the Newis Glad:

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.

Things to keep in mind:
The secret of vampirism, among other things.

Certainly there is no future for the genre except as a metaphor within some other work. By now the whole complex of ideas has passed so into the general culture that it is conceivable in art only as lyric imagery or as affectionate reminiscence. In fact, the vampire tradition has hardly been used in lyric verse—I can only remember one poem in Fantasy and Science Fiction. I always thought Italian directors would do very well with vampires as cultural symbols for the rotten rich—many of the traditions about the vampire are close to the atmosphere of films like La Notte or La Dolce Vita.

Summer is icumen in.

Well, sort of: even as the season out there wanes, and pumpkin spices ever so slightly begin to waft, we’re on the verge of launching the third season of the epic: Summer. —The first draft of no. 46 should be done this month, which means revisions and finalizations of no. 45 might begin this month, as well; I am confident if not certain that it will be released in October: the first novelette in vol. 5, The Greene Chapel; the beginning of, well, Summer.

the most Recent installment:

the Locomotive– majestic Generosity–

The locomotive stubby, boxy, there between brick-walled warehouses, an idling rumble so large and full they step around, move through it, a dozen or so in coveralls, toward the lone boxcar coupled to the end. A couple clamber up on the walkway running back up the side of the locomotive to knock the panels of it, peer in the vents, wreathed in the streetlight tangled on steaming exhaust. The rest cluster about a sliding door in the side of the boxcar, splashed with graffiti. A lever’s thrown, latches undone with booms that echo under the rumble, that door slides open even as an overhead door grates up on the warehouse there, snort a forklift pulling out onto the loading dock, and shouts, arms waving, someone in coveralls leaping up on the dock to confer heatedly with a man in shirtsleeves. The woman behind the wheel of the forklift holds up a clipboard. The rest of them all in coveralls form up a line across the street, from boxcar to loading dock, hup! a shout as swung from the boxcar comes an enormous burlap sack, hup! as it’s caught and passed to the next, and the next, even as a second swings out, a third, as the first’s heaved up on the dock, neatly dropped on the forklift’s waiting pallet, and the next, with grunts and whups of bags passed hand to hand down the line. I’m the man, someone chants, the publican man, and others join in, that waters the workers’ beer! Yes I’m the man, the middlin’ man, that waters the workers’ beer! What do I care if it makes them ill, or it makes them terrible queer, I’ve a car and a yacht and an æroplane, and I waters the workers’ beer!