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.
Boots Riley
So for me, the question isn’t “Is the public ready?” I start from: the public already knows things are messed up. The public is more open than we’re told. The question I ask myself is: how do I move people emotionally towards imagining something they can do? Not “the” solution, but a solution—something that shifts them from “It’s all hopeless” to “Maybe we can try this.” That’s what I’m after.
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:
Stockings, their red and black stripes tugged out of true by someone else’s fingers that close suspender straps, smooth the blackly satin garter belt, tug the red coatee into place. She lifts her arms as they do up golden buttons, heavy like the gold braid burdening her cuffs, spattering the glossy bill of her red cap, set at a jaunty angle. Those fingers settle the golden hawks pinned to either point of the coatee’s collar, straighten with a tsk her cap. She laughs, lips expertly red. Her sister sat beside her, lining her lips in a blazing mirror with a burgundy stick, her legs stockinged and gartered with polished boots laced up her shins, her coatee slung on the back of her chair, her cap on the counter before her. “Smile!” says Chrissie.
“No,” says Ettie, capping the stick with a disdainful moue.
“Go on,” says Chrissie, and Ettie does, a sudden, glorious grin, ostentatiously effortful, blatantly cruel, washing away to strand her stony affect. Costurere with a last pat for Chrissie’s coatee leans between them, rustle of white, bloomers and camisole, mob cap on her mousey hair. She takes up a little pot and a tiny brush, kneeling there by Ettie, who holds her half-done lips quite still as brilliant red’s applied. “It was easier, when we had the screen,” says Chrissie.
“It was easier with the owr, miss,” says Costurere, with a last deft twist to shape the Cupid’s bow. “If I’d be permitted to say so.”
