City of Roses is a serialized epic firmly set in Portland, Oregon, only with more sword fights: a wicked concoction of urban pastoral and incantatory fantastic, where aspirants are knighted in Forest Park, and the Devil keeps a morgue in an abandoned big-box store.
Miyazawa Iori
It’s true that I don’t want to say anything... I think there’s this mutual understanding among yuri fans, “don’t talk about yuri, make yuri.” If I accidentally blurt something out, it’ll provoke a flame war, and I don’t want to have what I say here spread around with a totally different meaning. And if it does, I’ll have to slice you all in half. I’ll be talking today with these feelings in mind.
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.
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:
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.
1510, says the scrap of paper in her hand, and 201. Across the street a small sign elegantly plain over demure glass doors says 1510– the Hawthorne. “Huh,” says Ettie, in her black shorts, her cropped blue sweater.
The doors are locked. A small black speaker on the wall beside them, and a keypad, she presses 2, then 0, then 1. The pound key, after a moment. A click, and the timbre of the stillness shifts, opens with a faint hiss. The loud burr of something ringing, then another click. That hiss still tugs the air. “Hello?” she says. “Starling? It’s, ah, Stephanie. Étienne Limoges?” A truck sighs down the side street, chasing its morning shadow. “Hello?” she says.
A beep, and the latch of the glass doors disengages with a thunk.
Up a switchbacked flight of stairs to a courtyard mezzanine, and more doors of demurely clouded glass, a bicycle hung upright, a rainbowed parasol furled against an unlit grill. The door at the end, opening slowly as she approaches, has the numerals 201 set in the brick beside it. The woman stood there wears a blackly simple maillot, trimmed in lurid pink, her dark hair pixie-cut. “Starling?” says Ettie. “I would’ve called,” but the woman’s turning away. “Can I come in?”
Past an unused coat closet an emptily spotless kitchen, bamboo and stainless steel. A sturdy pole’s been bolted floor to the low ceiling’s edge. Ettie steps around it into an open space that leaps two storeys up or more, the front wall unbroken glass that looks out over the street below. In the sunlight a couple of sleekly angular chairs, and sat to the left a thick-set woman in a white lab coat, black leather satchel on the floor by her sensible shoes, and to the right a young man, shirtsleeves gartered, scissors and thread-hanks and papers of pins tucked in the bib of his leather apron. A beat thumps quietly somewhere, and an airy drone of pipes, a crooning monotone, these are your broken arms, all a the legs a Irish kings, these three sad things. “Starling?” says Ettie.
“—to explain how this is Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks plus Portlandia with a smattering of Little, Big and Chinatown.”
