Most people who speak this way know little of history; Lafferty knew a great deal. Well, it is what Lafferty always hated. Lafferty is clear on this point. That’s what Lafferty is talking about: not genocide, but Gleichschaltung. That, I think, is how Lafferty saw the Germans’ part in it.

“Faith Sufficient” is a late sequel to Lafferty’s 1959 short story “John Salt,” though—true to Lafferty In "John Salt," Lafferty took aim at hellfire-and-brimstone preaching and fraudulent miracle-working. being slain in the spirit, speaking in tongues, other theatrical manifestations of the Spirit, and the whole Of course, Lafferty admired some ecstatics. One often sees it said that Lafferty was a serious Catholic and theologically literate.

So while "Quiz Ship Loose" is light Lafferty, it hits on one of his heaviest themes. Lafferty seems to want us to ask what the Palederians have lost. In "Quiz Ship Loose," Lafferty shows a similar shift. I doubt Lafferty ever read Borgmann, but there’s no reason he would have needed to. That hard line is right at the center of Lafferty’s meditation on post-consciousness.

. — Henry David Thoreau Lafferty seems to have liked the idea of shells being communication devices. In “By the Seashore,” we get Lafferty’s weird invention, the sinister Geography Cone. Lafferty shells usually appear somewhat ugly or dangerous to the smart characters. One thinks of Albert in “Eurema’s Dam,” a slightly earlier version of the character type in Lafferty. He is a young boy whom his family considers dull, perhaps retarded (Lafferty’s word).

.” — Letter Of Lafferty’s novel titles, my favorite is The Devil Is Dead. In Lafferty’s case, the objection is not usually put so cogently. Here, we find a real difference between Chesterton and Lafferty because, no doubt about it, Lafferty’ Yet Lafferty’s cruelty is not cheap shot cruelty. But it will not look like good humor should one not share Lafferty’s ultimate horizon.

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.

Crucially for Lafferty, the place is located underwater. Lafferty then does something interesting. No writer before Lafferty suggests anything about good magicians. This seems to be pure Lafferty. Why does Lafferty do this? Lafferty may not have shared that view.

Like Lafferty’s New York School exercise “Other Kind of Animal,” “Red Headed Future” was not a story in which Lafferty seems to have had much faith. “Red Headed Future” is the definition of a minor Lafferty story. It is unpublished. It would most likely interest only the Lafferty completist. When Ravel comes to him, Lafferty lays it all out: Jimmy’s bottoming-out experience was, from a vantage

Lafferty’s “Mr. Hamadryad” is a difficult story. At least it is for me. Phantasmetaxis is a rhetorical strategy Lafferty often uses to build up the plot. Yes, this is one of Lafferty’s pessimistic animal eschatologies. It could be a lot worse, Lafferty seems to say. Lafferty is in one of his delightfully imaginative bad moods.

It was an endlessly generative passage in Lafferty’s hands. Lafferty did not accept that explanation, or at least did not find it sufficient. Lafferty obviously enjoyed imagining aliens. In Lafferty’s fiction, plausible figurations of the “other sheep” show up often. This human-larva theory is then contradicted by other texts Lafferty invents.

Lafferty wrote the unpublished dystopian short story “Vestige” in 1963, between two of his strong stories Aside from some unusual incidental detail, it is not much like the science fiction Lafferty usually writes Its premise, that original thought must be snuffed out into what Lafferty later calls post-consciousness Lafferty sees the threat of scapegoating deviates—who are, of course, ordinary people with the capacity Spiritual alienation in Lafferty is always worse than any Marxist form of economic alienation in the

It could change the whole world, because consciousness and world are aspects of the same process. It all reminds me of Kenneth Anger, whose Crowleyan films use music and ritual as more than decorative In Lafferty languate, it could change the ambient and create a recension. The phrase echoes Goethe’s Im Anfang war der Sinn in Faust, a connection reinforced by Lafferty’s fluency And despite what Sweeny would have the reader believe, Lafferty’s narrator is explicit: “About Sweeny