"What do you do when you have just hanged a man? Why, the man himself had showed us what to do. Besides, a future kind of man doesn't leave much of a hole in the present." I've also sent you three other endings to it, designed so you can use any of the four page 16's here and throw the others away. Or, if none of these endings will do it any good, and if any of your sharpies can design an ending to make it sell, I'll split the proceeds with him. — Letter to A. L. Fierst, June

I wanted to jot down a few thoughts about how I understand Lafferty’s career as a writer of novels. The best thematic interpretation along developmental lines is Daniel Otto Jack Petersen’s idea that we move from pre-apocalyptic to apocalyptic, then end with post-apocalyptic, but this shades into exceptions. Another view is Andrew Ferguson’s idea that Lafferty gets a second wind after his break following the publication of Annals of Klepsis. He has a dual-track account that

“Yes, basisphaira as you call it, baseball has been played at least seven hundred years,” old Josh told them, and he began to put a story together about old bingles and bunts and bases on balls. “The first regular team was a barnstorming team named The House of David. That was before a regular league was established. The House of David boys were bearded and they had a lot of hokus to them; but they could play baseball. They beat every town team up and down every valley and co

Monster movies, philosophy, religion, classical art, puns, horror stories, linguistics, science fiction—how does he account for this quirky range of interests? Lafferty said, “I’m kind of a quirky guy.” And here we are . . . at the lake. Swan Lake is so beloved by the City of Tulsa, the water was drained out of it. The old lake was extensively renovated—dug deeper, reshaped, landscaped. When the land was refilled, the lake’s caretakers anchored wooden duck decoys in the water

Spring Break here in Houston, so I'm off to Tulsa to do some more work on Lafferty. The blog will be quiet for a few days.

The Collective Unconscious is all one, of course, just as all the waters of the Earth are one. And those ghost-fish called the archetypes are to be found repeating themselves all through it. And yet they do change, slowly but relentlessly: and possibly the Crooked Hole Drilling Company has had much to do with their recent changes. Your allegation that I treat my followers as patients is demonstrably untrue. . . . It is a convention among us analysts that none of us need feel

from East of Laughter Fb archive The way the germ of an idea becomes a published story is always interesting, and enough of the germs survive to make for a great essay on the topic on how Lafferty combined ideas, though, who would read it? Here are a few of the ideas Lafferty had that became published stories (scroll down for the titles): The Easter Island statues are of baboons not of men. Sky-divers, diving and gliding with complete nerve, come all the way to the ground — b

“Leaving aside all testimony of religion and revelation, I believe that a competent interdisciplinary biologist, working without prejudices, would come onto substantial evidence for the existence of unbodied beings or mentalities, from the effect they have on human persons; just as a competent interdisciplinary physicist-astronomer would arrive at the necessity of there being a moon of such a size and gravity and location and distance, even though, for some reason, the moon l

“Your machine can say how old a thing will be in its totality, but it can’t say how old a thing is right now?”— “Mostly it can do both. The present orientation can nearly always be coaxed out of it, though the clock considers the present of little importance. This is no gadgetry, people. It is positive science and it is wonderful.” “The block has solved many problems of involution and devolution,” Barnaby said. “Naturally the clock does not accept evolution, or has any intell

My working theory is that the best anchor for The Devil Is Dead  is its flat statement that “the Brunhilde sailed on November 7, a Friday morning.” Lafferty is usually vague about the year. He even writes that “the year is uncertain.” But then he does something odd: he supplies the day of the week, an only seemingly inadvertent calendrical lock. He would have remembered his doings on the day, for November 7 is R. A. Lafferty’s birthday, and it falls on a Friday in three plau

"How about Plutarch’s Lives  for the one book. No, it isn’t affectation to reach that far back. It is my belief that Plutarch invented the Novel as well as the biography in this. There were fifty short or medium-length novels here (the degree of fiction in them can’t be determined now) and they are good. He invented narration as distinguished from rhetoric and a few other things. He was the world’s best novelist (Balzac comes in second) and nineteen hundred years haven’t done

The first of a series of posts. For about a month, I have been typing up a Lafferty compendium, which is full of fascinating material: a partially written Camiroi story about a rhino fair, clues to the “Men Who Knew Everything” story sequence, an abandoned sequel to “Slow Tuesday Night,” reasonably worked out stories such as the "The Wheel and the Shoosh" about the invention of time/being and space, abandoned poetry, where Lafferty derived titles (“And Mad Undancing Bears”),

The "Distinction and Adornment of the World" is a scholastic phrase which covers our own province and position. The ‘Distinction’ is the special focusing on our own world apart from the billions of other worlds, all special, but not all special to us. It is the scale and site we are on. The ‘Adornment’ is the process and movement and composition, and finally the Flora and Fauna (including ourselves). Sure, we are an adornment, and so is all the other furniture of the world. T

Q. 1383. Are the souls in Purgatory sure of their salvation? A.  The souls in Purgatory are sure of their salvation, and they will enter heaven as soon as they are completely purified and made worthy to enjoy that presence of God . . . Q. 1384. Do we know what souls are in Purgatory, and how long they have to remain there? A.  We do not know what souls are in Purgatory nor how long they have to remain there; — Baltimore Catechism , 1885   “But there has never been a day l

“Looking at the Japanese from the outside (as I must) it seems that one of your finest literary entertainments and pleasures is the ‘Ghost Story’. And the essence of the Ghost Story is the juxtaposition of horror and fun, or reality and dream state, of the familiar suddenly gone strange and weird, of the loved and cherished suddenly turned frightening, and of the comic standing up like a giant among the various realities and rationalities.” “I seldom write ‘ghost stories’ pe

And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead. “We won't be taken in by that, Mr. Sheen,” Hector O'Day said. “We're too smart for that.” “So was the little boy who got pulled all the way down to Hell nine years ago,” Anselm Sheen said. “He was a really smart boy. He reminds me of you, Hector.” Jack of diamonds, Jack of Diamonds, I’ve known you of old / You’ve robbed my poor pockets of silver

Well, I started writing everything. I wrote a Saturday Evening Post story and an American Magazine story and a Collier’s Story , and some sort of a western story, and science fiction and mystery stories. I sent them around. The science fiction story sold and the others didn’t, so after several repetitions then, I just wrote science fiction. It took me about a year before I was selling. — "An Interview with R. A. Lafferty" (1983), D. Schweitzer “L’Avare” is a 1958 vignette