The objective truth as such is by no means adequate to determine that whoever utters it is sane; on the contrary, it may even betray the...

A Lafferty story is almost always told-not-shown. His characters are ridiculous larger-than-life personalities who say exactly what they are doing and why, stumbling through other-wheres and never-weres in prose that is abuzz with puns and paradoxes and enough said-bookisms to… but that is the point. He’s telling you a story minus the sly, aiming to please something deeper than the unconscious, deeper even than story-sense, trying to tickle something so fundamental you don’t

“Chombo” is a cunning boxing story, done Lafferty style. Our title character is a fighter living as a brush-cutter in the chaparral. He turns down an offer from his promoter, Doc Guzik, for a sanctioned fight. "I don’t believe I’ll fight in the states any more," Chombo says, preferring to "stay down here in the chaparral and just cut brush." When Doc questions his identity ("Isn't that Jerome?"), Chombo deflects: "My English is very faulty." His training regimen includes run

They had been in the large, unconscious, amitotic environment of intense activity kept well below the surface. It was there that the requisitions for sons were fulfilled; it was there that the selections were made as to what things should rise above the surface, what things might be kept in harmless somnolence below thesurface forever, and what things must be destroyed while they were still below the surfac e to prevent them from making trouble later. So it was that the boys

A short post today on the unpublished “Condition Quick: A Dia-log Between Two Dia-Persons.” It's a squib, what we now call flash fiction....

Reason, in itself confounded, Saw division grow together, To themselves yet either neither, Simple were so well compounded; That it cried, "How true a twain Seemeth this concordant one! Love has reason, reason none, If what parts can so remain." It was a sundering Dawn—Incandescence to which all later lights are less than candles—Heat to which the heat of all later suns is but a burnt-out match—the Polarities that set up the tension forever. “Been a Long Long Time” is one of

Paul Saka’s article on “Been a Long, Long Time” (1966/1970) argues that Lafferty’s target in that story is evolution. I touched on this in an earlier post, but since then, I have had Lafferty and evolution on my mind. Today I want to turn to his unpublished “Claudius and Charles.” The story doesn’t exist in the finished form that Lafferty usually achieved at the end of his writing process. Still, it is an intriguing story—arguably the most savage fictional statement he ever

For men are homesick in their homes, And strangers under the sun, And they lay their heads in a foreign land Whenever the day is done. To an open house in the evening Home shall men come, To an older place than Eden And a taller town than Rome. To the end of the way of the wandering star, To the things that cannot be and that are, To the place where God was homeless And all men are at home. — G.K. Chesterton, from "The House of Christmas" One of my favorite Catholic churche

Who was Arpad Arutinov? We may never know, but he left us with a puzzlingly heterodox work, The Back Door of History , the definitive version of which is the magisterial Second Revised Edition. Arutinov effected an epistemological break with conventional historiography and the natural sciences, his thesis being that consensus reality is almost invariably a lie and that the front door of empirical evidence and rational analysis will always be insufficient for comprehending phe

The search for the werewolf’s tail in Chapter Six of the unpublished Loup Garou is unlike anything else. Folksy, hilarious, weird, and drawn out to absurd lengths, it’s one of the strangest episodes in Lafferty, capped by a perfectly ridiculous payoff in a later chapter. It might be his shaggiest shaggy dog. The whole thing starts when the redneck liar Corbey, a "crafty old swindler," comes up with a bit of folklore to show off for the men gathered in Scroggins’s store. A mu

“I'd like to have a people-kid sometime,” Teresa said. “After all, mama had me. A people kid have fun playing with the fish kids, and...

This second Why Epiktistes? post shares analytical tools for thinking about memory’s role in the Institute story cycle. The guiding idea is that Epiktistes should be conceived first and foremost as an anti-amnesia machine. He is built to combat forgetting. That is what makes him, in the deepest sense, Epi-Ktistec. I also want to comment on how the Institute materials relate to the Ghost Story. Lafferty began what became the Institute cycle during the prenucleation phase of

“Let some sick world be brought,” said Easterwine, as though to heal it with his shaping hands. He disappeared then. In 2018, Kevin Cheek started a thread on Facebook's East of Laughter asking whether Epiktistes was related to Epictetus, the Greek philosopher of the 1st and early 2nd centuries. I’ll address that first: does Epiktistes have anything to do with Epictetus? No. That’s silly. I’ll try again. What Epiktistes has to do with Epictetus is that both names might look at

Desperate causes. A polemic on a topic that bothers me. Bothers me a lot. I hate when people fret and hedge about Lafferty’s conservatism. He is a dead author. I have even heard it said that Lafferty doesn’t fit within American conservatism. He didn't want to be part of what we now call movement conservatism. This is true to the extent that Lafferty’s largest circle was Catholic, a fact that is also acknowledged by his fretters and hedgers. And most Republican Catholics will

Today, something interesting, although it falls into a niche within a niche within a niche. In other posts, I have written about how...

"I don't mean that. You said ‘Being French, you would be superstitious.’ You'd have to be out of your mind to say a thing like that. There can no more be a superstitious Frenchman than there can be dry water or green horses. Think about the implications of that for a long time. Then your little problem will have solved itself." Loup Garou Some truisms: Lafferty wrote about con men, loved the tall tale, and thought a lot about consensus reality. Paul Saka’s recent article on

You may already have guessed that I once joined their company. But I was a very recent recruit of theirs and I have broken away. To make...

Some advanced Lafferty. I find Not to Mention Camels a hard book. Its components are easy enough to understand, but understanding what...

“Well, it is. When the soul is pulled out of the body it is just like the body only smaller. The same four limbs and all, but only the size of a cabrito, for the soul is the body in miniature.” A colleague has invited me to give a talk on narrative. I’m looking forward to showing his students how semiotic squares are used to analyze stories, which connects well with what they have been studying in class. But there is something else. What a fine pretext to teach some Lafferty

Notes on The Coscuin Chronicles . Like everything in the Resources section, it is a work in progress, but it may also be useful to...