This is a very miscellaneous post about a text I have wanted to write about for a few months: To Aurelia, With Horns . It can hardly be called a version of Aurelia,  but it is a kind of drafting out of ideas that were later repurposed for it, even if 90 percent of those ideas were drained away. There is zero St. Thomas Aquinas here, which will be surprising for anyone who has read Aurelia. Altogether, it is one of the strangest Lafferty documents that I have read. Enough of i

"The Covenant,” it said. “Large, hard-roasted, de-oiled, white peanuts under the Goober John trade name. Three a day, and they must be Goober John Number Ones. Failure to provide them will void the Covenant.” “There will be no failure,” said Malcomb ‘the Marvelous’McGruder. “It shall be done.” “We like-stuff pledge fulfill the Covenant,” it said. In his review of The Best of R. A. Lafferty  for the Los Angeles Review of Books , Matt Keely writes: “Lafferty was an electrical e

“With the Jews the women remain always a little better; and this is a people that also unfolds slightly on further acquaintance and also disappoints; for while we are discovering new virtue in them, we are finding that much of their assumed worth is made out of air.” — Carl Curlee, Hell to Pay Hell To Pay is an abandoned Lafferty novel that Lafferty started at some point but didn’t record, then picked up again in 1959 and 1961. Apparently, it was to be a retelling of the Fau