Ten recommended Andrew Ferguson essays on R. A. Lafferty, with a 107-entry index, links to related criticism, and comparisons with Arrive at Easterwine.

Anita Bryant as Miss Oklahoma I'm now having sixteenth and seventeenth thoughts about Phoenix, though I have a membership in it. It promises to be G&FOGo-dominated (Gays and Friends of Gays only), but I guess all the SF cons will be that henceforth. But there will also be the hard-core tedium guaranteed by the luminaries selected for the bask, the narrow range (SH(shriek) to SI (Simper))... and the One-Tantrum, Two-Tantrum, and Three-Tantrum appearances. — letter to Sheryl Sm

A second example would be "What's the Name of that Town?", in which Epikt (note the wonderful Hellenism: Epiktistes means "The Equitable One," a great name for a calculating device that takes all elements (Stoichae) equally) sorts his facts to discover that something must be missing. — Don Webb, “Effective Arcanum” Polemical post. Don Webb gives a lot of power to the unconscious meaning of words. Amusing, given how unselfconsciously wrong that bullshit about Epiktistes is. We

Lord Randal had invented the bow-and-arrow. But Axel could shoot the arrows farther and faster. And higher. And when he was six years old, Axel did what many persons have dreamed of doing: he made his mark on the sky. He dipped the heads of his arrows in mud, and he shot them up with uncanny accuracy and made mud marks on that transparent sky-cover which was twenty meters above them. He made about a hundred mud marks that conveyed a message in the written form of ‘code Chalde

But when you have done all these fine things, quoth Trinquamelle, how do you, my friend, award your decrees, and pronounce judgment? Even as your other worships, answered Bridlegoose; for I give out sentence in his favour unto whom hath befallen the best chance by dice, judiciary, tribunian, pretorial, what comes first. — François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book III, Chapter XXXIX, translated by Sir Thomas Urquhart His passion is for the British law, and he has spent

. . . our present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself . . . — Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom” (2003) This towering strangeness is part of their towering holiness. — Serpent’s Egg (ch. 2, p. 17). A thinking-aloud post about one of the thornier aspects of Serpent’s Egg. Early in the book, Lafferty tells us that in 2035, the year when the book takes

They keep accounts on Prime World; ultimate accounts, I mean. They keep crabbed, careful, fetishistic accounts. Oh, Noah, would I ever have to pay! That world is real, and all others are shadows of it. You say this, but you are afraid to mean it, and you are afraid to acknowledge yourself a citizen of it. But your only alternative is to own yourself to be a reflected and not a real person. 408. When will Christ judge us? Christ will judge us immediately after our death, and o

The four experimental groups were thrown together, on the North Shore of the growing Inneall’s Ocean, at a beautiful place named Heart’s Desire Cove. Inneall’s Ocean was now growing mostly to the South and East. It was capturing the valleys of the Verdigris, Grand, Illinois, Arkansas, and Middle and Lower Mississippi Rivers, and it seemed as if it would fill the whole area that had been filled by the Mid-American Ocean thrice in geological times. Yes, of course Inneall was ma

The first offense was the taking of the forbidden fruit. The second offense (which I believe is more grievous than the first) is the refusing of the bidden fruit. It is even the hacking down of the tree of the fruit. Advanced Lafferty today, and undoubtedly too brief. I’ve been rereading Serpent’s Egg, trying to understand how the Kangaroo connects to Inneall’s ocean, and throughout that novel one fact kept coming up. Once again, Lafferty is thinking about original sin, maybe

Hah-NAH-lee? HAH-nah-lee? Well, either, depending on your place in the time stream. Late in Okla Hannali, Lafferty writes: Should anyone ever wonder how the “Hannali” in the title of this study is pronounced, it is this: If you read it before the end of the Civil War (some hundred years before it is written) you accent it on the second syllable. If you read it at a later date, you accent on the first. Did you read the novel before Lafferty wrote it, before he was born, before

There is a great and deep oceanic mind behind all this, a mind shimmering with intelligence and intuition. There is a soul brimming full of adventure and daring. There is intrigue that boggles belief. Most of all there is a personage who is sometimes a leaping and sounding spirit, and sometimes the Foremost Secret is— The Foremost Secret What? Ah, that too, for the moment, is a secret. — Fair Hills of Ocean, Oh! In the Whole Lafferty are the Oceanic novels. I’ve updated the O

Title page of La relación (1542), reproduced in The Journey of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca (1922). They made their moves in the late hours and reestablished their prestige. They told a series of tales that were quite unusual, and the other liars looked at them with awe and admiration. Due to the peculiar nature of these stories they cannot be given here. There was weird stuff in them, and we haven’t the presence or style of Esteban and Dorantes to carry them off with a fl

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

Dotty herself was never sentimental, and it would not be decent to get sentimental on her behalf. — Chapter 2, Dotty Having just “reached her majority” at novel’s end, which by Texas law would have meant turning 18 years of age, 18 years into which she has packed several lives’ worth of incident and grief and loss . . . — Andrew Ferguson, on Dotty This afternoon, I revised my Dotty resource and started thinking about the novel’s somewhat murky chronology. Dotty is young at th

Book editors don’t add glosses or footnotes to the old SF stories they reprint, but many of those stories require cultural references that modern readers are not likely to recognize, because the references come from mid-century (i.e. the last century) popular culture. How many people under seventy will recognize that Philip K. Dick’s “Oh, to Be a Blobel!” is a reference to Marianne Moore’s poem, “Oh, to Be a Dragon”? Or that his “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” riffs o

Henry Clarke (1889-1931) They fight! There is a duality in the fight itself. There are things seen, and there are things visceral that cannot be seen. There is blood spilled that is more ornately red (violet-flecked and shimmering it is) than is the blood of Earth-Woomagoo. This is blood as seen by the light of the sun that shines through the green-and-copper atmosphere of Venus-Noga. It is slippery blood, blood smelling of tincture of iron, blood that one gathers in the

Strip Pit Puca dramas differ in pace and climax from the dramas of Earth people. In the high classic form, there is always a scene (very near the end) where all the bloody stuff is heaped together for the greater enjoyment and convenience of all. It is extravagant and outré. It is both tragic and comic in the tall burlesque of it. It thrills the liver and entrails and heart of the Pucas. And to Earth people it would seem rather crude and excessive. — The Reefs of Earth A Happ

A Rat-King The plot has all the unhinged unity of any shipwreck. And there is movement and force and power. Power above all! This is Destruction as pageant and presentation. One has the feeling that something very large will come out of all of this. Yes, like the destruction of the world. — The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny (p. 352) My second read showed pretty clearly why I remembered merely the premise and little of the plot: there is little plot to remember, in a

Give me back the Berlin wall Give me Stalin and St. Paul Give me Christ Or give me Hiroshima Destroy another fetus now We don't like children anyhow I've seen the future, baby It is murder —Leonard Cohen, “The Future” As to your selecting the name “Kirol” that was just to preserve you from a little numerological trap. Advanced Lafferty. The previous Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny post called the book one of Lafferty’s most Catholic works because the bloodshed of

[T]he image realized in pictorial form is not a garden-variety product but, on the contrary, the response to an intuitive vision whose invisible substance it seeks to realize and communicate in visible form. Far from contriving some idolatrous appearance or other, the true image attests to the fact that the visible scene or face it depicts has found the iconographer or artist. —Thomas Pfau, Incomprehensible Certainty: Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Image (2022) The mount