Oh, as to details, the music of the opera, though rotten, is superbly rotten. The costuming and staging is splendid. And all the singing...

“People are easily fooled. But there are tests for reality. If a thing is burned up, then there will be a residue of ashes and gasses. But if there is not such a residue, and the things appears to be unchanged, then it is not acting as if it were burned up.” — The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny , p. 357 “But if indeed six million Jews were killed (between a third and a half of the Jews in the World, and more Jews than were in the maximum area ever controlled by the G

“People are easily fooled. But there are tests for reality. If a thing is burned up, then there will be a residue of ashes and gasses....

“Noël! Noël! Noël! Noël! A Catholic tale have I to tell!” — Hilaire Belloc, "Noël! Noël! Noël! Noël! "(1910) "I stand by all that I wrote in the ‘TOLKIEN AS CHRISTIAN’ essay, but I don’t understand why Tolkien acted and wrote as he did. One of my friends has insisted that ‘EVERYTHING that Tolkien wrote was in a sort of cipher.’ Well, I haven’t been able to uncipher it, nor to uncipher the effect he has had on so many people." — Lafferty, Letter to Al Doty, September 4, 1993 “

Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) ​​​R. A. Lafferty unequivocally, categorically denied the Jewish Holocaust. This is sad, and inevitably complicates any discussion of his work, though the fact itself is not complicated. I used to be annoyed by Robert Silverberg’s comment that people knew there was great sadness in R.A.L. It was patronizing, and it didn’t make sense, but it is coming into focus for me. The Holocaust materials should be documented in the Tulsa archive in the McFarlin

From Salvador Dali's The Elephants (1948)      When a topos has acquired sufficient ornamentation, it is blessed, or it is cursed. If...

“Fully retractable, rhodium-plated. Dort glide. Ramsey swivel. And it forms its own carrying case. One dollar,” the man said. “In Our...

Saying these novellas are about consensus reality doesn't say much, so can we do better? Here is my attempt. The Three Armageddons of...

In The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny , consensus reality appears as a centralized construct, and Lafferty’s main concern is the...

"There's a kind of group amnesia that blocks out the details. But it didn’t end in Armageddon." I have pet theories about how Lafferty handles consensus reality, especially in the two novellas in Apocalyses , where it takes on its most nightmarish shape. What I want to do here is to explain how it works in those works, or at least how I think it works, as plainly and neutrally as I can. I’ll do this in three parts. The first will focus on Enniscorthy Sweeny. The second will t

From a reproduction of the wonderful Hereford Mappa Mundi (ca. 1300 AD). The inscription on Sardinia: Sardinia Grece Sandaliotes dicta a...