“The footfalls are those of Panther and his panthers. And who is Panther? Panther is Pan-Therion or Pan-Therium, the All-Animal, the prototypical animal. He is the cool-fever-flesh from which all others diverge. He is the composite (‘you should have seen some of the things and pieces of things that went into him’) and the generating force. He is the red-clay which is clay-flesh. He is also the Dream-Master.” — The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny “The Panther or Pan-Th

A short post about something that does not seem to be recognized by most Lafferty fans, and that seems to me important: the place of the historical fiction in the Lafferty canon. Most people who love Lafferty love Okla Hannali , which was published by Doubleday in 1972, reprinted by Pocket Books in 1973, and later issued by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1991 as part of its American Indian Series. Lafferty was amused by this Oklahoma Press cover, writing, But the picture

Since acorn worms and the human lineage diverged 570 million years ago, pharyngeal slits for filtering food evolved into gills for extracting oxygen, and later into today’s human upper and lower jaw and pharynx, which encompasses the thyroid gland, tongue, larynx (voice box) and various glands and muscles between the mouth and the throat. Humans and other terrestrial vertebrates actually initiate vestigial gills while embryos, though they disappear quickly and rarely persist

But something, almost from the beginning, has been seeping in to diminish the good-humor of the stories of our Earth. I do not know whether the tales of the friendly nine hundred and ninety-nine monstrous and alien species are subject to the same spoiling as are the tales of our own world. Everything in the world, in every world, is either good-humored or bad-humored. So all the bad-humored things were once locked up in an iron cavern and the iron doors made firm with bolts a

Lafferty wrote the unpublished “Pomponia” in 1958, when he was trying to break into different markets, and, like some of the stories he wrote for that purpose, it is both unmistakably Lafferty and somewhat askew from the Lafferty we know. One of the handful of places to which he sent the draft before giving up on it was Seventeen  magazine. It reads like the kind of piece he imagined Seventeen  might like. It takes the form of an exchange between a flighty girl and a mid-cent

“The vulgar crowd always is taken by appearances, and the world consists chiefly of the vulgar.” — Niccolò Machiavelli Castlereagh served on many committees and national forums. His heading-up of any body guaranteed its integrity and success. No president felt properly inaugurated unless Castlereagh stood by his side. His was the most sought-after endorsement in the country. He was Respectability. “The Man With Aura” was first written in 1961, went through several iterations,

Maybe Jones is on my mind, so a short note on something fun. Early on, when Lafferty was considering how he would use the Watkin material that would eventually find its home in the Men Who Knew Everything  sequence, he seems to have considered using Watkin as the basis for a Maybe Jones novel. There is a note that reads, “The Color-Chapter Sequence from Watkin’s The Bow in the Clouds ,” followed by some additional sketching and then a portrait of Jones. Jones was somehow goin

And there was a small bureau set up for that smallgroup of folks who may perhaps have slight flaws in theircharacters — the golden flaw, as Maybe Jones once called it.This small bureau was to plan the future for the good-timecrowd who could not be reformed into the sanctioned mold. My favorite work by Jonathan Swift is his 1704 A Tale of a Tub , a work about which readers disagree in fundamental ways and about which there will never be agreement. That readers arrive at differ

“. . . the greater and more unexpected [. . .] this incongruity is, the more violent will be his laughter.” —Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation  (1818), vol. I, §13 There was something futile in all this gushing blood and smashed transistors. The calculating Programmed remained comfortably ahead of the Jokers, but not too far ahead. They disassembled and put themselves to death when the odds showed themselves too long. How can you have a proper battle w

Little Will with a rubber band Shot his sister out of hand Shot her with a joyful shout In the eye and put it out. Two stories that seem to belong together. One is mostly unknown. The other is mostly forgotten. Each is about a practical joker who gets his just deserts. “Live It Again” and “Of Laughter and the Love of Friends” are weak Lafferty stories, though that is unfair to say of the unpublished “Live It Again,” which should be held to a different standard. “Of Laughter a

