“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 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

“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....

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

Prose fiction was a narrow thing. As a valid force it was found only in Structured Western Civilization (Europe and the Levant, and the Americas and other colonies), and for only about three hundred years, from Don Quixote  in 1605 to the various ‘last novels’ of the twentieth century. The last British novel may have been Arnold Bennett's Old Wives' Tale  in 1908 or Maugham's Of Human Bondage  in 1915. Both of them have strong post-fictional elements mixed in. The last Russi

Today, something brief on doggerel, memory, and “What’s the Name of That Town?”—one of Lafferty’s best Institute stories. It’s a farce, yes, but also a meditation on what happens when cultural memory breaks down. Lafferty’s poetry deserves more attention than it gets. Often dismissed as doggerel, it’s something more subtle—work that pretends to be simple but usually isn't. That he cared deeply about poetry is clear from a folder of unpublished translations. He took on these w

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...

It seemed, until I thought of it a bit, that I had written quite a few novels, and many shorter works, and also verses and scraps. Now I...

I thought it would be fun to build a program that generates visual maps for R. A. Lafferty’s fiction and nonfiction. After a fair bit of...