The face was skinny and ruddy. The nose was powerful and beaked; not like that of a bird of prey but like that one of the Roman-nosed water birds. The nose was always peeling, as though it were growing out from the inside and flaking off in those strips. That gnarly ant and aphid image with its glistening drop? Really important for understanding 3A. Nuts and bolts or maybe bolts and nuts. The Three Armageddons can melt one’s brain, so I think it's helpful to have a baseline f

Even with Nipkow, his “spirally apertured rotating disc that provided, at both sending and receiving ends, a simple and effective method of image scanning”, I wish I had an illustration of it. I can't quite figure what the damned thing looked like. — Handwritten note On November 18, 1992, Lafferty wrote to Patrice Duvic about his story “Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies.” Some handwritten notes about Nipkow also survive. In the letter, he wrote, “Paul Nipkow got his p

“It is the only animal that children dream of without having seen or been told about. Moncrief by his recall methods has studied thousands of early childhood dreams. Children universally dream of bears, Tahitian children subject to no ursine influence in themselves or their ancestry, Australian children, town tikes before they ever saw a bear toy. They dream of bears. The bear is the boogerman. Bears live in the attics of old childhood houses. They did in my own and in thousa

The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny is my favorite longer Lafferty work. One of its major ideas is silent radio, the drama that goes on inside us without being spoken or shown, yet somehow passes between us and enters the world we all share. Silent radio carries the ordinary richness of life, its pleasures, loves, and possibilities, but it also plays horrors that no one seems able to stop. Sweeny thinks he composes his own inward programs. He finds other people receiv

Harry Langdon (1884-1944) Whenever someone thinks of Lafferty and silent movies, the story that comes to mind first is "Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies," one of his stone-cold masterpieces. He graded it himself in September 1978, reporting to a correspondent "a fair story in Orbit 20, a fair story in Shadows (Doubleday, edited by Charles L. Grant), and a very good story ('Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies') in Terry Carr's Universe Eight." If that story is L

“Seven-Day Terror” is one of those Lafferty stories that everyone seems to enjoy. It first appeared in the March 1962 issue of Worlds of If and belongs to Lafferty’s early series about the precocious and cheerfully dangerous Willoughby children. This time, nine-year-old Clarence constructs a “disappearer” from a beer can and two pieces of red cardboard. His experiment wreaks havoc on cats, fire hydrants, automobiles, houses, and finally a grocer. Now for some extreme Lafferty

"Pioneer [Reventlo] was a sort of ghost in that he had a very loose association between body and soul. He was inhabited a little by the ‘Eden Archetype,’ a projection from the future. He knew of course . . . that all archetypes are these projections from the future and none of them from the past. And yet he sincerely believed it was the past he was excavating.” They were all quiet for a day and a night and a day. Then the spirit came and moved over them. But which way did it

“Everybody liked him except those animals, the coons, badgers, and wolverines, those animals that traditionally hate and fear dogs. Then there appeared a wolverine of genius in the neighborhood. In every species, whether wolverine or human or other, about one individual in five million will be an individual of genius. The gifted wolverine got about a hundred other wolverines to assemble. He had to be a genius because the slashing solitary wolverines are lone hunters who hate

“No one has ever really slaked his thirst in the bogus waters of reality. But almost everyone has imagined that he has. And the imagining is just as good. It was once said that subjectivity and objectivity were opposite sides of the same coin. Now we know that they are the same reverse side of the same coin, and the face of the coin is blank.” It would be a fun project to curate a chrestomathy of R. A. Lafferty’s thoughts on media, drawing intelligent connections to media stu

That’s Blarney Castle in County Cork, which Lafferty likely had in mind when he wrote “Square and Above Board.” The story has a strong 1940s feel. It plays like Lafferty’s version of a supernatural romantic comedy—Blithe Spirit (1945), I Married a Witch (1942), The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), Topper (1937), or The Canterville Ghost (1944). Lafferty wrote it in the 1980s, and it appeared, appropriately, in the October 1982 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, wi

