Over the Christmas break, I have been considering teaching Past Master  next summer and posting the lecture recordings. I would probably begin with Heideggerian categories and work backward, letting the novel’s Thomistic and other Christian elements come into clearer focus by contrast. I would also likely assign Paul Kingsnorth’s recent Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity  as a supplementary text, given how directly it speaks to the questions Past Master  raises

“Then Paul went back to the town, climbed up the idol at midnight (it was five hundred feet high and sheer and slick as ice); he pried out the emerald eye and substituted the green kidney. It fit perfectly. ‘I knew it would,’ said Paul.” On the East of Laughter Facebook group, Brad Frank, a long-one Lafferty reader who knew the man, recently posted about finding a copy of Past Master at the Tulsa flea market: Frank's lucky find got me thinking about the original Past Master

The skull of Cardinal John Morton, patron and benefactor of Thomas More "Only a God can save us."— Martin Heidegger, interview with Der Spiegel  (1966; published 1976) I have been thinking about something Daniel Otto Jack Petersen recently said: that he found it difficult to get into Lafferty’s  Fourth Mansions  (1969) because of its conspiratorial theme. Unlike Petersen, I am probably too quick to assume that all social organization is impossible without extensive conspiracy

“We will show you the back of the tapestry. What you see now is not the true face of Astrobe, not all of it. The other side of the tapestry is shaggier, but it is a real picture also, and a much more meaningful one than the world you look at now. […] Have you never had the feeling, Thomas, that you were looking at everything from the wrong side? You have been.” Thinking again about Ouden and wanted to put together some thoughts about how it works in Past Master . It seems hel

There was the Asteroid Midas, a big-beaked bird of a gambler who could do things with card and dice and markers in his long talons that seemed unlawful. — Space Chantey  (1968) They plucked that Asteroid Bird, the two of them, man and machine. He had been one of the richest and most extended of all creatures, with a pinion on every planet. They left the great Midas with scarcely a tail feather. When Tell and Gahn did business with a fellow now, they really did business. And

Advanced Lafferty. I have a fairly complicated Thomist reading of how Ouden and the various allegorical set pieces work in Past Master (1968). At bottom, it comes down to the argument that Ouden cannot be a character because he is complete privation, which does not exist as res  (a pleonasm, that). There is, however, a fascinating way one could work Ouden into the Thomist tradition and give him a kind of being. It would be by calling him what late scholasticism referred to as

For months, I have wanted to write about some remarks Lafferty made to Robert Sirignano concerning the Devil. They’re plainly important...

Charles Proteus Steinmetz (1865-1923) with Albert Einstein and Others. “Of course I'm unwell. Always have been,” Albert said. “What good...

Martin Crookall has done fun blogging on Lafferty. He is one of the few Lafferty readers who writes about the novels, which makes him a...

David Jones, "Building of the Ark" In his review of The Man Who Never Was , Paul Di Filippo compared “Quiz Ship Loose” to a classic episode of Star Trek: The Original Series  and called the instant chute genius. "Quiz Ship Loose" is a very Trekky planetfall story, and the crew’s encounter with the Pelederians will be familiar to anyone who enjoys Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. The aliens’ advanced technology and arrogance recall characters like Trelane or the Metrons, if you are a T

The Leviathan, by Charles Dufresne (1876-1938) “Devil, Devil, come in hate! Take the fine Evita bait!” the wild-girl chanted, but her...

Five more centuries were to pass before the structure of human relations had so changed that the use of this instrument met a more...

While thinking about Past Master  (1968), I returned to Lafferty’s short story "Condillac’s Statue or Wrens in His Head." It offers...

Lafferty’s description and visual imagery are as idiosyncratic as every other aspect of the man's work. Today, I want to consider a trick...

Paolo Uccello's St. George and the Dragon  (c. 1470) Then the great thing swooped and struck upward: a thousand kilograms of center bulk...

"I am a very disordered and very often a very bad man, but I know that there is this clarity and order and certainty: the Procession of...

Skulls from Hallstatt "The skulls made an impressive show in their niches on the rude wall." “It is only that definitions have lost their...

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, 1571 – 1610, The Supper at Emmaus, 1601. "The light from the sky turned ordinary light black, and...

In the rough diamond between them was a country so harsh as to make even the feral strips look tame. This was deeply muscled country that...

"It was probably in 1309, in anticipation of the emperor’s coming to Italy, that Dante wrote his famous work on the monarchy, De...