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

“People think I am being droll when I answer to the question ‘Who do you think is the best short story writer in the world’ — ‘I am.’ Yes, I'm partly being droll, but partly serious.”— Letter to Joye Swain, 1987 I’ve been putting together notes for a Lafferty syllabus, which means sequencing texts and sketching a few lectures, wondering whether a Lafferty course is feasible. My one rule on the blog is don’t waste a reader’s time, but I’m not sure how to say what follows quic

Slowly it wanders, — pauses, — creeps, — Anon it sparkles, — flashes and leaps; And ever as onward it gleaming goes A light on the Bong-tree stems it throws. And those who watch at that midnight hour From Hall or Terrace, or lofty Tower, Cry, as the wild light passes along, — "The Dong! — the Dong! The wandering Dong through the forest goes! The Dong! the Dong! The Dong with a luminous Nose!" — “The Dong with a Luminous Nose,” Edward Lear (1877) “What about the sex and sorcer

Unlike some other unpublished Lafferty stories, “Whittle Come Back” does not work. Not because it is not a traditional murder mystery, but because it is an incompletely conceived screwball comedy. Lafferty does not seem to know what he wanted to write here. After the story, I will say more about what may have happened. The story centers on Wilton Whittle, the wealthy inventor of Plasto. Whittle is an unemotive man, and he has a habit of leaving his affairs unfinished. Suspec

Imagine a man who declared that he had painted a picture three miles long and a rival artist who announced a few months later that his painting was four miles in length! They were liars, of course, but what magnificent lies! . . . These lies were no less than colossal and supercolossal. Clearly the men were doubly artists: they were both painters and press agents. —John Francis McDermott, The Lost Panoramas of the Mississippi, p. 23 Today I will be tentative: tentative about

Tulsa postcard, c. 1965 The persona is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual. — C.G. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology The only one of us (and he is not technically of us) who holds fully to the Third Revelation is Diogenes Pontifex. Diogenes is completely outside

“We do not even know what his character is,” said Doctor Fell. “Most men who sound vicious take out their viciousness vocally. And all of the sadists I have known, and I have known a great many in thirty years of police work, are mild of talk and appearance and inclined to banter. You will have to admit that Soapy Seeley is not what we might call a sterling character. A man of sterling character is not arrested two hundred plus either thirteen or fourteen times in ten years.

Philip Henry Gosse (1810-1888) "Yes. The creator could save himself a lot of trouble by setting beginning very near the end. He could make it all its mementos and history and cosmic evidence whenever he chose, or as late as he chose." "Yes. He could make it all at the last moment, all complete, and who would know the difference? He could make it between the moment that he had Gabriel set lip to horn, and the moment that he sounded that last (and only) note." "And if he c

“There’ll Always Be Another Me” is one of my least favorite Lafferty stories. It is a late variation on the schizo-gash, a potshot at the New Age metaphysical temperament. That I don’t mind. The story’s trick: one locks a door to force something out, only to find oneself abruptly on the other side, locked out instead. We have two main characters who become four. One day, the unified Spaltman (let's call these unified selves Priors) decides to answer ten advertisements from Lo

But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting. — Micah 5:2 But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting. — Micah 5:2 "Certainly we have hea

Nathan admonishes King David by Aert de Gelder (1683) 1  And the LORD sent Nathan unto David. And he came unto him, and said unto him, There were two men in one city; the one rich, and the other poor. 2  The rich man had exceeding many flocks and herds: 3  But the poor man had nothing, save one little ewe lamb, which he had bought and nourished up: and it grew up together with him, and with his children; it did eat of his own meat, and drank of his own cup, and lay in his bos

“Nor Limestone Islands” is the hit single of Lafferty’s Fortean stories. It has a sticky title. Within that heterogeneous group, it is reader-friendly. It is centripetally Fortean. In these ways, it is like “Fall of Pebble Stones.” Both stories point like the Hand from Heaven to printed lines of Fort’s  The Book of the Damned  (1919). Lafferty seemed to tire of using Fort in this way. His preferred method became reimagining Fort. He then raids Charles Fort for ideas, twistin

The greatest loss of life from a "natural disaster" in the United States occurred on September 9, 1900, when a category 4 hurricane struck the boom town of Galveston, Texas killing at least 8,000 people, destroying about 7,000 buildings and leaving more than 10,000 people homeless. In comparison, Hurricane Katrina, a Category 5 which struck the New Orleans area in 2005, killed about 1,800 and displaced about one million people. The city of Galveston as it was, never really re

A while back, I put together a broad programmatic statement for the blog, and I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts that help me read Lafferty. The “you” in these thoughts is really me. Lafferty, in interviews and correspondence, said he never meant to confuse readers, but he did so at times while trying to do something difficult. I believe him. This is one of the ways in which Lafferty is not a modernist who throws out contingent difficulty for the aesthetic pleasure of con

You make one comment though that is as totally backwards as anything can be in this world: “There is very little real tragedy in life because so few people have the emotional capacity to live them . . .” But the fellahin people who make up ninety-seven percent of mankind do have almost total emotional capacity for real tragedy, and that is the ambient they live in. It is only the effete semi-literates (there are no true literates) who have become innoculated against tragedy (

"The "Sad Adventure of Consciousness," an unpleasantness that lasted no more than seven thousand years, was a sort of response to former dilemmas, a cure that was worse than the sickness . . . There are no more dilemmas or other two-horned problems bothering the world now. So we raise one-horned monuments, single-horned for our single-mindedness . . . A two-horned head, of whatever sort, was likely to have a two-pronged or conscious mind inside of it. But now it will all be e

My stories are slightly future history, set just far enough into the future as not to get stepped on by the present. Yes, I hope the bits and pieces will fall into it. I am always out in the rain with a bucket and trying to catch something. Yes, sometimes I use the old trick of having stories connected by a common minor character or otherwise. Balzac was one of the inventors of this device a hundred and forty or so years ago. In his Human Comedy, he ran quite a few of his cha

I’ve been thinking about the dynamics of Gnosticism/eschatology and R. A. Lafferty lately, so here’s a quick sketch, more a prompt than a full argument, with a way in. Philip K. Dick and Lafferty share an obsession: the twentieth-century recovery of Gnosticism as the problem of modernity. Hans Jonas is the obvious touchstone; both writers almost certainly knew his work. What interests me is where they split once you ask what “Gnosticism” means under modern conditions. How muc

I began to try to write in about 1959 and went a year or so before my first sale . . . My life has been mostly interior and that interior very shallow. . . I am forever a Catholic, a bachelor, a political independent, a lone badger (lone wolves are a legend, they are always in groups, but even the bachelor badger digs himself a hole and spends most of his time in it). So it stands. There isn't much of a biography. Most of my life I forgot to live. — letter to Damon Knight, Se