“Molasses is a little like amber,” Diogenes said. “It flows so slowly that sometimes it seems to be solid. Creatures can be imprisoned in it and apparently be held motionless in it. They must deceive themselves as to their own time scale, for if they do not deceive themselves they will be dead . . . . Things can not have been going on for the orthodox time at the orthodox pace.” — "Out of the Molasses Trap" “There are no duplications in the Pristine World, and there are no no

I have total freedom to do whatever I want to do, but at this point in time I am enjailed in a pokey or slammer in Boondocks New Jersey. — “The Wheel and the Shoosh” (unfinished draft) Lafferty was extremely good at getting the most out of his drafted material and ideas. Almost everything gets used, as if he were dealing with a buffalo. Over the twenty-plus years of his writing life, when he turned out the huge corpus, it seems he made most of it work. There are the unwritten

John Logie Baird demonstrating a Nipkow disk in 1927 It is worth preserving as a remnant of that early era when there were giants on the earth. And, if it is preserved, someday someone will gaze into the old kerosene-powered receiver and cry out in astonishment in the words of the Greatest Bard: "—what poet-race shot such Cyclopean arches at the stars?" Whoever you are, and whenever or whereever you read this first story in the book, it will be best story you will r

“Who wants to die? Everything struggles to live. Look at that tree growing up there out of that grating. It gets no sun, and water only when it rains. It's growing out of sour earth. And it's strong because its hard struggle to live is making it strong. My children will be strong that way.” ― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn “I heard you talking to Herr Boch about antlers and horns. You believe that horns are more predilected to evil than antlers are, and that is the tru

“As to the ‘Square Hills of Quintana Roo’ (dammit [. . .] you’ve got my typewriter upset again), I loved that title but I DON’T believe I ever actually wrote the piece. The square hills were the strange pyramids in Yucatan, believed by some archeologists to be older than the pyramids of Egypt.” — Letter, 1993 MAYA - YUCATAN setting novel. The HUITMANNA, bearded QUOTZO, still lives, and the civilization is still thriving under jungle shades. — Notes The Square Hills of Quinta

When the Abebaios Block (the Hesitation Block) had been removed from most human minds (usually by simple childhood metasurgery), people began to make decisions faster, and often better. The "Block" had been a mental stutter. When it was understood what it was, and that it had no useful function, it was done away with. And individuals sharpened up as if they had been gone over by a honing stone. Future readers are lucky that so much of Lafferty’s writing process survives, thou

For anyone else who enjoys this sort of thing, here are some of Lafferty’s original titles: "Pani People" became "Pani Planet." "Rangle Dang Kaloof" became "Rang Dang Kaloof" on republication “Glaciation” became “Day of the Glacier” "Is He a Wreck?" became “Adam Had Three Brothers” "And There Confuse" became "Special Condition in Summit Street" "Blood Off a Knife" became "Enfants Terribles" "Mater Inventorum" became "Eurema’s Dam" "Saecula Saeculorum" became "Been a Long Long

Maybe Jones is on my mind, so a short note on something fun. Early on, when Lafferty was considering how he would use the Watkin material that would eventually find its home in the Men Who Knew Everything sequence, he seems to have considered using Watkin as the basis for a Maybe Jones novel. There is a note that reads, “The Color-Chapter Sequence from Watkin’s The Bow in the Clouds,” followed by some additional sketching and then a portrait of Jones. Jones was somehow going

This is a very miscellaneous post about a text I have wanted to write about for a few months: To Aurelia With Horns. It can hardly be called a version of Aurelia, but it is a kind of drafting out of ideas that were later repurposed for it, even if 90 percent of those ideas were drained away. There is zero St. Thomas Aquinas here, which will be surprising for anyone who has read Aurelia. Altogether, it is one of the strangest Lafferty documents that I have read. Enough of it s

Casey's verses are all doggerel . . . His musical compositions hide a greatness, but they hide it well. His drawings are all comic, but only a few of them are meant to be. Let us consider the drawings on the opposite page: (For technical reasons, there is no drawing on the opposite page, but Schrade's description will suffice.) This supposed itself to be a drawing of Hell, but it is a second-hand drawing of a second-hand Hell. We believe that, in most respects, it is authenti

