the Newis Glad:

Things to keep in mind:
The secret of sorcerers.

Sorcerers have always held the anomalous position, at the edge of the fields or woods. They haunt the fringes. They are at the borderline of the village, or between villages. The important thing is their affinity with alliance, with the pact, which gives them a status opposed to that of filiation. The relation with the anomalous is one of alliance. The sorcerer has a relation of alliance with the demon as the power of the anomalous.

Things to keep in mind:
The secret of a moral universe.

Recently, I went to see a Rothko exhibit with my friend Adam. We were in Paris, and the city was gray and cold. On my way to the Fondation Louis Vuitton, I walked through a wooded area. I looked up, and there were pine trees. For a few moments, I couldn’t walk because I was so flattened by the sight of these enormous trees. They were bare of needles. The scaly bark was an ashen purple. The branches were dark as they spread out over the milky veil of the sky. I used to run through pine forests with my cousins. The pine tree is an indelible image of my childhood. But something about seeing them there, when I least expected it, thousands of a miles away from the pine trees of my youth, the trees which had been cut down to pay for booze and which would never be replaced, all this time and distance away from those lost trees, to have encountered them in Paris, my life so radically transformed, startled me.

Various sundries.

Happy Labor Day! Today is for me the fourth of a four-day weekend, so I feel I’m doing the holiday justice—though I have been engaged more than usual in the work of self-promotion over the course of it, which is in itself laborious. Ah, well. Let’s get to it:

Things to keep in mind:
The secret of sin.

Her name was Opal. She didn’t become a friend. She was more like a rival. She had flour to the elbow like long white gloves and she clicked that stud while she waited for me to get to the end of a sentence I was in no hurry to get to the end of, because the ordering was the point and the pizza was a formality. “The Pig Kahuna.” Back bacon, thin pineapple, red onion, chopped cilantro, hot honey. I told her how I wanted it built and she built it, layer by layer, with the flat, unhurried patience of a woman dealing cards she knows you can’t afford. The hot honey came last, always last, and she held the bottle at a height that made a thin line of it and I watched the line and she watched me watch it. There are women who will make your food exactly how you asked, and there are women who will make you watch. I ate the slice standing up. I did not taste it once that entire year.

the most Recent installment:

Dark, but not Silent – all 87 Episodes – telling the Wolf – a Phone call to Darfur –

The room’s dark, but not silent, a wheezing pulse in, and out, in, and out, quiet but relentless until, a whistling hitch in the rhythm, a stirring, rustling, someone’s rolling over on one of those two so-similar beds, there’s someone also on the other bed, still, for now, and silent, as the tone of that quietly regular rhythm climbs, and shrills, then settles, a notch higher, perhaps, than before. In, then out, in, and out, a fluted draw, a whistling exhalation, until, a hork, another, briefer shift, the rhythm’s awry, overwhelmed by a single perpetual unstopped wheeze, much louder, out and out and out. That other figure, silent but no longer still, hitched up on an elbow, colorless hair a-sway, “Ma!” the whispered exhortation, and then, a bit louder, “Ma!” A shift, a whip, a shadowy pillow flung across the gap between beds but too hard, over and past, whump and whuffle against and down the wall on the far side, flump to the carpet, and still that exhaling wheeze.

“Ma!” Not so much louder, but much more exhortative, yet still that whining, wheezing outflow, and nothing flowing in. Shuffle scrumble out from under a comforter into the narrow aisle between beds to crouch, shove against the other mattress, bed-frame thump but still that incessant whining leak. A plastic housing on the nightstand between the beds, a separate, breathy whirr from it, along a corrugated plastic tube drooped toward the woman asleep, her cheek on the pillow, turned away, dark hair lankly spread, white comforter up to her chin, that tube laid over a mounded shoulder to a plastic mask loosely skewed over mouth and nose, and all the air that rushes from it. Jo leans over the sleeping figure, reaching gingerly to touch, adjust, that mask, to settle it more certainly, a high-pitched keening suddenly snuffed with a whuffing suck, the quiet rhythm resumed, in, and out, the whistled draw, the fluting exhalation, she draws back, but there’s a hitch, a hum, a cheek turning up from the pillow, “What, what?” the muffled mutter.

“Your mask, Ma. It was loose.”