Post 400

It is Sunday, I am relaxing with a Texas red ale, and this is post 400, which seems like as good an occasion as any to say a few personal things about my Lafferty hobby project and where it stands.

By my own count, admittedly a heterodox one, there are 265 complete Lafferty short stories. At this point, I have written something about all but three of them. Which means that, for all its obvious flaws, this blog is probably the most comprehensive Lafferty resource online. Anyone interested in Lafferty can come here and learn about the stories, fragments, and unpublished works, albeit through the filter of my own tendentious biases. Even so, my approach to writing about Lafferty has always been transparency first. I want to give you something to argue with. The biggest hurdle, I think, is that Lafferty wrote so much and was so damn smart. So when I write about a story, I have two aims: to make an argument, even if that means being polemical, and to provide as many informational shortcuts as I can, so that people a great deal smarter than I am can piggyback on the blog and blow a hole through my take if its what is warranted.

One of the reasons I started this blog was my disagreement with a line in the SFE entry on Lafferty. It says, “It could almost be said that his entire unknowable corpus constitutes, in the mind’s eye, either an aleph (see Jorge Luis Borges), or a basilisk, or both at once. He and Gene Wolfe have more than a shared faith in common.” Lafferty would call that hokey or dog dirt. I reject it entirely. His corpus is not unknowable. It only seems so because of neglect and the accidents of publication history. One of the pleasures of making this a side project has been getting to know the whole shebang. At this point, I have read all of the stories and novels, published and unpublished, more than once, and I can assure you that it is not unknowable. One of my quirks is that I keep a great many notebooks, and I am sure I have at least a few hundred possible posts on aspects of Lafferty that help make sense of him as a writer.

My plan, for now, is to keep the blog going, though at some point it may simply become part of my files, alongside my other projects. I keep all my work printed out and in a metal file cabinet because I am a neanderthal like Finnegan. A few academic friends have expressed interest in doing a podcast, so that may happen. I am happy to be reaching the end of my work on the short stories, because my primary interest in Lafferty is what Lafferty does as an anti-novelist. The work on the short stories is largely done, so I can finally turn to my main interest, the novels. If the podcast does not happen, I may write a series of introductions to the novels, or simply keep the blog going with posts on whatever odds and ends about Lafferty happen to interest me.

In any case, it has been a pleasure getting to know Lafferty’s work. Whatever form the project takes next, I am glad to have spent this much time proving, at least to myself, that his corpus is not unknowable.