Two opposite points on the rim of a rolling wheel cannot both be on the top at once: this is taken as an almost reasonable postulate. But they could both be on top at once if one of them were suppressed by Amnesia. —Matthew Woodbine Junior, in The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny is difficult to discuss, even for those of us who know how magical it is. The difficulty lies in how much Lafferty packs into it. That informational

“I came ashore, swimming and wading through turbulent water. It was early morning. The shore was muddy with engendering mud, and full of promise. It was the year 1923, and I was a young man of no more than a quarter of a century of physical years. I went up that muddy shore and entered into the green and burgeoning years of my life. If I remember to do it, I can come back to that same shore, and to that same year, and have another sixty green and burgeoning years to my life.

I’ve needed to update the concepts section of this blog for a while, and I’ve made a first pass that better reflects my current understanding of how Lafferty works. I'll be working on this in the next few weeks. At some point, I want to work what I take to be Lafferty’s own critical language into it. Until then, here are his own key concepts, as I can isolate them at this point:

A tour of the forty-seven planets in Lafferty’s story and the people, beliefs, and fashions behind their names.

“History is the peopled worlds. History is ourselves in our clearest aspect. Only in history do we find the substance that is our justification. History is the account that we will give to God when, on the last morning, He will ask us to give an account of ourselves in species and persons. Only in history do we find the clarity that is our purpose of being.” Today I want to sort out the events preceding Long John Tong Tyrone's planetfall in Annals of Klepsis. Readers will kno

Sometimes one caught sight, upon a bell tower, of an enormous head and a bundle of disordered limbs swinging furiously at the end of a rope; it was Quasimodo ringing vespers or the Angelus. Often at night a hideous form was seen wandering along the frail balustrade of carved lacework, which crowns the towers and borders the circumference of the apse; again it was the hunchback of Notre-Dame. Then, said the women of the neighborhood, the whole church took on something fantasti

Works resource updated. I have turned it into the research tool I wish had existed when I began reading Lafferty. It brings together a large body of information in a searchable catalogue. You can browse Lafferty’s works, publication appearances, completion dates, reviews, variants, translations, links to cover art and full issue scans, and references to archival holdings at the University of Tulsa and the University of Iowa, from which manuscript scans may be ordered. The pro

That photo is of Knight with his friends Terry Bisson and R. A. Lafferty. In my office at the college, I keep it pinned to a corkboard. Someone once said, "Is that your dad?" Then I got to talk about Dan and RAL. Dan Knight is one of the heroes of Lafferty's publication history and one of my favorite people. I count him a dear friend. Without him, we would not have Dotty. We would not have More Than Melchisedech. We would not have many important Lafferty pieces. Knight was bu

I keep playing around with the idea that Harry Stephen Keeler’s webwork might help us understand what Lafferty was trying to do with post-fictional consciousness. What I have done is use ideas about Lafferty and world-creation to build a model that tracks causality through those principles. I thought I would share the EOL work for anyone interested in that immensely complicated novel, the one where he really separates the sheep from the goats. I have also added an ecological

"This is power politics," Julius Brass explained it to James Tyrone. (They still talked together sometimes.) "I don't look like a Jew. I'm tow-haired and light-skinned and pug-nosed and freckle-faced. I'm an Anglo if there ever was one. And since my father changed the name from Messing to Brass we don't even sound Jewish. The kids don't recognize hardly any of us as Jews. But they know the niggers when they see them. And they know the Catholics because they go to the Catholic