Not long ago, someone I respect asked how to use the blog: what to read, where to begin. Look, I don’t know. This hobby thing now has more than 500 posts, plus other resources, totaling about 700,000 words. It took me a while to learn how to write about Lafferty. Part of that meant dropping academic cant and giving up the urge to write pretty, two habits that annoyed me in other people’s writing. To cover all the territory, the prose would need to be piston-like because Laffe

Here are two passages from Lafferty on what it means to be called civilized. The first passage, from The Fall of Rome, contrasts Gothic workmanship with Roman prestige; the second, from Okla Hannali, contrasts Choctaw life with stereotypes of primitivism. To score Lafferty’s music, I've used a technique developed by Richard Lanham. Repeated expressions occupy the same column, and indentation shows the relations among clauses. This arrangement directs attention to how the argu

A short post about something that does not seem to be recognized by most Lafferty fans, and that seems to me important: the place of the historical fiction in the Lafferty canon. Most people who love Lafferty love Okla Hannali, which was published by Doubleday in 1972, reprinted by Pocket Books in 1973, and later issued by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1991 as part of its American Indian Series. Lafferty was amused by this Oklahoma Press cover, writing, But the picture

A brief update today. My preliminary map of the sources Lafferty mined for Okla Hannali is now live under Resources. Exploring Choctaw history has proved fascinating and humbling. I've also expanded the Serpent's Egg glossary and will continue refining it. With that housekeeping done, I want to revisit Past Master within the context of our AlphaFold era, a moment when, according to recent analyses, AI capability doubles roughly every five months. Past Master touches many them

I’ve been working on Okla Hannali and thinking about Lafferty's first draft in ‘63. It’s usually said, based on what Lafferty himself disclosed in interviews, that the novel draws heavily from his own experiences and from the stories of Indians he knew personally. That is undoubtedly a major part of it. But I also wonder when he became aware of the connection between the Choctaw and the Irish. Did he know this in his youth? If you have read Okla Hannali, you probably know tha