Lafferty's Door The things that the people were doing right now were a little bit extreme. Granted that they all loved one another. Granted that they were all present and were not doing these things behind each others’ backs. But the quick loving was going on a bit too hotly. And there shouldn’t have been that sort of mixing of generations. Well, everybody loved the several young girls who were there for the ‘evening’ (Mary Jill O’Trassy and Chiara and Teresa Benedict and

And what if all of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversely framed, That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of all? It was another of those extraordinary enlivening events. It got them. It got Erma Planda of the golden body, and Judy Brindlesby of the sometime incredible hair. It got Lisetta Kerwin of the now shattered serenity; it got Rushmore and Hilary and Blase. Perhaps it had

“Yes. Even ourselves it would kill. That is why we have our eyes always shielded. That is also why we erect another shield: that of our ritual politeness, so that we may never forget that too intimate an encounter of our persons may be fatal.” Lafferty wrote “The Polite People of Pudibundia” early, in 1959. Gene Wolfe once said that early Lafferty is Lafferty with water, and later Lafferty is straight Lafferty. “Pudibundia” falls squarely into the first category. It is also o

“Mad Man” could stand as an emblem of Lafferty’s work in the minds of many readers, even if it is not the story they first think of when they think of him. It is classic, quirky, light-seeming 1960s science fantasy, full of Lafferty’s humor and style. Read by itself, it is really fun. Read against the whole of his work, however, it becomes a fascinating story, especially for anyone interested in Lafferty’s developing thoughts about the relation between machines and human pers

Dotty resolved to become the foremost Galveston-style piano player in the world. There are those who say that she became just that. She was good, very good, possibly the best. But that was some years after this first period of her return. — Dotty A twelve-year-old girl, a cripple, the daughter of the proprietor, was playing the piano. It was not for some time, due to the primacy of other matters, that Moysha realized that she was playing atrociously. Then he attempted to corr

Since acorn worms and the human lineage diverged 570 million years ago, pharyngeal slits for filtering food evolved into gills for extracting oxygen, and later into today’s human upper and lower jaw and pharynx, which encompasses the thyroid gland, tongue, larynx (voice box) and various glands and muscles between the mouth and the throat. Humans and other terrestrial vertebrates actually initiate vestigial gills while embryos, though they disappear quickly and rarely persist

Slowly it wanders, — pauses, — creeps, — Anon it sparkles, — flashes and leaps; And ever as onward it gleaming goes A light on the Bong-tree stems it throws. And those who watch at that midnight hour From Hall or Terrace, or lofty Tower, Cry, as the wild light passes along, — "The Dong! — the Dong! The wandering Dong through the forest goes! The Dong! the Dong! The Dong with a luminous Nose!" — “The Dong with a Luminous Nose,” Edward Lear (1877) “What about the sex and sorcer

“What would not I give to wander Where my old companions dwell? Absence makes the heart grow fonder; Isle of Beauty, fare thee well!” — Thomas Haynes Bayly, “Isle of Beauty” The noonday devil is walking among the Cepheids, and Lucifer who fell like lightning is still falling. At the same time Christ has not been born, and the time is today, and the world has already ended and exploded into something bigger. We are all of us contemporaries for we all live in eternity. Belloc

“Laff, do you remember 'Johnny Crookedhouse,'" Barry Malzberg asked me once. ‘How could you have known, how could anyone have known?’ I gasped. ‘For my sins I was sometimes assigned to the slush piles when I worked for publishers,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember anything about it except the name, and I can never forget it. It was, it was—’ ‘The worst story ever written,’ we both said at once. No, of course there is no copy in existence. I hope not.” Being a big Barry Malzberg fan

A few years ago, there was some discussion of “Ishmael Into the Barrens” on East of Laughter that made a few interesting points, most of which were made by Petersen. But it was clear that, for some readers, the story amounted to an old man yelling at hippies. There is some of that, but it is not the whole of it. What the old man is yelling about is the sexual revolution and how it decoupled sexual pleasure from procreation. The story will never be well understood or much like

This post is a first attempt to chart Melchisedech Duffey’s peculiar sexual life and aspects of antisemitism in More Than Melchisedech, situating them within the blog’s broader exploration of neglected sides of Lafferty's fiction. It confines itself to presenting textual evidence, without advancing interpretation beyond highlighting the link between Melchisedech Duffey’s sexuality and antisemitic tropes in the Argo legend. In the novel, Duffey is blackmailed for pedophilia by

“That may well be,” I argue. “Sex may be implicit in everything. But I want it out of everything and right here in one piece where I can see it and smell it and taste it and feel it and watch it. When is the main act? When do the people do it? What is this run-around that you keep giving me?” — “Sex and Sorcery” (1973) There are more than a few unrealized but fascinating story premises and unfinished fragments in Tulsa. One of the stranger and more interesting is “Told as Twi

“I'd like to have a people-kid sometime,” Teresa said. “After all, mama had me. A people kid have fun playing with the fish kids, and they like him, too. And he could climb int he rocks with the Groll's Trolls. He would sort of knit our family together. You think about it, Peter, and I think about it too, and we see what we come up with at the next milting time.” Lafferty’s "The Ultimate Creature" is a yarn, a cosmic fable about Peter Feeney, “the meanest man of all the world

"For it is desire (cupiditas) when the creature is loved for itself. And then it does not help a man through making use of it, but corrupts him in the enjoying it." On the Trinity, Book IX, Chapter 9 I’ve been thinking again about Lafferty’s The Men Who Knew Everything stories. The more I sit with them, the more I see the sequence as one of his clearest takes on what we can know—and where knowing ends. In Austro, who is caught in the strange orbit of those men of unusual geni

A while back, I shared some thoughts on East of Laughter in response to a discussion about certain obiter dicta on pornography in an essay Lafferty wrote. Though it didn’t generate any discussion, I stand by the idea that Lafferty’s most profound fictional engagement with human sexuality appears in The Flame is Green (1971). To ensure these thoughts aren’t lost, I’m preserving them here. Lafferty rarely engages with eros explicitly or in a sustained way, but in The Flame is G