Spotted this thing in the contemporary-collage newsletter that turns up in my inbox every Wednesday, and now keep imagining the world to which it seems it should belong.

You could go in some sort of Mad-Max-meets-David-Lynch picket-fence-apocalypse direction, or perhaps something more along the lines of the more interesting end of the urban fantasy fiction that was big around the late Noughties and early Teens… but really, I want it to be worn by the protagonist of the strange and transcendent-ecstatic Gene Wolfe story “Golden City Far”.

That story doesn’t mention any such coat; it may not mention any coat at all. (It’s been a few years since I last re-read it.) But I find that its world has such a powerful pull that images—signs which, like this coat, somehow overload signifier and signified simultaneously, and thereby make something altogether numinous—just fall into it, whether they belong there or not.

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I can’t recall who or what or where tipped me off to Collé, the newsletter in question. I’ve been reading it a while now, so I guess I have an excuse for having forgotten, but I have less of one for not sharing it when I first found it, and thereby also thanking whoever it was found it before me.

Whoever you were, I’m sorry. You have given me a number of hours of sheer joy—a rare gift—and I should have thanked you properly and publicly when I had the chance.

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Our ethics die when we stop practicing them; that’s the real reason why the “old web” is dead. Could it be resurrected? No idea. Doubt it.

(Not my job, anyway. This site is my job; the web is the superfund site just outside my allotment.)

The point is that I still think of those old-web values as my values, but I have nonetheless gotten remarkably sloppy about actually living them. So let this be reminder to myself; all things good on this Earth should flow into the City, but only if we play the pipework.