So does Hell seem an altogether pleasant place, when it comes with its both hands full of enticements. —Where Have You Been, Sandaliotis? Some interpretations on the blog will seem really out there. I would defend them with confidence, from arguments about being inside a female reproductive system in “Flaming Ducks and Giant Bread” to the reading of “Junkyard Thoughts” as a story about a mental breakdown taking the form of a dissociative episode. However, the interpretation I

“Charles,” Gorgonius Pantera said, “you wrote some of the easiest-to-ignore works in all the history of disreputable literature. Did you really have anything to go on at all? You created a whole universe of your own, but did you use anything at all that was material in that creation?” “No, Gorgolanza, I didn’t create a universe, I discovered one. I named it the Fortean Universe when I found that it was unnamed. I don’t know why many persons didn’t discover it before I did. Th

The world's a blast (Ka-whoosh! Ka-whish!) With healthy soul and belly, And all the skies are full of fish, And all the fish are smelly. Charles Fort’s Super-Sargasso Sea comes up on the blog from time to time. Judging by the number of variations Lafferty gave the idea, he loved it. Oceans, seas, rivers, springs, and other waterways are a major part of his corpus. He uses them to write about time, the unconscious, and the suprahistorical. Yet there are the twists. For instanc

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

“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, twisting F

Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a re-gaining—regaining of a clear view. I do not say ‘seeing things as they are’ and involve myself with the philosophers, though I might venture to say ‘seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them’—as things apart from ourselves. — J. R. R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories Lafferty disliked Tolkien’s work. Even so, Tolkien is useful for thinking about the Lafferty stories that center on recovery. In “When All the Lan

Winding Stair Mountains, Oklahoma In Reverence is the chief joy and power of life;—Reverence, for what is pure and bright in your own youth; for what is true and tried in the age of others; for all that is gracious among the living,—great among the dead,—and marvellous, in the Powers that cannot die. — John Ruskin What's this stuff about art not supposed to be didactic? I buy you geography and arithmetic books and you chew them up and don't learn what's in them. Then I put th

“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

"Fall, at Pel-et-Der (L'Aube), France, June 6, 1890, of limestone pebbles. Identified with limestone at Château-Landon—or up and down in a whirlwind. But they fell with hail—which, in June, could not very well be identified with ice from Château-Landon. Coincidence, perhaps." — Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned (1919), citing La Nature, 1890-2-127 Forteans today. In “Oh Whatta You Do When the Well Runs Dry?” the world is thrown into chaos when the well of all human creativ

The ethos of this blog can be found in Lafferty’s Serpent’s Egg (1987). It’s something he has characters say about mysteries, my favorite genre: "The trouble with mysteries is that the mystery-giver doesn't play fair," Inneall complained. "He doesn't give us all the clues." "Yes he does, Inneall. He gives all the clues." That might be my favorite moment in Lafferty's work. Although he experimented with mysteries, his great