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Dante Alighieri , The Divine Comedy: Inferno , Canto III Those of us who spend time with Lafferty's fiction This led me to the idea of "Thinking With Lafferty," a tag I took from a terrific work on Alfred North I hope that Lafferty readers eventually build a conceptual toolkit, a "bric-a-brac" for reading him. When Lafferty stopped writing, he offered a sad, self-deprecating reason: he said he was writing drivel I've come to see Camels as Lafferty’s Inferno , the first movement in an unfinished Divine Comedy,

Civil Blood In the early 1960s, Lafferty wrote a novel called Civil Blood . Lafferty has often been called reactionary in his Catholicism, and while this is fair from one perspective This is very much part of the Belloc factor that I indicated in Lafferty’s work. This is intellectual and spiritual hypocrisy on Lafferty’s view. One can learn a great deal about Lafferty by reading it.

is always interesting, and enough of the germs survive to make for a great essay on the topic on how Lafferty Here are a few of the ideas Lafferty had that became published stories (scroll down for the titles): these were all sections of one picture that showed the whole length of the river.

Lafferty seems to be saying that true justice is elusive, especially once violence and greed are involved Lafferty also targets what we now call identity politics (a term coined in 1977). This is consistent with the larger pattern of Lafferty’s work: political idealism and structural rot This is Lafferty holding up a mirror to human brutality. Beneath the wit, Lafferty is saying something brutal about real tendencies.

.” — Stan Musial Lafferty’s unpublished 1958 short story “The All-Star Series” is slight, though it touches on themes dear to Lafferty: tradition vs. sterile progress, the letters vs. the spirit of the law, nostalgia Lafferty then switches to the official box. Lafferty was a fan of baseball and baseball pitches, using the trope several times in his short stories Sixteen years after Lafferty wrote “The All-Star Series,” Major League Baseball did abandon horsehide

In my understanding of how Lafferty’s fiction fits together, I group his otherwise uncategorizable genre novels under the term "Oceanic Novels," adapting one of Lafferty's terms. The novels are ocreanic because the low mimetic cannot carry the eschatological intensity that Lafferty What I recently referred to as the  Big Egg Problem  attempts to specify the writerly challenge Lafferty In a note on the story, Lafferty explained that it was based on a series of dreams he had experienced

Advanced Lafferty. A few thoughts on one of Lafferty’s more intricately constructed stories, “The Cliffs That Laughed.” It is a tour de force of indexical play, with Lafferty showing how slippery the position of the I-index In two places in Lafferty’s work, the Parthen becomes a question of incest, though the nature of that The first story is very much romance’s descent into darkness, though with the Lafferty flavor.

If you have felt overwhelmed by the deeper reaches of a Lafferty novel, you may want to continue. Lafferty’s densest work is not excessive, in my view—it is difficult. This matters because it shapes how we approach the hardest material in Lafferty. Lafferty’s essay "More Worlds Than One?" So there it is: where others see excess in Lafferty, I see difficulty.

William Blake, The Red Dragon and the Woman Wrapped in the Sun, c. 1805 My last post looked at Lafferty's For Lafferty, that would place it squarely inside his complicated horn imagery. I suspect Lafferty had a similar moment.  Lafferty has also reversed the order of events by dislocating the cacophony. Lafferty implies that this is a double miracle, the moment of Genesis 2:7.

Lafferty’s "The Ultimate Creature" is a yarn, a cosmic fable about Peter Feeney, “the meanest man of Lafferty gives the reader this tender exchange: “'Oh, four such pretty kids of ours!’ Teresa said. “I’m not good,” Lafferty once told Harry Harrison, “at writing things to a pattern.” As Lafferty writes, Peter is “a man of deprivation and penury . . . a museum prowler unable to own, a It reminded me of Lafferty being more at home among Catholic Tagalog speakers and Mexicans than among

A short post today on Lafferty’s “The Doggone Highly Scientific Door.” Lafferty makes most of us laugh. This is a story that makes me laugh more than once. Lafferty dials up the slapstick. When the Lafferty family left Neola, Iowa, for Oklahoma, Lafferty was four. Along the way, Lafferty also slips in some great puns.

That, of course, sounds like something Lafferty would have hated. It is one of the most puzzling moments in Lafferty. My suspicion is that it has more to do with Lafferty's reading of Melville and Melville's interest in What was Lafferty's fictional Cloots obstructing as he mouthed progress? It seems unlikely that Lafferty read Cloots in French, which is what leads me to weigh Melville here.