the Newis Glad:

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

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.”

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.

the most Recent installment:

White towers

White towers blank in the lamplight, clustered on the table, a clump of them quite tall at the one end, lowering in the middle, and the one lone tower taller than the rest there at the other end, all spread along the bank of a broad blue curl of river painted along one edge. Delicate bridges of foamcore and thread span the blue, and a little white boat between a couple of them, and at the foot of one, just past the lone tower, a bloom of color, towers and blocks in red and yellow and blue instead of white. In her purple gown she leans over it, her hair wrapped in a fine black scarf. “I’d no idea,” says Lymond behind her, “you could get wine in cans.”

He’s sitting sideways in an overstuffed armchair, the only chair in that wide room, both legs hooked over the one arm, leaning back against the other, and in his hand a plain silver can that says Pinot Gris in clean black simple letters.

“Is his majesty pleased?” she says.

“What, with today?” he says. “Didn’t go too badly, I guess.”

“Better than the wine?”

“Oh,” he chuckles, leaning down to set the can on the floor with exaggerated care. “I’m not about to touch the wine.”