I've mentioned this before on the blog, but in my day job I'm not an Americanist, much less a specialist in science fiction. My background is in eighteenth-century British literature, and Lafferty ended up being just a hobby interest. One of the first things that caught my attention when I started rereading him was how he sometimes uses heroic couplets to generate ideas. It may seem an odd thing to fasten on, but the eighteenth-century mind loved the couplet, with its sharp a

But the lie had to be a good one, because if your lie is badly done it makes everyone feel wretched, liar and lied-to alike plunged into the deepest lackadaisy, and everyone just feels like going into the other room and drinking a glass of water, or whatever is available there, whereas if you can lie really well then get dynamite results, 35 percent report increased intellectual understanding, awareness, insight, 40 percent report more tolerance, acceptance of others, liking

Maybe Jones is on my mind, so a short note on something fun. Early on, when Lafferty was considering how he would use the Watkin material that would eventually find its home in the Men Who Knew Everything sequence, he seems to have considered using Watkin as the basis for a Maybe Jones novel. There is a note that reads, “The Color-Chapter Sequence from Watkin’s The Bow in the Clouds,” followed by some additional sketching and then a portrait of Jones. Jones was somehow going

And there was a small bureau set up for that smallgroup of folks who may perhaps have slight flaws in theircharacters — the golden flaw, as Maybe Jones once called it.This small bureau was to plan the future for the good-timecrowd who could not be reformed into the sanctioned mold. My favorite work by Jonathan Swift is his 1704 A Tale of a Tub, a work about which readers disagree in fundamental ways and about which there will never be agreement. That readers arrive at differe

Alas, we have the terminal report of him! The coded chatter gives the sighted mort of him, How out beyond the orb of Di Carissimus His sundered ship became a novanissimus. His soaring vaunt escapes the blooming ears of us, He’s gone, he’s dead, he’s dirt, he disappears from us! Be this the death of highest thrust of human all? The flaming end of bright and shining crewmen all? Destroyed? His road is run? It’s but a bend of it; Make no mistake, this only seems the end of i

What the Eleans call the pillar of Oenomaus is in the direction of the sanctuary of Zeus as you go from the great altar. On the left are four pillars with a roof on them, the whole constructed to protect a wooden pillar which has decayed through age, being for the most part held together by bands. This pillar, so runs the tale, stood in the house of Oenomaus.— Pausanias, Description of Greece 5.20.6 “Which Great God, yours or mine?” Porcellus grunted. “They aren't the same, o

There was the Asteroid Midas, a big-beaked bird of a gambler who could do things with card and dice and markers in his long talons that seemed unlawful. — Space Chantey (1968) They plucked that Asteroid Bird, the two of them, man and machine. He had been one of the richest and most extended of all creatures, with a pinion on every planet. They left the great Midas with scarcely a tail feather. When Tell and Gahn did business with a fellow now, they really did business. And th

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

A light post. Space Chantey gets pigeonholed as a sci-fi Odyssey, but that one-liner misses what makes it remarkable. On East of Laughter today, someone suggested that Lafferty set out to satirize heroism but ended up celebrating it instead, if I understood the comment correctly. This is an interesting take. I wonder how common it is. No one has yet pinned down what Space Chantey is doing, but it is certainly more than a parody of heroism. It's a Menippean satire. Think of it

First, a table that lays out the plot of Space Chantey (1968), then some thoughts about Lafferty's Lay. When Gospel-trumpeter, surrounded With long-eared rout, to battle sounded, And pulpit, drum ecclesiastic, Was beat with fist, instead of a stick; Then did Sir Knight abandon dwelling, And out he rode a-colonelling. That's Hudibras, Samuel Butler’s scathing seventeenth-century takedown of Cromwell's England. But they sound a lot like Lafferty. There