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:

June 29th – Good and Vital, even Necessary –

Dear Jo—

Of course I love you. How could I not love you.

I am not angry. I am

disappointed

I do not like this pen that I have borrowed from Sam, whom you do not know, whose family name I do not recall at the moment. She is a perfectly pleasant enough person who has been assigned by whom I’m not entirely certain to assist me with a thoroughly unnecessary process that has been imposed without my assent or, frankly, understanding, but that is neither here nor there, at the moment, this pen, this pen this blaste

THIS PEN

will always turn of a sudden in my fingers and decide quite suddenly to scrath scratchily impede the flow of its ink

It is frustrating.

I sit here.

I sit here, writing, I am writing, to you, with a borrowed pen on a stolen pad, outdoors, in a park, and the sun is shining, the air is pleasantly hot, I am neither hungry, nor especially thirsty, and I slept very well last night indeed, and yet. I took this pad of paper and Sam’s disappointing pen and came out here because I was suddenly seized by the desire to write, to you, but now that I am here and doing precisely that, I find I do not want to write, to you: I want to speak with you, to laugh with you, even to argue and fight with you, I want to seize your hand in my own and draw you close, I want to kiss your cheek even as you turn away, embarrassed, I want you to put your arms about me

I want you to hold me

I want to wake from sleeping very well indeed and hear and feel your sleeping, dreaming breath beside me, and all I have is this paper and this pen. Nor did I not bring the letter you wrote, and oh my heart I thank you so much for even such a meagre scrap of you, that I did not bring with me on this utterly unnecessary errand, and so I do not have it with me now, to read, once more, in the sun. I shall answer my memory of your questions, instead.