There was a nice brown egg, lightly boiled, for each of them, and then sardines on toast, and then buttered toast, and then toast with honey, and then a sugar-topped cake. And when Lucy was tired of eating, the Faun began to talk.
“The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” – C. S. Lewis
“…the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no
secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear
again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They
don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise
you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in.
Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen
as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you
will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know
who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to
know again.”
— Arundhati Roy on Indian mythology and folklore, in God of Small Things (1997)
“It was only once – once – that an audience went to see Romeo and
Juliet, and hoped they might live happily ever after. You can bet that
the word soon went around the playhouses: they don’t get out of that
tomb alive. But every time it’s been played, every night, every show, we
stand with Romeo at the Capulets’ monument. We know: when he breaks
into the tomb, he will see Juliet asleep, and believe she is dead. We
know he will be dead himself before he knows better. But every time, we
are on the edge of our seats, holding out our knowledge like a present
we can’t give him.”
— Hilary Mantel on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, in “Can These Bones Live?”, Reith Lecture, 2017
“So what makes this poem mnemonic is not just repetition. Rather, it’s
the fact that with repetition, the repeated phrase grows more and more
questionable. I’ve remembered “Come on now, boys” because, with every
new repetition, it seems to offer more exasperation than encouragement,
more doubt than assertion. I remembered this refrain because it kept me
wondering about what it meant, which is to say, it kept me wondering
about the kind of future it predicted. What is mnemonic about this
repetition is not the reader’s ability to remember it, but that the
phrase itself remembers something about the people it addresses; it
remembers violence. Repetition, then, is not only a demonstration of something that keeps
recurring: an endless supply of new generations of cruel boys with
sweaty fists. It is also about our inability to stop this repetition:
the established cycles of repetition are like spells and there’s no
anti-spell to stop them from happening. The more we repeat, the less
power we have over the words and the more power the words have over us.
Poetic repetition is about the potency of language and the impotence of
its speakers. In our care, language is futile and change is impossible.”
— Valzhyna Mort on Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, in “FACE – FACE – FACE: A Poet Under the Spell of Loss”, The Poetry Society Annual Lecture, 2021
When Edmund takes the warm drink and Turkish delight offered by the White Witch, or when Ofelia grabs a couple of grapes from the Pale Man’s banquet, well, I felt it in my soul.
Of course she took more chicken. Who wouldn’t take more chicken?
I’m really high on 90s media right now, especially science fiction and thrillers, but like… That’s not a time of happiness. The 90s was about mistrust and paranoia coming after an era that tried to slap a veneer of prosperity on everything, at least for Americans. But it’s comforting to dip into stories of this time in which people just accepted that things are fucked, and I suppose companies were seeing the tide turn and investing in media that explored those themes.
But I can still remember the fear, living through riots in Los Angeles and a strange sense that this could all come crumbling down. Being a kid, I’m sure I couldn’t grasp what adults were experiencing then, nor how much worse it was in other parts of the world. It seems safer now than it ever was in the 90s, but I think we can all see that there’s a sort of veneer being pulled over our eyes again to distract from the economic and social disparities that drive the anger and actions that can make places feel unsafe.
So being the simple person that I am, I ultimately just wonder what kinds of stories you’ll tell in ten, twenty years. How will these times lead to the media ahead? What are we fucking up now that’ll lead to the stories of tomorrow?
People out here criticizing R.L. Stine for making up titles and then writing a story for it like that’s weird??? When a good title knocks you answer the door and let it roam around the house.
I’m probably just a hack but there’s so much public domain stuff that anyone can take and use in any way they like, so like… I might just do that. Just make another version of Dracula, or The Raven, or whatever story that has already been written and is free to reinterpret in any way I see fit.
I always thought the choice was mine And I was right, but I just chose wrong I start the day lying and end with the truth That I’m dying for the knife
“Part of why they’re regaining popularity is because the world is a mess and we either don’t know how or don’t have the power to fix it.”
Games highlighted: The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, Elsinore, Outer Wilds, Undertale, Inscryption, The Stanley Parable, The Forgotten City, Twelve Minutes
“I eventually came to realize, if I’m going to do this all again, if there are few real consequences for failure… why would I play in a way that’s so boring?”
Games highlighted: DEATHLOOP, Dishonored, Hitman 3, Bloodborne, Twelve Minutes
“Every decision you make matters because you’re always spending your most precious currency: time.”
Games highlighted: Outer Wilds, Dead Rising, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, The Sexy Brutale, Elsinore, Minit, Vision Soft Reset, Twelve Minutes, DEATHLOOP, Hitman 2, Deus Ex: Human Revolution
