On the left are four pillars with a roof on them, the whole constructed to protect a wooden pillar which Eliot and Lafferty both had a solution: myth. While Lafferty never loses his interest in irony (it is pervasive), he becomes increasingly aware of He becomes the Whole Lafferty. While only Lafferty could have written “Pig in a Pokey,” the story is slyly dependent on repackaging

century, and American decay; and its place in his peak writing years is a brute fact that shaped his whole Lafferty’s family line of devils. Every Lafferty reader will quickly see that Lafferty is anti-Communist. The invaders predictably invade again, now with the backing of the whole communist world. From within the Whole Lafferty, the Vietnam War is a mythically charged spiritual battle against demonic

Advanced Lafferty. Lafferty a figure of the realized eschaton. Lafferty detested this. This is conspiratorial Lafferty. Lafferty writes: “It's Josue's horn!”

This is where Lafferty’s satire of Jung is sharpest. If you've read Space Chantey (1968), you know Lafferty often plays conceptual games of this sort. The final piece of Hopp-Equation Space satire is how Lafferty inflates Jung's cherished principle of In analytical psychology, compensation is the psyche’s built-in self-regulation, but Lafferty warps it writing his novel: "But how can a human being stand the tension of feeling himself at one with the whole

Lafferty writes both stories with the eyes of Apocalypse in mind. or a whole world,” the patrick Croll said. Does monstrous abundance have much of a place in Lafferty when severed from a theistic cosmos? What are perfect monsters in Lafferty? What makes Lafferty’s monsters Laffertian is that their sublimity reaches perfection when they become

"LAUGHING KELLY" Black comedy about the burials of several Lafferty characters. Lafferty having fun. "SYLVESTER" Surreal and melancholy. Lafferty was fascinated by the backbrain. Remember what Lafferty says about that. "INTERNAL DOCTOR HARVEY LEE" One of Lafferty's great pieces of light verse.

Most readers, sooner or later, will ricochet off some part of Lafferty. This is where the giant motorcyclist Whole-Hog McCloud rides out, giving us some of Lafferty’s best writing Lafferty pushes affect to the point of decision. Lafferty wanted to do more. Another one for the Lafferty playlist.

Its title will be familiar to Lafferty readers because he later used it for the climax of Arrive at Easterwine Lafferty practically writes a prose poem on an expanded haruspicy: the reading of snakes’ bellies and Lafferty incorporated the story chiefly into chapters 11 and 12 of Arrive at Easterwine. A few passages will show how Lafferty did it, moving from outside Epikt to inside him: A while ago, someone asked what I thought of Lafferty’s depiction of Epikt as AI.

While thinking about Past Master (1968), I returned to Lafferty’s short story "Condillac’s Statue or On the whole, I doubt he would have had much patience for it—the philosophical assumptions behind the (I would put money on Lafferty having consulted it while writing the story, likely alongside his copy Lafferty’s subtitle points to what he is up to in "Condillac’s Statue." These are always fun moments in Lafferty.)

From the very top you would be able to see whole islands that nobody else had seen, to see whole ships They are all special pieces of the Lafferty canon, and one wishes Lafferty had written more like them Readers first encounter one of Lafferty’s great images of childhood: piracy as the Laffertian correlate it is rendered with Lafferty’s genius for the grotesque. A significant Lafferty coinage.

It’s Down the Slippery Stairs” A few quick notes on being totalizing: I believe readers need a total Lafferty But in Lafferty’s case, you lose something essential by ignoring it outright. In the same way, Lafferty totalized because he was an old-fashioned Catholic—and Catholic means universal The irony is that people haven’t yet assembled enough of the logocentric Lafferty even to deconstruct Lafferty, as we know, disliked Marxists.

Each represents a rough precinct of (parodied) modern knowledge (which, following Lafferty, we might syllabus of post-consciousness); each “doctor” has a professional deformation and advances the themes Lafferty I think of him being the way Lafferty saw Jung: very wrong, but not quite as wrongheaded as many other Each specialist's deformation distorts the movement toward that perfected whole, which Lafferty calls beyond that McCory's endlessly enchained mathematics, which ties into what I have elsewhere called Lafferty