I think “solidarity” is what Freaky Tales would call it, a movie which, believe it or not, I’m actually going to talk about. But again: I’ve given myself permission to write the longest essay anyone will write about Freaky Tales, as an exercise, experiment, statement, and/or self-indulgence; I like writing, and I am enjoying writing this, so I am. But the more I write, the more that length gives permission to anyone who doesn’t want to read it—even encourages them—to close the browser and move on. You’re not stuck with me, after all, the way you have no choice but to see a mural as you drive past it each day. You can go find something you like better and leave me to my fun. The internet is a very different space than a wall, or the running time of a film. It’s essentially unlimited in a very specific way: You can write as much as you want on it, spend as much time and fill as much space on the blank canvas of your word document as your silly heart desires, and no one else’s space will be infringed or diminished by it. Nothing’s keeping you here, and you are as welcome to stay as you are to leave. No one is charging you rent.
Posted 9 days ago.
A sharp eye might’ve noticed some changes to the various outlets listed on the Books page, as other places where: Spectator Books in Oakland has been added, there’s a selection of zines on the shelves there now, so if you find yourself on that side of the Bay, head on over, say hi; and but also, Smashwords has been removed.
Which is rather a shame: I’ve been listed with Smashwords almost since I’ve had ebooks—they were the non-Amazon place I sold non-Kindle editions, aside from directly, myself. —But Smashwords was purchased by and integrated with Draft2Digital, and Draft2Digital has announced two new fees: a new account activation fee of twenty dollars, which is annoying on principal (pay us to allow us to take a portion of the sales you make through us, that’s never a good look) but wouldn’t’ve affected myself; and a maintenance fee of twelve dollars, charged annually to every account that didn’t sell a hundred dollars or more in the previous annum.
Draft2Digital insists the fees are needed to combat genAI slop, but that rationale crumbles at the slightest investigation—the new account fees, perhaps, but the maintenance fee’s a joke in that context: slopsters are going to clear a hundred bucks a year without blinking; that’s why they’re in the game, after all. It’s us handcrafted indie oddballs with no gusto for marketing that will end up paying—in all those years I’d been listed there, I’d yet to clear a hundred bucks total myself, much less per any given twelvemonth. The decision to decamp was easily made.
Ebooks will still be distributed far and wide via Ingram; the loss for me, here, aside from continuity, is some library access, but that can be somewhat remedied by signing up with Kobo, which I might’ve already done, some time ago, I dunno. Who can remember which among the infinitude of available accounts they’ve created as a byproduct of trying to get by in this benighted age. We’ll see.
Posted 14 days ago.
Maya S. Cade
Boots, do you think audiences are ready for the kind of leftist, solution‑oriented art you’re presenting to them?
Boots Riley
I think they’ve been more ready than the media wants us to believe. When I was in high school in the 1980s, they got on the PA system and called me a communist. That didn’t make people afraid of me. It made a lot of them think, “Oh, the government doesn’t like this dude—that must be cool.” That was the “me” decade, supposedly apolitical, but that was my experience. Then after 9/11, my band had an album with the Twin Towers blowing up on the cover—which we’d done before the attacks. Afterward, we were on MTV‑sponsored tours, on Fox News, all that. My bandmates thought I was going to get shot if we went through the Midwest and the South, especially because I was stopping shows to speak openly against the bombing of Afghanistan. Not Iraq—Afghanistan, right after 9/11. Everywhere we went—Montana, Michigan, Florida, Texas—I’d stop the music, say my piece, and get thunderous applause. So much of the job with being in the media is to make you think you’re the most left person in any room, that everyone else is more conservative than you. But that’s not what I was feeling on the ground. Then you had Occupy, which was very radical in its language and its targets, happening in pretty much every town. You look at how people responded to Sorry to Bother You: the thing folks had trouble with wasn’t the politics—it was the horse dicks. That’s what got people. I heard story after story: “My Republican parents loved it.” Later, during the 2020 strikes and other workplace actions, I was getting dozens of messages from organisers saying, “We were trying to convince people that a strike was possible. It wasn’t landing. Then we screened Sorry to Bother You and that flipped the switch.” Workers would be texting, “Equi‑Sapiens, let’s be out,” and using the film as a reference point for real‑world action.
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.
—Black Fire: Charles Burnett and Boots Riley in Conversation
Posted 43 days ago.
Miyazawa Iori
This “relationship” doesn’t necessarily have to be “love,” love is one of the things this colossal “something” envelops within itself. I think at this point everyone can agree that the definition of yuri as just “love between two women” is no longer applicable. This “something” that connects two women together is sometimes referred to as an “unidentified enormous emotion.” This concept dates back to around 2016. The better you depict the change in the “emotions,” the more “high-resolution,” the more real the work of fiction will feel. High-resolution yuri is “strong” yuri.
