Peggy Marie Tyrone had long since taken it upon herself to keep Loretta Sheen in good repair. Loretta Sheen, the daughter of Barnaby and Monica MacLish Sheen, had died three and a half years before this, in 1959. — In a Green Tree, Lafferty's synopsis Some Barnaby thoughts. During the fall of 1978, Lafferty was looking for someone (anyone) to publish a completed masterpiece, the quasi-autobiographical tetralogy, In a Green Tree. To help the effort along, his agent, Virginia K

There are nine basic colors: hylicon, violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, and mystes. There are persons who say that there are more basic colors than these: but they confuse hues with colors, or they list non-basic colors such as the purples and magentas and the variously named non-spectral violets and reds. To such persons we can only say, "You are mistaken." There are other persons who say that there are fewer basic colors than these listed here, that the fir

Idolatry is distinguished from Image-worship by an undue finality. It rests in the relative as though it were the Absolute, worships the creature, the image and vehicle of the Divine Spirit, as though it were that Spirit. — E. I. Watkin, The Bow in the Clouds Here is one of the more complicated clusters in the Lafferty canon: four stories, all published in 1973, that form a sequence within The Men Who Knew Everything. The ongoing Centipede Press edition chose to break them up

"I examined the four walls, the carpeted floor, and the ceiling of the room. There are only six interior sides to a regular room like mine, and if they are secure the room should be secure." " . . . my girl friend Rosemary Korff told me, ‘but now you have acquired a mind without boundaries and a personality without a center.’ So I went about fixing drinks and cheeses and taco dips for my guests . . . at my own Party Without Walls." There are so many memorable birds in Laffer

The world's a blast (Ka-whoosh! Ka-whish!) With healthy soul and belly, And all the skies are full of fish, And all the fish are smelly. Charles Fort’s Super-Sargasso Sea comes up on the blog from time to time. Judging by the number of variations Lafferty gave the idea, he loved it. Oceans, seas, rivers, springs, and other waterways are a major part of his corpus. He uses them to write about time, the unconscious, and the suprahistorical. Yet there are the twists. For instanc

“The children, Austro and Loretta and Mary (none of them is more than a child or at most an adolescent), are close kindred, closer to each other, perhaps, than to us. It is common, perhaps universal, that children are of a slightly different race (I mean it literally) than they will later become. But it is all right with them.” “When were the several decades left out of United States history, Barnaby?” Cris Benedetti asked him. “Early, and recent, and present, for I rather su

One of Lafferty’s deeper-cut poems is “Ancient Sorceries,” written a year before he retired from writing. It is a The Men Who Knew Everything/In a Green Tree sonnet, rooted in his private symbol system. The whole poem proceeds by association, and one could follow those associative lines for a long time. Human beings have an older, more primitive brother: childish but powerful, and known under many names in myth, religion, monstrosity, divinity, and folklore. This is Austro, b

“Your machine can say how old a thing will be in its totality, but it can’t say how old a thing is right now?”— “Mostly it can do both. The present orientation can nearly always be coaxed out of it, though the clock considers the present of little importance. This is no gadgetry, people. It is positive science and it is wonderful.” “The block has solved many problems of involution and devolution,” Barnaby said. “Naturally the clock does not accept evolution, or has any intell

"Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? may I not wash in them, and be clean?” So he turned and went away in a rage." (2 Kings 5:12) Part of The Men Who Knew Everything cycle, “Rivers of Damascus” is one of Lafferty’s standout stories. It is also one of his great meditations on the nature of history. I view it as a spiritual sequel to an earlier and more accessible "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne" (1967). At this point, Lafferty ha

But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee: Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee: and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee. Who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the Lord hath wrought this? — Job 12:7–9 “What is really the situation, Austro?” I asked. He drew a hand in his drawing tablet. Somehow he had the perspective all wrong, for the hand was a million times bigger than the drawing tab

Drumm Booklet 19 Lafferty’s “Slippery” is a good example of how Lafferty can be both light-hearted and subtly moralizing. The moralizing here is lightly applied. Roy Mega and Austro develop a friction-destroying mist called “Slippery-Gip,” which unleashes chaos. Austro delights in the way everything slides about uncontrollably, and he plans to blackmail the world by targeting people and their possessions with this hyper-slick substance, derived from super-glycerine. General G

Skeleton of the Tyrannosaurus Rex, in the American Museum of Natural History, from The Outline of History by H.G. Wells, Volume I, published in 1920 My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky: So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die! — William Wordsworth, “My Heart Leaps Up” “After him! After him!” Bernard Sheen cried out. — My Heart Leaps Up, Chapter 1 “What Big Tears the Dinosaur’s” is one of the quietes

“The strictly artistic quality in a work of art is the display of significant form or pattern. To this therefore the utilitarian or didactic purpose must be strictly subordinate. If it interferes with the display of form the artistic value of the work is correspondingly diminished.” E. I. Watkin Today I want to think a little about how Lafferty uses E. I. Watkin’s The Bow in the Clouds (1931) in the Barnaby stories. I’ll focus on one of the most striking examples of this to b

"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

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 a being acts as a demiurge; other times, it is a complex interplay of Gnostic and Kabbalistic ideas, as in Not to Mention Ca