the Newis Glad:

Things to keep in mind:
The secret of landscape.

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.

Summer is here, if you want it.

Now that nos. 45 and 46 are complete and 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.

Things to keep in mind:
The secret of law.

The aptness of this satire in 2025—in which the law is even presuming to rule on biological “reality”—draws attention to the similarities between the 2020s and the 1920s, which seem much closer to the present now than, say, the 1940s or 1950s. Like our current government, the good burghers of Lud-in-the-Mist can’t counter, or even account for, the ongoing collapse of the dominant symbolic order around their ears because they are unable to recognise on ideological grounds the very forces that are opposing them.

the most Recent installment:

a Running shoe, blue & brown

A running shoe in one hand, blue and brown, a square-toed Oxford black in the other, he stands there, looking from one to the other, “Where was I,” he says. Setting them both on the counter, he pushes the running shoe over to the woman on the other side, holding the mate, brown and blue. Her jacket and her long brown hair dark with rain. She puts hers by the one he’s given her, “So, now what?” she says. “Do I put them on?” and he shrugs. “You can, if you like,” he says. “They’re shoes.” He drops the lone black Oxford onto the jumbled pile of shoes at his feet. “Welcome to Portland,” he says.

Patter of rain against plastic tarps, blue and green, garbage bags stretched over flattened cardboard boxes, a lean-to strapped to the high wire fence along the sidewalk. A curl of freeway overhead, a shadowed mass above the streetlight, and the blank black sky beyond. His grimy hoodie blotched with rain, he kneels at one end of it, lifting a flap, “Hey,” he says. “I’m with the XO. Jefe’s here?” Three or four figures lying under the shelter, on old blankets, a sleeping bag, more flattened cardboard. One of them maybe nods. “So who are you,” says another one, but the fence rings as he curls up against it, sitting himself as much under the shelter as he can get. His eyes narrowed over cheekbones hunched. “I’ll tell you tomorrow,” he says.