Mizoguchi Rikimaru
Do you theorize that yuri can be classified by its “strength”?
Miyazawa Iori
I didn’t come up with the words “strong yuri,” but I do always strive to write strong yuri. Which is, basically, to depict human beings. Though it’s been said that this is what science fiction have never been good at since time immemorial.
Mizoguchi Rikimaru
But I feel that some authors these days manage to depict yuri without actually depicting humans.
Miyazawa Iori
True... [Both end up glancing at Kusano Gengen sitting in the audience.] But let’s return to the subject at hand.
—Yuri made me human:
interview with Miyazawa Iori
Posted 64 days ago.
The poet begins as “vncouthe,” that is, anonymous, unknkown and unexperienced; his aim is to become both “kent” or known, and “kenning” or knowing—experienced enough to be an accomplished author, and recognized as such by the world at large. 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. The self-consciousness of Spenser’s first major work thus involves a paratextual form which “in its deictic frame structured like a set of Chinese boxes, or perhaps of receding mirrors” goes further than mere self-presentation, to an immanent comment upon the epistemological role of criticism and its place at the core of literary production.
Posted 84 days ago.
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:
And now, back and back again to volume 6. I should be done with the first draft of no. 48, I mean I’m hoping it’ll be by the beginning of May, and then we’ll start pulling it all together. I hadn’t initially planned on releasing the novelettes of season 3 in closely matched pairs, but that’s how it’s going, so far. Further bulletins etc.
Posted 84 days ago.
It is time-honored framing. This without that. An object of desire dangled; a problem proffered; a proprietary solution presented. What goes unspoken, however: “This” is never actually… “this.” Who can honestly say they have eaten a baked or air-fried anything that was as gloriously, shatteringly crisp as it would be if it emerged from a vat of hot oil, still sizzling on its way to a resting rack, every molecule of moisture on its crystalline surface squealing? Without “that,” the thing in question simply cannot be “this.” It can be delicious, wonderful even, worth making and making again. But it cannot be “this.”
Want to make carnitas without all the fat? Bolognese without the wait? Why? Why when there are so many pork dishes that are not confited, so many Italian pasta sauces that don’t require hours of simmering. If “that” is to be avoided for whatever reason, it feels like a failure of the imagination to stay stuck on “this.” We, editors and readers alike, are all drinking the same very contemporary, very American flavor of Kool-Aid, keeping up the charade that we can have everything we want and nothing that we don’t, even as our lives feel harder and tighter. Perhaps our time could be more productively and pleasurably spent imagining that another world is possible.
Why not just ask a different question? Like: What if crispy wasn’t the only thing that chicken wings could be? What if they wanted to be… wet?
Posted 98 days ago.
The existence of the murals had leaked out of the rail yards by the late 1940s. “Art blooms in strange places but in all Portland perhaps the strangest is under the Lovejoy ramp to the Broadway bridge,” the Oregon Journal offered in passing.
A reporter at The Oregonian took a wrong turn coming out of downtown one evening, dodged an oncoming freight train, and unexpectedly found himself “surrounded by birds and animals” as well as “a fantastic half-tree, half-human that grappled with the night.”
In 1962, newspaper columnist Doug Baker mentioned the murals, calling them “Daliesque works,” perhaps attracted to the drawing of the man who’d turned into a tree—an image from Greek mythology.
Baker cheekily pointed out that while Stefopoulos didn’t get to do any drawing at his present Spokane, Portland & Seattle Railway posting, he “still manifests an interest in art. On the wall of his shack at NW 14th and Thurman there’s a single picture—a Playboy ‘Playmate’.”
Despite the occasional mention of the Lovejoy Columns in local newspapers in the 1950s and early ’60s, Stefopoulos wasn’t particularly aware that his murals had become a minor attraction. He rarely saw the drawings himself anymore, skirting his old, under-the-viaduct spot when he headed home from work.
Rather than retreat to his cramped, second-floor room at Northwest Couch Street and Third Avenue, he invariably settled in at the nearby Tacoma Café, where he had his mail sent.
“Here, says a woman who knew him, he was despondent,” Portland writer Bill Donahue related years later. “He drank—ouzo, beer, whiskey. When he didn’t show up at the Tacoma Café or one of the all-male Greek coffeehouses Old Town had in those days, friends would go looking for him.”
These were indeed his friends, but they were drinking friends.
Posted 143 days ago.