"What do you do when you have just hanged a man? Why, the man himself had showed us what to do. Besides, a future kind of man doesn't leave much of a hole in the present." I've also sent you three other endings to it, designed so you can use any of the four page 16's here and throw the others away. Or, if none of these endings will do it any good, and if any of your sharpies can design an ending to make it sell, I'll split the proceeds with him. — Letter to A. L. Fierst, June

I wanted to jot down a few thoughts about how I understand Lafferty’s career as a writer of novels. The best thematic interpretation along developmental lines is Daniel Otto Jack Petersen’s idea that we move from pre-apocalyptic to apocalyptic, then end with post-apocalyptic, but this shades into exceptions. Another view is Andrew Ferguson’s idea that Lafferty gets a second wind after his break following the publication of Annals of Klepsis. He has a dual-track account that e

“Yes, basisphaira as you call it, baseball has been played at least seven hundred years,” old Josh told them, and he began to put a story together about old bingles and bunts and bases on balls. “The first regular team was a barnstorming team named The House of David. That was before a regular league was established. The House of David boys were bearded and they had a lot of hokus to them; but they could play baseball. They beat every town team up and down every valley and co

Monster movies, philosophy, religion, classical art, puns, horror stories, linguistics, science fiction—how does he account for this quirky range of interests? Lafferty said, “I’m kind of a quirky guy.” And here we are . . . at the lake. Swan Lake is so beloved by the City of Tulsa, the water was drained out of it. The old lake was extensively renovated—dug deeper, reshaped, landscaped. When the land was refilled, the lake’s caretakers anchored wooden duck decoys in the water

from East of Laughter Fb archive The way the germ of an idea becomes a published story is always interesting, and enough of the germs survive to make for a great essay on the topic on how Lafferty combined ideas, though, who would read it? Here are a few of the ideas Lafferty had that became published stories (scroll down for the titles): The Easter Island statues are of baboons not of men. Sky-divers, diving and gliding with complete nerve, come all the way to the ground — b

“Your machine can say how old a thing will be in its totality, but it can’t say how old a thing is right now?”— “Mostly it can do both. The present orientation can nearly always be coaxed out of it, though the clock considers the present of little importance. This is no gadgetry, people. It is positive science and it is wonderful.” “The block has solved many problems of involution and devolution,” Barnaby said. “Naturally the clock does not accept evolution, or has any intell

My working theory is that the best chronological anchor for The Devil Is Dead is Lafferty’s statement that “the Brunhilde sailed on November 7, a Friday morning.” Lafferty is usually vague about the year. Here he even says that “the year is uncertain.” Yet he does something unusual: he gives the day of the week, thereby creating several calendrical locks. November 7 was Lafferty’s birthday, which makes the specificity suggestive. Within the plausible postwar range, November 7

The first of a series of posts. For about a month, I have been typing up a Lafferty compendium, which is full of fascinating material: a partially written Camiroi story about a rhino fair, clues to the “Men Who Knew Everything” story sequence, an abandoned sequel to “Slow Tuesday Night,” reasonably worked out stories such as "The Wheel and the Shoosh" about the invention of time/being and space, abandoned poetry, where Lafferty derived titles (“And Mad Undancing Bears”), how

A short post on a curiosity. Lafferty wrote a sequel to “Quiz Ship Loose” that has never been published. The work survives in an intermediate stage. His handwritten notes and a complete typed version exist, though he never polished it. The story is typed on lined notebook paper, a sure sign of a first-typed draft. Had Lafferty wanted to save the story, he would have next typed it out on carbons. For whatever reason, he abandoned it. In “Hooligs,” we again meet the crew of Qui

Voltaire They had been having a hard time waking Voltaire up and keeping him awake. But, once he understood that it was one of his highest desires really being presented for him, he was able to stay awake pretty well; and he cackled and carried on like a person a hundred and fifty years younger than himself. But it takes a long time to strangle a man with entrails as slick as those were. Fourteen choruses of Grave-Stone Rock were done while it was going on, and one of those