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It Again” and “Of Laughter and the Love of Friends” are weak Lafferty stories, though that is unfair to say of the unpublished “Live It Again,” which should be held to a different standard.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 it s

"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

"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