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

Following my request for a review of the materials, the University of Tulsa’s McFarlin Special Collections has updated its archival record: https://utulsa.as.atlas-sys.com/subjects/3870 https://utulsa.as.atlas-sys.com/subjects/4411 A word about this. The photograph of the Holocaust denial letter in the Antisemitism section was not reproduced from the University of Tulsa Special Collections, but comes from another source. Lafferty’s carbon of the letter is archived at Tulsa. S

In the case of the Effigy History of Music and its author, there is a correspondence and mutual clarification between creation and creator that is not to be found in the Effigy History of Mountains, for instance. With almost any musical instrument, Karl Effigy can play out the clarifications of the statements in his History of Music. But Karl Effigy can not, to the same extent, clarify the obscurities of his History of Oceans or his History of Continental Upthrusts. And yet h

Bernard Baruch with JFK The Three Armageddons of Enniscorty Sweeny is so damned slippery. “It is slippery, General, slippery,” Austro said modestly. There will probably never be a consensus about it—how it works, what it does, what it says. The book overloads the mind. It arrests thought. It does so deliberately, aggressively. That is why serious Lafferty readers should think hard about it rather than settle for confusion as an endpoint. Aggressive Lafferty is interesting Laf

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.” — Franz Kafka, in a letter to Oskar Pollak (January 27, 1904) I'm under the weather, taking a sick day, and thinking about The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny. This will be a response to a great Thomas Flight video I watched on YouTube. In my professional life, I push for colleagues to embrace new technologies, a stance that can be quite polarizing. Many of my colleagues take a “burn-it-with-fir

“We all say the same things, we all think the same thoughts, we all have the same feelings and pleasures,” the precis machine played. “Both love and hate disappear, for they were two aspects of the same thing—a mantle that was worn by our species in its childhood. We stand unencumbered before the grian-sun. We are the sun. We are everything. We merge. We lose both being and non-being, for both are particulars. We become the extensible and many-dimensioned sphere that has neit

“People are easily fooled. But there are tests for reality." — The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny This will be the last I have to say about Lafferty’s Holocaust denial for a while, unless it becomes directly relevant to an argument about a specific story. I have thought a great deal about what an intellectually serious counterargument to my work on Lafferty and Holocaust denial would require, as any responsible person would. The first and most significant obstacle is

There are few direct personal statements on this blog, although everything here probably reveals something about me. About Lafferty’s Holocaust denial, I want to be on record with maximum clarity. I read Lafferty with a kind of double vision, and I believe two things about him are equally true: R.A. Lafferty was a literary genius of unparalleled imagination and insight. R.A. Lafferty was a crank on aspects of conspiratorial history who embraced a grotesque and evil lie. Criti

“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 Ge

“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 Ge

“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