26 February 2021

“I am awaiting perpetually and forever a renaissance of wonder”

Feb 27

This Week

This past week, my Quiet Little Horrors podcast released its first mini episode and kicked off this month’s Shirley Jackson film adaptation discussion. In the mini we talk about 2018’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, an interesting but not entirely successful film. This Sunday we’ll release our full-length episode on 1960’s The Haunting.

Heads-up that paid subscribers got the monthly longform offering, which was not the typical essay but a piece of subtle and weird short fiction called “The Wind Chimes,” which I couldn’t find a suitable home for out in the wild but I’m still very fond of. I might make a habit of publishing more fiction that way in the future.

Links

The future of the middle class depends on student loan forgiveness.

Britney Spears was never in control.

The 101 best movie endings of all time. This is an excellent list.

Who is still buying VHS tapes?

What happened to Columbia House music club?

“If you have a habit pattern, the more conscious part of your mind can concentrate on your work, and you can get ideas and do those things, and the rest sort of takes care of itself in the background.” David Lynch’s industrious pandemic.

Reading/Watching/Listening

I read Laura’s Ghost: Women Speak About Twin Peaks, an interesting but uneven collection of essays about and interviews with women who love Twin Peaks. As a woman who loves Twin Peaks, I appreciated the focus on the depth and complexity of Laura Palmer and the frank discussion of the sexual assault at the story’s center. I felt the repetitive nature of the interviews might have been better served in an edited documentary format, but the printed word is what we’ve got and it’s a collectively valuable perspective to have.
Spinning the new Hold Steady 24/7. “You get what you get when you push too far ahead.”