A short post today on the unpublished “Condition Quick: A Dia-log Between Two Dia-Persons.” It's a squib, what we now call flash fiction. It is one of the many pieces where Lafferty vents his frustration with the cultural and literary shifts of the 1970s and 1980s, but here the satire is compressed into two pages. We find Lafferty's ongoing exasperation with America's distorted media ecology and his sense of how rotten the state of science fiction is. The punning title is our

Some advanced Lafferty. I find Not to Mention Camels a hard book. Its components are easy enough to understand, but understanding what Lafferty is doing and how it fits together is challenging. One way to model the main conflict is to map it as being directly about good versus evil. Another is to step back and see it as a clash between fundamentally different and incompatible power systems, each vying for dominance within the derivative media bubbles of non-Prime realities. T

“You go on home, King!” one of the kids called to the dog from inside the park. “They won't let dogs inside the park this year. Or stay with Mr. Hunt if you want to." A short post today on Lafferty’s “The Doggone Highly Scientific Door.” Lafferty makes most of us laugh. This is a story that makes me laugh more than once. It follows Elroy Hunt, a perpetually forty-nine-year-old carnival enthusiast who sees himself as a perpetual kid. One day, Elroy is barred from entering Wh

“The faith to move mountains is not an empty sophistry, not a hollow vessel of speech,” said Joshua.“There is a power, and we live by that power. The weakest of us live onthe accumulation of power, and those of us who are stronger add continually to that power store. I say to you that it is not a great thing to move a mountain. I say that tohold a mountain in being is a much greater thing?" -- — "John Salt" “Be quiet.” Polder spoke softly but carryingly in his powerful

“A mood makes a world appear. —Martin Heidegger A passing comment on the Lafferty Facebook group East of Laughter has me thinking about “The 99th Cubicle.” The first time I read it, I filed it away as a minor and heavy-handed bagatelle about sin built on the old hypodermic needle model of media. After re-reading it, I’m not so sure. That uncertainty is the point of this post. If you decide to read—or re-read—the story, be aware that it has variant endings. The original, short

"Bubbly, mighty bubbly, Miss Aster," Dr. Izzersted said. "Do you know that some days are very good for blowing soap bubbles (I blow a lot of soap bubbles in my business), and some days are terrible for it? Yes, on a bad day you can add all the glycerin and gloop that you wish to the mixture and you will still not be able to blow decent bubbles. And some fortnights are good for flying eidolons; but most times are very poor for it. This is an excellent fortnight for flying them

"We've reached the place I told thee to expect, / Where thou shouldst see the miserable race, / Those who have lost the good of intellect." Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Canto III Those of us who spend time with Lafferty's fiction know that conventional interpretive methods fall short. His work is intellectually intense, filled with surprising connections that make its literary magic resistant to ordinary analysis. Really discovering him comes with the recogni

The question then arises, what poverty is required by the practice of this counsel or, in other words, what poverty suffices for the state of perfection? The renunciation which is essential and strictly required is the abandonment of all that is superfluous, not that it is absolutely necessary to give up the ownership of all property, but a man must be contented with what is necessary for his own use. Then only is there a real detachment which sufficiently mortifies the love

Today, I want to think about the metaphysics of time in "Selenium Ghosts." Before turning to that issue, let’s take stock of some of what else is at play in the story. The story plays with television, fiction, and hoaxing. There’s the relationship between Clarinda (Claire de lune/moonshine) and her lover Apollo, or is he just another of her performances: an actor pretending to be another actor pretending to be a character? Bentley’s recurring male cast also carries psychologi

Advanced Lafferty. “Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies” is the only short story by Lafferty with the complexity of his most difficult novels. In the coming days, I’ll write several posts about it and share my notes. Today, I want to look at how masterfully it complicates narrative technique. To get a grip on the story, I think we need to X-ray it. I’ll begin with its diegetic protocols, the rules governing its narrative levels. Here are the terms as I’ll use them: Dieg