City of Roses is a serialized epic firmly set in Portland, Oregon: a wicked concoction of urban pastoral and incantatory fantastic, where a grocers’ warehouse might become a palace, and an antique bank is hidden beneath a department store.
Boots Riley
So for me, the question isn’t “Is the public ready?” I start from: the public already knows things are messed up. The public is more open than we’re told. The question I ask myself is: how do I move people emotionally towards imagining something they can do? Not “the” solution, but a solution—something that shifts them from “It’s all hopeless” to “Maybe we can try this.” That’s what I’m after.
Miyazawa Iori
It’s true that I don’t want to say anything... I think there’s this mutual understanding among yuri fans, “don’t talk about yuri, make yuri.” If I accidentally blurt something out, it’ll provoke a flame war, and I don’t want to have what I say here spread around with a totally different meaning. And if it does, I’ll have to slice you all in half. I’ll be talking today with these feelings in mind.
The first of these aims will result in his being “kissed” or praised by the reading public and his courtly audience, but at the same time can only result from being “kissed” or touched by critical contact. If the poet remains unnoticed by criticism (“vnkisste”) he will always remain obscure (“vncouthe”) in the twin senses of unheard-of but also invisible, unavailable to the consciousness of his potential readers. The one who can provide him not only with fame but, at one level, his very existence, is the already knowledgeable EK.
Actually, having gone back to volume 5 already, I’ve finished the first draft of no. 47, and I’m a couple-thousand deep in the first draft of no. 48, which means I’m back again in volume 6, but today, today we’re doing the cover reveal for no. 47, which is in volume 5—thus, the title.
Anyway: the cover for no. 47, June 29th:
Pounding pounding, hurling herself against the demure brown door, “You must!” she cries. Adjusting her baggy grey coat she rattles the knob that will not turn. “Open!” she roars, kicks, hurls herself again. It shivers inward, tripping her staggering into a stairwell with a spray of splinters, “Hello?” she calls, pushing back her cloud of white-gold hair. Something saggy flops in her other hand.
Up the stairs then, pounding, back along a balustraded hall past the first door, ajar, to the second. She smacks it with the heel of her hand. “Open!” she calls. “I must speak with you!” Pounding. “Hello!” A deep breath. “I know you are within,” she says, more quietly. “It is of vital importance that I speak with you.”
Clack and scrape, the rattle of a bolt. The door opens enough to show a man peering over a taut-stretched security chain. “You shouldn’t be here,” he says, low and close.
“But I am. I bear news of utmost importance.”
“I don’t give a shit if it’s life or death,” he hisses, “if you wake her, I’m gonna,” but then he catches himself, deflating.
“It concerns the roof over her head,” says Marfisa, “the floor, beneath her feet.”
He leans close to the gap, scowling. “How did you,” he says. “Who are you.”
“Eddie?” a querulous voice from somewhere behind him. He sags even more, shaking his head, dwindling hair of it clipped close. “Nothing, ma’am,” he says. “Solicitor. Go on, now. You need your rest.”
“Nothing, hell,” that voice. “Go on. Let ’em in.”
“Long, complex with a lyrical rhythm to it that’s intoxicating.”
“—to explain how this is Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks plus Portlandia with a smattering of Little, Big and Chinatown.”
“…a flicker of sharp impressionistic scenes skittering atop a deeply imagined alternate present.”
