that same shore, and to that same year, and have another sixty green and burgeoning years to my life.

Saskia van Uylenburgh “I change history here and now, Saskia. I paint forgeries of things that would not exist for a generation yet, and now will never have existed.” — "Dutch Master" Doodkiststraat: A street in Amsterdam where the death-house and Dead Christ Church are located. The name literally translates to “Coffin Street,” reinforcing the chapter's focus on mortality and the blurred lines between life and death. — Half a Sky After that, Dana and Galopade were following t

“It is the only animal that children dream of without having seen or been told about. Moncrief by his recall methods has studied thousands of early childhood dreams. Children universally dream of bears, Tahitian children subject to no ursine influence in themselves or their ancestry, Australian children, town tikes before they ever saw a bear toy. They dream of bears. The bear is the boogerman. Bears live in the attics of old childhood houses. They did in my own and in thousa

Hiroshi Inoue recently completed a Japanese translation of More Than Melchisedech (unpublished) and published this truly excellent commentary in a Japanese fanzine. The English translation below restores Lafferty’s original wording wherever Inoue quotes the novel. I agree with most of his argument, including his account of how the novels relate to the short stories. He lays it out with exceptional clarity.

“Molasses is a little like amber,” Diogenes said. “It flows so slowly that sometimes it seems to be solid. Creatures can be imprisoned in it and apparently be held motionless in it. They must deceive themselves as to their own time scale, for if they do not deceive themselves they will be dead . . . . Things can not have been going on for the orthodox time at the orthodox pace.” — "Out of the Molasses Trap" “There are no duplications in the Pristine World, and there are no no

And Lamech took unto him two wives: the name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other Zillah. And Adah bare Jabal: he was the father of such as dwell in tents, and of such as have cattle. And his brother’s name was Jubal: he was the father of all such as handle the harp and organ. And Zillah, she also bare Tubal-cain, an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron: and the sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah. —Genesis 4:19–22 Those students who are now developin

Oh hang the cliffs with corpses nailed, For revel and for banger. Our enemies are here impaled In Cliff-and-Mountain-Hanger "Song of the Traitors of Tarshish" “We here are seven moral buzzards, yes. And we are up against an evil so enormous that only we evils can even see it.” Haunter of Moons and The Giant Ratchet of Sumatra were round-robin collaborations in which members of Oklahoma Science Fiction Writers (OkSFW) took turns continuing a story. OkSFW began in 1977, when C.

Condillac angrily beat on the lower part of the statue with his leaded cane, breaking off toes. “I will not be lectured by a rock!” he crackled. “You have not these ideas originally, and mature brain matter will reject such. Therefore, you have them not! Reason is the thing, Statue, rationality. We promulgate it. It spreads. It prevails. The tomorrow world will be the world of total reason.” “No, it will be the Revolution,” said Rock-Head. “A world condemned to such short far

I’ve needed to update the concepts section of this blog for a while, and I’ve made a first pass to better reflect my current understanding of how Lafferty works. I'll be working on this in the next few weeks. At some point, I want to work into it what I take to be Lafferty’s own critical language. Until then, here are his own key concepts, as I can isolate them at this point:

ALEX Yes, I've known him a long time, Mary. I knew him when he was a boy named John Salt. And before he was a Faith Man he was a Pitch Man. He brought the pentecostal touch even to peddling potato peelers. He came very near to calling down the fire of Heaven on those who would not buy. He left a lot of house-wives shaken up, with that little peeler in their hand, and the dazed look in the eye. Before that I knew him as a boy. There are legends about him even from his boyhood,

“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

Comics and Lafferty make a fascinating story, given the place comics occupy in his work as both an influence on his techniques and a subject in their own right. Think of the Toonerville Trolley and its influence on “Interurban Queen,” Rocky McCrocky, the cartooning of Enniscorthy Sweeny, Dorg and cave art as cartooning, and so on. There is an alternate universe in which Lafferty’s stories get adapted during the second flourishing of horror anthology comics in the 1960s and ea

The largest church in my city is that of a Christian sect that will not show the cross. It is built in imitation of a style that requires the cross, and the simple elimination of it would leave an emptiness and discordance. What is done to disguise this gaping omission? There is not permitted to be seen one right angle in the entire building, not one natural congruence of horizontal and vertical line. There are asymmetrical spires all over the place, there are twenty-nine deg

Technology is a queer thing. It brings you gifts with one hand, and stabs you in the back with the other. —C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures These were sometimes criticized, but mostly by persons of standards derived from an earlier age, from the pre-postliterate age. — Serpent’s Egg Lafferty sent this little piece off on February 2, 1975, for the “Oklahoma Authors” series in Oklahoma Librarian. It appeared eight months later in the October issue, alongside a great Lafferty photog

Bix Beiderbecke, one of Smith's great interests I began to write late in life when I realized suddenly one day that I was leaving nothing at all in the world. All old bachelors come to this feeling sooner or later. Don't let it ever happen to you . . . — Lafferty, letter to Sheryl Smith, October 1, 1971 This will be of interest to about three people. Sheryl Smith, Lafferty’s first strong critic and his clever correspondent, ran a computer consulting business in the years befo