“Is there an anti-Christ — the man who fled naked from the garden at dusk leaving his garment behind? We know that both do not keep the garment at the moment of sundering.” I’ve been thinking about “Camels and Dromedaries, Clem,” one of my favorite Lafferty stories. It is also one of his most philosophically demanding, though it doesn’t look like it. Daniel Otto Petersen has recently written about the story in an essay that considers it alongside Lafferty’s “Splinters.” It is

Mountains delectable they now ascend, Where Shepherds be, which to them do commend Alluring things, and things that cautious are,...

Today I found myself thinking again about Hilaire Belloc, which brought to mind Lafferty’s satirical “Rogue Raft.” The piece lampoons the...

“Old Foot Forgot” is, like much of Lafferty’s work, a funny, strange, and poignant philosophical tale disguised as science fiction. Unlike yesterday’s “The Rod and the Ring,” however, it is highly approachable. It wrestles with a longing for personal identity after death, and with those who insist that the longing is misguided. In the West, this is Heraclitus instructing us that we dissolve into the cosmic Logos; Parmenides insisting that distinctions are illusions and only B

“One would, however, like to say: existence cannot be attributed to an element, for if it did not exist, one could not even name it and so one could say nothing at all of it.—But let us consider an analogous case. There is one thing of which one can say neither that it is one meter long, nor that it is not one metre long, and that is the standard metre in Paris.—But this is, of course, not to ascribe any extraordinary property to it, but only to mark its peculiar role in the

“I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two on the other side of the moon, and one plus God knows what on this side.” — Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire (1974) "Other Side of the Moon” is early Lafferty. It centers on Johnny O’Conner, who lives by routine. Every evening, he takes the same bus with the same passengers. They include the old Joker with the egg-shaped face,

But the spider meant to bite her. It glittered with the meanest eyes ever seen, and there was a noise right at the lower level of sound — malevolent spider laughter. "And You Did Not Wail" has a simple plot. Sometime in the future, the world is overtaken by emotional excess and collective hysteria. A few refuse to go along with it. Among them is our main character, Basil Cubic, a rational engineer whose name is ironic but perhaps complicatedly so. "Basil Cubic" is unsurprisin

“But my sin was this, that I looked for pleasure, beauty, and truth not in Him but in myself and His other creatures, and the search led me instead to pain, confusion, and error.”— St. Augustine, Confessions Hark, hark! The dogs do bark. The beggars are coming to town. Some in rags, and some in jags, and some in velvet gowns. “And Some In Velvet Gowns” is exospheric, as high-concept as Lafferty gets. But its height comes from somewhere. That can be misleading, though, because

On my mind today is “How They Gave It Back,” partly because of our violent times, and partly because it's a response to the American crisis that began in the 1960s. Today, the Washington Post ran an article titled “America Enters a New Age of Political Violence.” Today, one will find similar pieces in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal . In The Atlantic is Graeme Wood''s "Political Violence Could Devour Us All," where he writes, In the past day, some have mur

“You go on home, King!” one of the kids called to the dog from inside the park. “They won't let dogs inside the park this year. Or stay...

Let's begin with being right. The English reformers who enclosed the commons were right. Efficiency rose, though it cast peasants into poverty for centuries. The American temperance advocates were right that banning alcohol could curb abuse, and America got gangster empires and political corruption. The chemists who added lead to gasoline? Engines ran more smoothly with less knocking, poisoning generations. Then there is asbestos, antibiotics for livestock, and Mao’s war agai

On my reading, Prime in the Oceanic Novels will always be perceptually complicated, so I spent some time in the last few days thinking...

"Fall, at Pel-et-Der (L'Aube), France, June 6, 1890, of limestone pebbles. Identified with limestone at Château-Landon—or up and down in a whirlwind. But they fell with hail—which, in June, could not very well be identified with ice from Château-Landon. Coincidence, perhaps." — La Nature, 1890-2-127, as quoted by Charles Fort in The Book of the Damned (1919) Forteans today. In “Oh Whatta You Do When the Well Runs Dry?”, the world is thrown into chaos when the well of all hu

For months, I have wanted to write about some remarks Lafferty made to Robert Sirignano concerning the Devil. They’re plainly important...

Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find everyone engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel—a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while over against the tree's opposite side a human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel

After wrapping up the Oceanic section of the blog, I’ve been thinking about Fair Hills of Ocean, Oh!, and Domdaniel. Lafferty readers will recognize the name Domdaniel. It appears now and then throughout his work. He mentions it in Not to Mention Camels , among the ocean of archetypes: "With Corn Mother, with Fenris-Wolf, with Hermaphrodite, with Python there was a new lodger in Domdaniel, the castle that is under the ocean." There’s a playful exchange about it between Epikt

New section added to the blog for the oceanic novels. Some diagrams for how I think they work. The diagrams isolate what I take to be...

Sheryl Smith did not write much about Lafferty, but everything she wrote is worth looking at closely. Here is her most groundbreaking...

But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee: Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee: and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee. Who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the Lord hath wrought this? — Job 12:7–9 “What is really the situation, Austro?” I asked. He drew a hand in his drawing tablet. Somehow he had the perspective all wrong, for the hand was a million times bigger than the drawing tab

What makes “Interurban Queen” so remarkable, though, is the incredible tonal balance with which Lafferty handles the two sides of this question: I cannot tell, even with inside knowledge of Lafferty's personal politics, where his sympathies lie — probably a historic first in s-f of this type. — Sheryl Smith, "Lafferty’s Short Stories: Some Mystagogic Goshwow" A few times in his work, Lafferty mentions the Toonerville Trolley from a wonderful comic strip that I wasn’t familiar