5 March 2021

“There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature - the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter.”

Mar 06, 2021

This Week

Over at Quiet Little Horrors, we have both our Shirley Jackson adaptation episodes out and ready for your listening pleasure: first a mini about We Have Always Lived in the Castle and a full-length discussion about The Haunting. Share and enjoy.

Last week I sent a bit of supernatural fiction out to paid subscribers. I can’t explain why I like this piece so much but I do. You can sign up if you’d like to read it.

I don’t have many links this week. Maybe next week’s batch will be better. I have several reading/watching/listening updates, though.

I’m in one of those phases where I’m thinking about the newsletter itself. It’s on its way to seven years old and I haven’t made any changes in a while. Any suggestions for how I can refresh, enhance, streamline? I’m opening the comments to everyone on this one so you can let me know what you might like to see in the future. You can also email me at hello@jenmyers.net.

Links

The subtle joy of the small horror movie.

This is several years old, but why not read an interview with Laurie Anderson.

“Many things here are lovely or sweet, but almost nothing is beautiful. Nothing beautiful, nothing big, nothing cool. And nothing new. In a museum that otherwise shows visitors the most awe-inspiring science in the most modern and attention-grabbing ways, here is science of the most ordinary things in the world, the science of your humble backyard. Yet it is in the company of blue whales and cosmic wonders, this homeliest and homiest of halls.” On the Hall of New York State Environment in the American Museum of Natural History and the fullness of a moment.

Draw an iceberg and see how it will float.

Reading/Watching/Listening

The film A Dark Song has been on my watchlist for a while now because it pops up often in conversations about worthy slow burn horror films. I finally sat down to watch it and found it more emotionally-driven then I anticipated. Recommended if you like stories of darkness as transformative catharsis.
I started reading Trickster Makes the World: Mischief, Myth, and Art by Lewis Hyde, a longform consideration of trickster mythology and lore as creative metaphor. So far it’s lovely.
A beautiful short film by Native American filmmaker Erica Tremblay: Little Chief.

Another item I’ve been meaning to get around to is the podcast series Headlong: Surviving Y2K. It’s a couple of years old now but educational and emotional at the same time. Recommended if, like me, you were only vaguely aware of the swirl of Y2K and the truths behind it.
Nick Cave’s newest, Carnage, is quietly electric.