“It is not my game. I am too guileless.” “The serpent in the garden said the same, but for all that he had a motive.” “Hands of the Man” was written in 1957 as a con-game story with no science fiction elements, and interesting for at least three reasons. The first two have been documented by Andrew Ferguson . First, it is a Wreckville story, so anyone interested in Lafferty’s heterotopia of brilliant confidence agents will want to know it. Aside from the early novel Antonino

“The children, Austro and Loretta and Mary (none of them is more than a child or at most an adolescent), are close kindred, closer to each other, perhaps, than to us. It is common, perhaps universal, that children are of a slightly different race (I mean it literally) than they will later become. But it is all right with them.” “When were the several decades left out of United States history, Barnaby?” Cris Benedetti asked him. “Early, and recent, and present, for I rather su

This is a very miscellaneous post about a text I have wanted to write about for a few months: To Aurelia With Horns . It can hardly be called a version of Aurelia,  but it is a kind of drafting out of ideas that were later repurposed for it, even if 90 percent of those ideas were drained away. There is zero St. Thomas Aquinas here, which will be surprising for anyone who has read Aurelia . Altogether, it is one of the strangest Lafferty documents that I have read. Enough of i

"The Covenant,” it said. “Large, hard-roasted, de-oiled, white peanuts under the Goober John trade name. Three a day, and they must be Goober John Number Ones. Failure to provide them will void the Covenant.” “There will be no failure,” said Malcomb ‘the Marvelous’McGruder. “It shall be done.” “We like-stuff pledge fulfill the Covenant,” it said. In his review of The Best of R. A. Lafferty  for the Los Angeles Review of Books , Matt Keely writes: “Lafferty was an electrical e

“With the Jews the women remain always a little better; and this is a people that also unfolds slightly on further acquaintance and also disappoints; for while we are discovering new virtue in them, we are finding that much of their assumed worth is made out of air.” — Carl Curlee, Hell to Pay Hell To Pay is an abandoned Lafferty novel that Lafferty started at some point but didn’t record, then picked up again in 1959 and 1961. Apparently, it was to be a retelling of the Fau

One of Lafferty’s deeper-cut poems is “Ancient Sorceries,” written a year before he retired from writing. It is a The Men Who Knew Everything/In a Green Tree  sonnet, rooted in his private symbol system. The whole poem proceeds by association, and one could follow those associative lines for a long time. Human beings have an older, more primitive brother: childish but powerful, and known under many names in myth, religion, monstrosity, divinity, and folklore. This is Austro,

If present mathematics does not fit black holes, then present mathematics must be extended a trifle. That's better than smashing and exploding all the worlds. The fictions based on all this are unoriginal, yes. And the science that stutters around it is likewise unoriginal. — "Something New Under the Black Suns" (1979) Lafferty wrote “Aloys” in the Fall of 1957 when he started his serious bid to be a professional writer, one of the strongest of the early Lafferty stories jus

Casey's verses are all doggerel . . . His musical compositions hide a greatness, but they hide it well. His drawings are all comic, but only a few of them are meant to be. Let us consider the drawings on the opposite page: (For technical reasons, there is no drawing on the opposite page, but Schrade's description will suffice.) This supposed itself to be a drawing of Hell, but it is a second-hand drawing of a second-hand Hell. We believe that, in most respects, it is authenti

V. Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine. R. Et lux perpetua luceat eis. Fidelium animae, per misericordiam Dei, requiescant in pace. Amen. "Promontory Goats" is a Lafferty piece that I don’t know what to do with. It is one of Lafferty's most ambitious and theologically serious works, and it is funny, weird, dark, hopeful, slippery, offensive, and Origenist in ways that puzzle me. It is also one of the Lafferty stories that is just impossible to summarize. If one looks at Laffer

[17] But because from some words following on these the Averroists wish to take Aristotle’s intention to be that the intellect is not the soul which is the act of the body, or a part of such a soul, we must even more carefully consider what he goes on to say. Immediately after he raised the question about the difference between intellect and sense, he asked in what intellect is like sense and how the two differ. Earlier he established two things about sense, namely that sense