I keep playing around with the idea that Harry Stephen Keeler’s webwork might help understand what Lafferty was trying to do with post-fictional consciousness. What I have done is use ideas about Lafferty and world-creation to build a model that tracks causality through those principles. I thought I would share the EOL work for anyone interested in that immensely complicated novel, the one where he really separates the sheep from the goats. I have also added an ecological da

Now we must apply what we have said of the part to the whole living body. For the same relation must hold of the whole of sensation to the whole sentient body as obtains between the part and the part. That which has the capacity of life is not the body which has lost its soul, but that which possesses its soul; seed and fruit are bodies of this kind potentially.The waking state is actuality in the same sense as cutting is the actuality of the axe, or seeing of the eye; but th

“Then Paul went back to the town, climbed up the idol at midnight (it was five hundred feet high and sheer and slick as ice); he pried out the emerald eye and substituted the green kidney. It fit perfectly. ‘I knew it would,’ said Paul.” On the East of Laughter Facebook group, Brad Frank, a long-one Lafferty reader who knew the man, recently posted about finding a copy of Past Master at the Tulsa flea market: Frank's lucky find got me thinking about the original Past Master

Bernard Baruch with JFK The Three Armageddons of Enniscorty Sweeny is so damned slippery. “It is slippery, General, slippery,” Austro said modestly. There will probably never be a consensus about it—how it works, what it does, what it says. The book overloads the mind. It arrests thought. It does so deliberately, aggressively. That is why serious Lafferty readers should think hard about it rather than settle for confusion as an endpoint. Aggressive Lafferty is interesting Laf

The psychoanalyst C. G. Jung (mostly in the essay Aion ) argued that the human person was made up of the Ego, the Self, the Shadow, and those opposing twins the Anima and the Animus. That’s five persons in us, and he hints at quite a few more. But can these different persons in the PERSON be physically separate and visible? They can be, but not as a usual thing. But in certain hysterias and raptures and hilarities and exuberances and plain High Spirits (when the Ghost hangs h

The skull of Cardinal John Morton, patron and benefactor of Thomas More "Only a God can save us."— Martin Heidegger, interview with Der Spiegel (1966; published 1976) I have been thinking about something Daniel Otto Jack Petersen recently said: that he found it difficult to get into Lafferty’s Fourth Mansions (1969) because of its conspiratorial theme. Unlike Petersen, I am probably too quick to assume that all social organization is impossible without extensive conspiracy

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 Esteban exist s . Lafferty mentioned it. Readers wanted it and didn’t get it. Diehards also know the short story connected to the novel, “Tongues of the Matagorda,” incl

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.” The Unique Media Imagination of Lafferty It would be a fun project to curate a chrestomathy of R. A. Lafferty’s thoughts on media, dra

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