the Newis Glad:

Things to keep in mind:
The secret of the pastoral.

The essential trick of the old pastoral, which was felt to imply a beautiful relation between rich and poor, was to make simple people express strong feelings (felt as the most universal subject, something fundamentally true about everybody) in learned and fashionable language (so that you wrote about the best subject in the best way). From seeing the two sorts of people combined like this you thought better of both; the best parts of both were used. The effect was in some degree to combine in the reader or author the merits of the two sorts; he was made to mirror in himself more completely the effective elements of the society he lived in.

The twenty-second; the forty-fifth.

In a day or so, then, I'll crack open the file for no. 46 and get that under way, while the first draft for no. 45 lies fallow. If you're a Patreon or Comrade, that means there'll be another couple-three months at least before you'll be seeing the actual start of the next bit of story, but at least you'll get two novelettes in reasonably close proximity, time-wise. Most likely. There's some slips yet, betwixt cup and lip.

(I trust when you see why, you'll understand, and appreciate. I hope, rather. Have I mentioned that this third season is, structurally speaking, the most complex, by far? —The third movement of any symphony is a dance movement, typically speaking, a burst of playful, even joyous energy, after the contemplative turn of the second. And so.)

Things to keep in mind:
The secret of allusion.

Although it is perfectly natural for a writer as steeped in literature as Nabokov to build his fiction on a literary allusion, the procedure has been adopted by many novelists and is hardly an indication that the focus on literature somehow carries the writer away from the world of experience outside literature. Fielding makes the Joseph story in Genesis central to Joseph Andrews; Joyce famously organizes the episodes of Ulysses as parallels to episodes in the Odyssey; Faulkner uses the biblical story of Absalom’s rebellion as a prism through which to see the catastrophic history of the American South.

the most Recent installment:

that Stern and Rough-hewn Hawk– Egg whites & Eschatology– Sky falls; Mountains crumble– three Answers–

That stern and rough-hewn hawk caged in his fingers the Duke’s leaning on his cane by the glass-topped café table, still in his long and camel-colored topcoat, a red-brown derby on his head. “Was there a riot in here?” he says as they open the door. Behind him by the bulky blond wood armoire Jessie arms folded in a double-breasted pinstripe coatdress, her hair in a tight bun, her lips carefully red.

“Get out,” says Jo, unshouldering the duffel bag and laying it and the narrow box on the floor. Ysabel behind her still in the little hallway kitchen.

“I came here out of concern,” says the Duke, “and frankly, I’m even more concerned, now–”

“Get out,” says Jo, laying a hand on the glass table-top.

“Words were said,” says the Duke. “In haste. By both of us, I’m not gonna deny it, but in all that heat I had a little light in mind and I’m worried it didn’t articulate in a fully appreciable manner. So maybe–”

“Get. Out,” says Jo.

“Breakfast,” says the Duke. “I can get us a private dining room at the Heathman, full spread buffet, we can talk, undisturbed–”

“We already ate,” says Ysabel, as Jo’s saying, “Dammit, Leo, get the fuck out of my apartment.”

“Jo!” snaps the Duke, and he tumps his cane-tip on the carpet. “Listen to me. This is important. If you cannot keep a roof over her head then all bets are off.”

Ysabel steps up close behind Jo then. Jessie’s looking down at the pile of clothing by her feet. “The fuck is that supposed to mean,” says Jo quietly.