the Newis Glad:

Things to keep in mind:
The secret of point of view.

This is a good place to discuss point of view in The Emperor of Gladness. Perhaps it is dry, technical, and petty, but point of view matters a great deal to me as a reader. Point of view describes the organizing intelligence of a story. It controls the time signature, the outlay of information, the mode of telling, the mediation of backstory, the integration of event and description into experience, which itself compounds into meaning. Point of view isn’t just first, second, or third person. It’s also verb tense. It’s whether something is experiential or summarized. It’s whether or not a story is retrospective. Whether it’s told focalized through this character or that other character. It controls what feels right in a story versus what feels extraneous or improper.

Things to keep in mind:
The secret of sitting bolt upright in that straight-backed chair.

Many readers of The Night Land, and more still who give up on the book, gag on its prose; The Night Land is a famously “difficult read.” For The Night Land, Hodgson devised an eccentric, faux seventeenth- or eighteenth-century style, convoluted and orotund, which even Lovecraft found “grotesque and absurd.” A few critics have supported Hodgson’s stylistic choice (Greer Gilman in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, Nigel Brown in “An Apology for the Linguistic Architecture of The Night Land”), but Murphy mounts an innovative defense. He asks us to see the difficulty of reading as an intrinsic element of weird fiction, a twinning of the reader’s efforts with those of the characters’—

#IZM2025.

I've written before, about my, well, I wouldn't say discomfort with the zine scene, no, I mean, maybe I'd go as high as out-of-placeness, but you put it like that, I mean, I tend to feel out of place just about anywhere I go, so. City of Roses is a number of things, a website, some books, an epic, an oddity, what I do with what time I can spare, but it has always been a zine.

the most Recent installment:

Six of them– Milo, Dub, Jonesy & Goose – a Capital suggestion– no Shout, no Cry, not a Word– Who He is–

Six of them in the room, and him, slouched in the doorway, hands tucked in the pockets of his grimy sweatshirt. “That you spend time,” the withered old man is saying. “And I pay money, for that time.” A low, incantatory growl, a bellows-rasp of breath between each phrase. “That I buy, your time. How. How can I, buy time.” Sunlight glowers behind heavy ruddy drapes drawn over a picture window. “Hand me some time. Put, in my hands, an hour of your day.” He’s sitting in the big brown leather recliner, leaning forward, soft shoulders warmly wrapped in an old quilt. “See what good,” he says, and under the quilt a hand jolts, and another wheeze of breath, “it does. Either of us. Some of you.” One of those eyes squinted shut by a snarl of wrinkles, radiating from that sunken nose. “Think it’s your effort. Not time, but labor. Work. That if you try. That if you strive. That’s what I want. That’s what I pay for. But I don’t. Pay you. What I want. What I want.”

The XO’s there, across the room, frowning around the stiffness of his scar, and three men on the couch, the two of them at either end upright, elbows on knees, the one in a soft plaid workshirt, a steaming cup in his hand, the other in a brown and blue down vest, empty hands scraped rawly red about the knuckles, and between the two of them Jasper, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, grizzled head in his hands. “We, built,” the CO’s saying, from his recliner, “the finest country, the shining city, our green Jerusalem. We did that.” One hand springs from the quilt, clawed in a fist. “No one paid us. No one. Paid. Us.” There in the corner, Moody sips his coffee, watching the XO, who’s watching the CO. “We built it. It was ours. Until the others came, and took it.”

At that, he pulls his hood up, ducks back around the doorway, away down the unlit hall.