My working theory is that the best anchor for The Devil Is Dead  is its flat statement that “the Brunhilde sailed on November 7, a Friday morning.” Lafferty is usually vague about the year. He even writes that “the year is uncertain.” But then he does something odd: he supplies the day of the week, an inadvertent calendrical lock. He would have noticed. November 7 is R. A. Lafferty’s birthday, and it falls on a Friday in only three plausible postwar years: 1947, 1952, and 195

The first of a series of posts. For about a month, I have been typing up a Lafferty compendium, which is full of fascinating material: a partially written Camiroi story about a rhino fair, clues to the “Men Who Knew Everything” story sequence, an abandoned sequel to “Slow Tuesday Night,” reasonably worked out stories such as the "The Wheel and the Shoosh" about the invention of time/being and space, abandoned poetry, where Lafferty derived titles (“And Mad Undancing Bears”),

The "Distinction and Adornment of the World" is a scholastic phrase which covers our own province and position. The ‘Distinction’ is the special focusing on our own world apart from the billions of other worlds, all special, but not all special to us. It is the scale and site we are on. The ‘Adornment’ is the process and movement and composition, and finally the Flora and Fauna (including ourselves). Sure, we are an adornment, and so is all the other furniture of the world. T