Desperate causes. A polemic on a topic that bothers me. Bothers me a lot. I hate when people fret and hedge about Lafferty’s...

New section added to the blog for the oceanic novels. Some diagrams for how I think they work. The diagrams isolate what I take to be...

You will hear it said that Lafferty is a bit like magic realism, but isn’t quite magic realism. For a while, I’ve thought this has to...

Hatchet Face (1785-1863) In the earliest times to which authentic history extends, the law will be found to have already attained a fixed...

Prose fiction was a narrow thing. As a valid force it was found only in Structured Western Civilization (Europe and the Levant, and the...

“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...

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

"Aeon is the measure of the duration of non-material creatures or substances, as time is that of material creatures or substances. Thomas...

Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) Mimesis 1 (Prefiguration): Mimesis 1 is the pre-narrative, lived understanding of human action, encompassing...

William Blake, The Red Dragon and the Woman Wrapped in the Sun, c. 1805 My last post looked at Lafferty's aesthetics and theology in...

As he opens the second canto of Paradiso , Dante warns his readers that only those prepared for the mysteries ahead should continue the...

“The Forty-Seventh Island” is one of Lafferty’s weaker stories. It isn’t short on invention; what it lacks is the theotropic dissonance...

Forza [force] and froda [fraud] being the two essential elements of sin, it follows that they must be the two cardinal virtues of human...

Several million evolvate computers, computers who said that they were the only true born-again humans, accompanied the pilgrimage or tour...

Lafferty had a soft spot for Neanderthals and every kind of ape-man. My favorite instance of this appears at the end of Arrive at...

The question then arises, what poverty is required by the practice of this counsel or, in other words, what poverty suffices for the...

Picking up on yesterday’s post and the theme of Gnosticism, I want to look at its presence in Lafferty’s work a little further. Lafferty...

Stanley Elkin once said that he did shtick upon shtick until he got carpentry. In the same vein, there’s a maneuver so core to Lafferty’s...

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...

I’ve been closely reading "Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies." In the coming days, I’ll make several posts about it and post my...