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 instan

"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 h