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 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