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subtle—work that pretends to be simple but usually isn't. That he cared deeply about poetry is clear from a folder of unpublished translations.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 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

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 understood by some sort of intuition that what I had been writing was a never-ending story and that the name of it was “A Ghost Story.” The name comes from the only thing that I have learned about all people: that they are ghostly, and that they are sometimes split-off. But no one can ever know for sure which part of the split is himself. D

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...

Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) Mimesis 1 (Prefiguration): Mimesis 1 is the pre-narrative, lived understanding of human action, encompassing...

" . . . just as Atrox devised one hundred and one tests by which one might know whether one was in a dream or in reality." In an...

The Smiling Christ of St Francis Xavier Gregorio Montejo's essay, "There Are Three Ways to Open a Secret Door: R. A. Lafferty's Bricolage...

Several million evolvate computers, computers who said that they were the only true born-again humans, accompanied the pilgrimage or tour...

Picking up on yesterday’s post and the theme of Gnosticism, I want to look at its presence in Lafferty’s work a little further. Lafferty often extracts elements of Gnostic thought and builds spectacularly upon them, shaping strange new conceptual structures all his own. Sometimes, this is as straightforward as in his short story "Snuffles" (1960), where being acts as a demiurge; other times, it is a complex interplay of Gnostic and Kabbalistic ideas, as in Not to Mention Ca

I’ve been closely reading "Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies." In the coming days, I’ll make several posts about it and post my...

While thinking about Past Master  (1968), I returned to Lafferty’s short story "Condillac’s Statue or Wrens in His Head." It offers another take on how to construct a Programmed Person. In the story, the philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714–1780) creates a statue out of frog-colored travertine granite on his estate near Beaugency. The occult doctor Jouhandeau helps him enliven this statue—“Old Rock” or “Rock-Head”—with sensory abilities one by one: smell, hearing, si

"And they threw her down, and the wall was sprinkled with her blood, and the horses trod upon her." 2 Kings 9:33 "But one of the...

Lafferty’s short sentences fascinate me. For several weeks, I've tried to understand how they work, especially those sentences that carry...

Lafferty completed "Horns on Their Heads" in June 1971, though even that date feels late. The writing belongs to the late 1960s, when he...

"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...

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...

The Execution of Thomas More in 1535 by Antoine Caron (1521-1599) I’m working through Past Master  to create an annotated outline, and a...

“It was like an old Puca comedy: one person falls into the quicksand, drags another in after him, then a third, then a fourth—until they...

I was lucky enough to come across Andrew Ferguson’s thoughts on Lafferty’s ghost story early on—Lafferty's idea that his fiction forms a...