As usual, Eddison’s prose in The Mezentian Gate is unsurpassedly beautiful, flowing with the richness of Zimiamvia’s divine realms and creating a world that is bombastically larger than life, exploding with vibrant energy and emotion and wit and intelligence. A choice example can be found at the opening of chapter two:
It was eight months after that meeting in Mornagay: mid-March, and mid-afternoon. Over-early spring was busy upon all that grew or breathed in the lower reaches of the Revarm. Both banks, where the river winds wide between water-meadows, were edged with daffodils; and every fold of the rising ground, where there was shelter from north and east for the airs to dally in and take warmth from the sunshine, held a mistiness of faint rose-colour: crimp-petalled blossomed, with the leaf-buds scarcely as yet beginning to open, of the early plum. Higher in the hillsides pasque-flowers spread their tracery of soft purple petal and golden centre. A little downstream, on a stretch of shingle that lay out from this right bank into the river, a merganser drake and his wife stood preening themselves, beautiful in their whites and bays and iridescent greens. It was here about the high limit of the tides, and from all the marshland with its slowly emptying creeks and slowly enlarging flats (for the ebb was well on its way) of mud and ooze, came the bubbling cascade of notes as curlew answered curlew amid cries innumerable of lesser shore-birds; plover and sandpiper, turnstone and spoonbill and knot and fussy redshank, fainter and fainter down the meanderings of the river to where, high upon crags which rose sudden from water-level to shut out the prospect southwards, two-horned Rialmar sat throned.
This is a truly magnificent passage and we see in it Eddison’s similarities to Tolkien, Peake, and earlier pre-genre fantasy writers who understood landscape—and the artful rendering of it in literary form—to be absolutely integral to making their fantasy worlds, in some sense, real or real-seeming, and a key aspect of the verisimilitude so many fantasy writers use at the same time to denaturalize readers’ from their own world, rendering “reality” in new, critical perspectives. The scene begins with a moment in the changing of the seasons that quietly transitions readers from the big reveal at the end of the first chapter, and from there pulls the reader almost as a camera might move slowly through a forest in the opening scene of a film, lingering on tiny images and small happenings that each seem so delicately real and together prove the hapticity of this fantasy world. Eddison pulls us gently through the landscape, enlivening it with color and temperature and texture, with animal inhabitants, with the sounds of their lives, just enough that we understand what it might be like to be not just in Zimiamvia but here, on the banks of the Revarm river in early spring, until he suddenly shifts our perspective away from this temporary elysium to a lofty mountain rising high above it all—an abode of the gods, the seat of the Fingiswold palace, the birthplace of Mezentius, the god who will do the impossible and die. The book abounds with such powerful imagery, familiarizing us with the impossible, making Zimiamvia more real, perhaps, than reality…
Posted 151 days ago.
First, and I should have done this sooner, here’s the cover reveal for the 46th novelette, June 24th:
Patreons and Comrades have seen it already; Patreons and Comrades have, in fact, already received their electronic copies, and paper copies are forthcoming. (A bit of a hitch in the mailing: turns out when you use padded envelopes, which is all I had in the moment, the post office won’t let you select First Class Mail, but requires a rather more expensive package rate. Re-enveloping will be necessary.)
Now that nos. 45 and 46 are complete and here in the world, a number of elements of this new season, Summer, the third season of the epic, might well be coming into focus. —Head over to Chapbooks, and scroll down to the brand new section where the third season chapbooks will be collected, and you’ll notice that no. 45 is the first installment of vol. 5, the Greene Chapel—and that no. 46 is the first installment of vol. 6, Eleleu Ie.
(I did mention that the structure of the third season would be the most complex, by far; that third movements of symphonies are, typically, dance movements.)
Summer will be leaning into the geographic separation of our two protagonists, Jo and Ysabel, that occurred at the end of Spring; Summer. Each novelette will focus particularly on the one, or the other, on Newport, or Portland, but there will be an epistolary component, as well, as they write letters to each other over the course of the season. (Thus, my peculiar difficulties in being unable to finish no. 45 until I’d written enough of no. 46 to have a feel for the letter Ysabel would send to be read in no. 45.) The season will alternate (mostly), but each volume will collect the novelettes particular to the one, or the other: thus, the Green Chapel is Jo’s volume, and Eleleu Ie is Ysabel’s, and when all is said and done, you’ll be able to read it whichever way you’d like.
Re-runs, meanwhile, have gotten through all of the first season, and have just begun the second, so it’ll be a while before any installments of the third season appear here, for free (September 14th, 2026, or thenabouts.) —Patreons and Comrades will get their copies as we go, as per usual; if you’re not yet either, you can order paper copies, or, we’ll try something, you can pick up electronic copies from itch.
Anyway. Here we go: Summer.
Posted 171 days ago.
