“People think I am being droll when I answer to the question ‘Who do you think is the best short story writer in the world’ — ‘I am.’ Yes, I'm partly being droll, but partly serious.”— Letter to Joye Swain, 1987 I’ve been putting together notes for a Lafferty syllabus, which means sequencing texts and sketching a few lectures, wondering whether a Lafferty course is feasible. My one rule on the blog is don’t waste a reader’s time, but I’m not sure how to say what follows quic

I’ve been thinking about the dynamics of Gnosticism/eschatology and R. A. Lafferty lately, so here’s a quick sketch, more a prompt than a full argument, with a way in. Philip K. Dick and Lafferty share an obsession: the twentieth-century recovery of Gnosticism as the problem of modernity. Hans Jonas is the obvious touchstone; both writers almost certainly knew his work. What interests me is where they split once you ask what “Gnosticism” means under modern conditions. How muc

Though more than half of mankind does not believe in the ultimates and basics, surely less than five percent of the Science Fiction People have any belief at all in what is real. Science Fiction is, for ninety-five percent of the people who indulge in it, a surrogate “True Belief,” in things from which the truth has been carefully removed. It is a “True Belief” in a false religion, one without dimension. — “True Belivers” (Prose Statement) The city is built To music, therefor

A short post on something I’m trying to think through. One of my categories for understanding Lafferty is the oceanic , that place where the underworld of all humanity comes together, his version of the Jungian collective unconscious. Lafferty was remarkably open to radical soteriology, something I am still trying to understand, though it makes sense for someone so interested in the history of the world. He was intensely interested in the history of peoples, yet he was also

“I become a transparent Eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances—master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance.”— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature The attempt to see into the world of Karl Kleber was almost a total failure. The story is told of the behaviorist who would study the chimpan

“In conceiving a story or inaugurating a plot which involves threads weaving with threads, if the thread A, or viewpoint character, should figure with the thread B in an opening incident of numerical order n (with respect to the incidents in the conditions precedent) there must be invented a following incident n + 1 involving threads A and C; an incident n + 2 involving threads A and D; an incident n + 3 involving threads A and E; and so on up to perhaps at least n + 4 o

He welcomed them as one of the rarest and heartiest foods ever. They entered into him. Ah, the salt and the sulphur of them would stand him well in his crux hour when it came. By eating its brains, he would always have a certain mastery over this enemy. Advanced Lafferty today. Reading The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Monsters (2025) has me thinking again about Petersen’s idea of the ecomonstrous , which Petersen writes about in his dissertation. Lafferty fans who want to th

Over the last year of reading Lafferty, I’ve repeatedly found myself adjusting my assumptions about what he is actually saying. I thought I’d post something brief on three areas where my thinking has changed. What has me thinking about this is the Catholic American writer Donna Tartt . Someone once said that she liked Tartt more than O'Connor because O'Connor finds her artistic solutions in the catechism in a way that Tartt doesn't. Lafferty (he was, weirdly, O’Connor’s senio

This isn’t a question of turning you upside down or inside out. You have all been turned inside out for a very long time. The approximate dates of the turning are in my databanks; the reasons and circumstances of it are not. That is not your right surfaces that you have been seeing for this long time. Those are your blooming entrails on the outside of you, draped about you, looped over your pseudo-ears. Even more than on the physical do these analogies apply on the psychic pl

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 a 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

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.” — Franz Kafka, in a letter to Oskar Pollak (January 27, 1904) I'm under the weather, taking a sick day, and thinking about The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny . This will be a response to a great Thomas Flight video I watched on YouTube. In my professional life, I push for colleagues to embrace new technologies, a stance that can be quite polarizing. Many of my colleagues take a “burn-it-with-f

“The concept of the ‘immanent Trinity’ (alternatively called the ‘ontological Trinity’) and the ‘economic Trinity’ is the result both of the distinctions of the tradition and of the unique pressures exerted by modernity. The terms ‘immanent Trinity’ and ‘economic Trinity’ themselves are modifications of the early distinction of theology and economy, in that they refer to trinitarian persons and their relations immanently in God’s being (immanent Trinity) and these persons and

“Oh sure, you're loaded with weird stuff. You couldn't function otherwise. It's an essential enzyme in you. It will replace itself as rapidly as it's used, and it's meant to be used. The whole world is there in caricature, and something is busy there solving the problems and fictions of the world. Or else it is the prime stuff in there, and it is the world that is the caricature of it.” — “It’s Down the Slippery Stairs” A few quick notes on being totalizing: I believe reade

“The answer to the Mystery of Matter (why should there even be so cumbersome a thing as matter? Why did the Word have to be made Flesh? Was not the Making of Matter rather a cheap, and also difficult, trick for a Spirit to indulge in?) — the answer to this contains the answer to the question ‘How Did God Get to be God?’” — “In the Turpentine Trees” (1983) "Snuffles" on my mind. It was a good excuse to reread the edited transcript of the LaffCon3 panel on the story. It was a

A Lafferty story is almost always told-not-shown. His characters are ridiculous larger-than-life personalities who say exactly what they are doing and why, stumbling through other-wheres and never-weres in prose that is abuzz with puns and paradoxes and enough said-bookisms to… but that is the point. He’s telling you a story minus the sly, aiming to please something deeper than the unconscious, deeper even than story-sense, trying to tickle something so fundamental you don’t

Who was Arpad Arutinov? We may never know, but he left us with a puzzlingly heterodox work, The Back Door of History , the definitive version of which is the magisterial Second Revised Edition. Arutinov effected an epistemological break with conventional historiography and the natural sciences, his thesis being that consensus reality is almost invariably a lie and that the front door of empirical evidence and rational analysis will always be insufficient for comprehending phe

Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find everyone engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel—a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while over against the tree's opposite side a human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel

There were two hundred and forty men in our battery. Not all of them could tell such stories as these that were deep folklore incarnate. But at least two hundred of them could. I have always believed that this element of genuine folklore, this giantism, this unbounded joy, was always to be found in the talk of traveling men and of soldiers, those especially. And they are genuine folklore by the only valid test: they sound like genuine folklore. I make this contribution on t

"The principal difference is that Lafferty plays them for laughs and sheer absurdity—his mode is the tall tale. If Paul Bunyan had not...