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:

Dust & Darkness– at This hour– a Handful of City– 20 Fucking minutes–

Dust within, and darkness, the lights from the parking lot outside barely reaching the stack of drywall, the buckets, the mound of garbage there beyond, gutted boxes, shucked plastic clamshells, shriveled and crumpled plastic and paper wraps. They look about as they file in, one by one, Pwyll in his long embroidered coat, and Medoro in his work jacket, Astolfo in his sweats, Gerlin with a stained apron about his belly, Peg Greentooth, her hair gone black in the shadows, and bringing up the rear in his short brown jacket Luys, who closes the scuffed glass doors.

Out across the darkness of that great empty space a single light, a desk lamp back there, perched atop a lone, mostly intact filing cabinet, dimly illuminating a twisted tangle of torn metal and some great fallen bell, and Jo, in her black T-shirt, her black jeans, sitting on an upended drawer, smoke curling from the cigarette in her hand. “Come on,” she says, leaning down to stub it out, then flicking the dead butt away as she stands. “Over here. Careful of the pictures.”

Scattered over the filthy concrete, the edges and the corners of them caught in the weak light, a thousand photographs, and another thousand, and more, and they pick their way across the room from one clear spot to the next. “You’re gonna step on some,” says Jo. “Can’t be helped. It’s okay. Just, be careful. Okay,” she says. “Okay. I ain’t Leo,” and she’s looking about them as they look from one to another, “I think we’re all pretty clear on that,” and it’s nothing like laughter, or even smiles, but still the rustling, the relaxing, the settling that spreads among them, and “I don’t know you,” she says. “I didn’t come up with you. We never hung out together. I never did what you do, and you don’t do what I’ve done. I don’t know you, and that’s,” she’s looking away, aside, “I’m not your Duke,” she says. “I’m the Duchess.”