“Say, this is not quite the speech I intended to give. Nobody is throwing fruit or vegetables or eggs at me. But in the Indo-China War things are not muddy. There is no possibility of American gain or advantage. There are just not any lootable assets for us in Indo-China. We do not need their rice crop, we do not need their fish crop. Times were good when we intervened in accord with our treaty promise, and it was our involvement that turned times bad for us. The enemy does n

SF has never been very forward-looking. It is likely the least innovative of literatures. It has certainly never been daring, though several of its practitioners wear the ‘I am Daring’ badge hypocritically. It is a field compounded largely of patsies who can be led by nose-rings anywhere at all. — "The Case of the Moss Eaten Magician" I want to think a little about Lafferty's support for Joseph McCarthy and his refusal ever to believe that McCarthy had been wrong about commun

“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

One question in Lafferty’s thinking about the end of contingent worlds is how to measure a life against the world’s. Everyone grows older and sees worlds fade. That is, anyone who is lucky enough to live long enough to experience that kind of loss. Lafferty certainly went through it. He was probably haunted by this more than most people (I think) because his father was so old when he was born, and he was the baby of the family. His grandparents were a century older than he. H

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 Lon

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 goin

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

One of Lafferty’s deeper-cut poems is “Ancient Sorceries,” written a year before he retired from writing. It is a The Men Who Knew Everything/In a Green Tree sonnet, rooted in his private symbol system. The whole poem proceeds by association, and one could follow those associative lines for a long time. Human beings have an older, more primitive brother: childish but powerful, and known under many names in myth, religion, monstrosity, divinity, and folklore. This is Austro,

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

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

“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

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

My working theory is that the best anchor for The Devil Is Dead is its flat statement that “the Brunhilde sailed on November 7, a Friday morning.” Lafferty is usually vague about the year. He even writes that “the year is uncertain.” But then he does something odd: he supplies the day of the week, an only seemingly inadvertent calendrical lock. He would have remembered his doings on the day, for November 7 is R. A. Lafferty’s birthday, and it falls on a Friday in three plau

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 "The Wheel and the Shoosh" about the invention of time/being and space, abandoned poetry, where Lafferty derived titles (“And Mad Undancing Bears”),