“We already had the World of Fact. Oh, the poor, dingy, hopeless, small-minded World of Fact! It didn’t deserve much, but it deserved at least to have its nakedness clothed with metaphor and mythology. The World of Computers is bearable. The old World of Fact was ceasing to be. “Even the Quest for Reality of the talented but diminishing Group of Twelve has now changed (without their knowing it) into the Quest for Acceptable World Metaphor.” East of Laughter buries the lede, s

Giulio Romano, The Fall of the Giants, 1532–1534. Fresco, Sala dei Giganti, Palazzo Te, Mantua, Italy. "No, Atrox, you are wrong," Denis Lollardy said firmly. "You did not bury him in the ground, you buried him in your mind. And I found him there, for all of us can raid into your mind as you can raid into ours. And then I carved him out of fine travertine marble. He was one of my greatest forgeries, forgeries for which there was no physical original. Then I buried my magnific

That photo is of Knight with his friends Terry Bisson and R. A. Lafferty. In my office at the college, I keep it pinned to a corkboard. Someone once said, "Is that your dad?" Then I got to talk about Dan and RAL. Dan Knight is one of the heroes of Lafferty's publication history and one of my favorite people. I count him a dear friend. Without him, we would not have Dotty. We would not have More Than Melchisedech. We would not have many important Lafferty pieces. Knight was bu