City of Roses is a serialized epic firmly set in Portland, Oregon: a wicked concoction of urban pastoral and incantatory fantastic, where a grocers’ warehouse might become a palace, and an antique bank is hidden beneath a department store.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Ys—
Please use the blasted US mail I am asking you write to me at the address I gave you and put a stamp on it though I suppose you’ll have to find someone to get you a stamp maybe Gloria no definitely Anna will have a stamp I’m sure so many stamps in all denominations arranged by color and size. Do stamps have denominations? Is that what it’s called? Get a basic forever stamp and put it on an envelope with 736 North Coast Highway 97365 on it and put the damn envelope in the mail that’s what it’s for. I’m not worried about Sweetloaf being followed that ship has sailed they know where I am and it hasn’t become any more of a problem yet but give it time no it’s because of Sweetloaf himself. It’s because of how Sweetloaf thinks he owes us something because of how he thinks he has an obligation because you were his Queen and I was his fucking Duchess is just the stupidest fucking word can I just say that? Like Aviatrix or Editress. I was his Duke except I wasn’t everyone just acted like I was until they didn’t have to anymore only he still does Sweetloaf the way he looks at me sometimes it’s positively destabilizing sometimes like if in that moment I asked him if I asked so painfully over-it snarky-assed foulmouthed Sweetloaf to please if he wouldn’t mind just hopping off the balcony there go on break your leg well he’d do it without a moment’s hesitation when he looks at me like that.
Which is maybe thinking about it something you’re all too used to. I don’t know.
You told me You wrote me wrote me You wrote to me about Luys or I guess I should say I should write King Luys I mean but here’s the thing that I think I’m trying to get at which is I bet he never once gave you a look like that I mean I know now he never looked at me like that not once that ever you know reached his eyes.
But this is about Sweetloaf.
We have to let him go.
We have to let them all go.
“…a flicker of sharp impressionistic scenes skittering atop a deeply imagined alternate present.”
“—to explain how this is Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks plus Portlandia with a smattering of Little, Big and Chinatown.”
