"The "Sad Adventure of Consciousness," an unpleasantness that lasted no more than seven thousand years, was a sort of response to former dilemmas, a cure that was worse than the sickness . . . There are no more dilemmas or other two-horned problems bothering the world now. So we raise one-horned monuments, single-horned for our single-mindedness . . . A two-horned head, of whatever sort, was likely to have a two-pronged or conscious mind inside of it. But now it will all be e

A Past Master exam for the hardcore Lafferty reader. All gnawing questions I keep going back to. Why does Pottscamp stutter? What is the structural role of the boy with the toy? Who is the false ansel? Why is the Ouden passage dream delayed? What is the relation of Adam to Athens and Jerusalem? Why did Cathead only appear twenty years ago? Who is the stranger at the end of the novel? Who are the time travelers who visited Thomas More before Paul, and why did they do it? What

" . . . whether persistent and inveterate wickedness might be changed, by habit, into a kind of nature, you, reader, must judge, that is, if in any way, both in these seen and temporal ages and in those unseen and eternal ages, that portion will be wholly discordant from that final unity and harmony. In the meantime, however, both in these seen and temporal ages and in those that are unseen and eternal, all those beings are arranged in order, by reason, according to the measu

This is because, in another sense, who [Origen] was and what he achieved have been hidden for the better part of the Christian era behind a false mythology and an even falser historical record. Though, as I say, he towers over the landscape of Christian thought, he has done so invisibly ever since his putative "condemnation" in 553 at the Fifth Ecumenical Council. — David Bentley Hart, Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies  (2020) Advanced Lafferty. I have a theory about why

“Are we still dangling on the thread, or has the thread been broken even before the official act (soon to be proposed) to break it ? The Ancient Instruction was to go to All Nations. But we are not the Nations. We are something different. The Promise was that the Transcendent Thing would endure till the End of the World. But we are not the World. We are quite a different world, and no promise was ever given to us.” “Nine snakes in my head! I won’t!" Thomas shouted. "It is not

"Panic Flight" is an early, unpublished Lafferty story that satirizes science fiction before Lafferty cast his lot in with it. The only comments on the story speculate that it failed to sell because the market was unwilling to be twitted by an unknown upstart. More likely, the story did not sell because it is oddly unbalanced and not very good. It wants to do too much with too little. On the one hand, there is the lampooning of science fiction language. This sits at the front

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. — Genesis 1:6 Then came the clear instant . . . when it was shattered completely and the blue sky was seen supreme. The unpatterned primordial water in "Love Affair with Ten Thousand Springs"  has me thinking about Lafferty’s short story "Encased in Ancient Rind,” a pretty gloomy piece in the felix culpa  tradition. Both the Fall and the Flood have already happened

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 hero in my book. He likes to say that Lafferty has about two hundred fans. If by “fan,” Crookall means someone who enjoys the short stories, or someone who liked Past Master  and keeps a fond place for Lafferty in memory, then 200 would be an absurdly low number. But Lafferty fans are an odd lot. Few read his works the way typical fans of a w

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 general need. From the sixteenth century on, at least among the upper classes, the fork comes into use as an eating instrument, arriving by way of Italy first in France and then in England and Germany, after having served for a time only for taking solid foods from the dish.— Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, Vol. 1., The History of Manners “

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