Carnival of souls

* The big news today, for me, is that Midnight Meat Train may yet get a theatrical release in the U.S. If it’s one of these “coming soon to a theater near you, provided you are near Tampa, Florida” deals, I’m breaking out the meat tenderizer.

* The other big news today is that Phoebe Gloeckner, one of the four or five best living cartoonists, has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete work on her years-in-the-making graphic novel about the mass murder of women in Juarez, Mexico. It does indeed sound like she’ll be using the digital technique I noticed a while back.

* My long-distance love affair with gaming continues: Joystick Divison’s Gary Hodges presents the Top 5 Most Unforgivable Video Game Enemies–not bosses, mind you, but the little pissants who made a level or game impossible to beat. Fucking Bald Bull, man.

* This Ernest Hemingway quote reminds me a bit of Bruce Baugh’s contention that mainstream critics have it backwards when addressing monsters in horror movies:

“No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in,” says Hemingway. “That kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread. Raisin bread is all right, but plain bread is better.” He opens two bottles of beer and continues: “I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true.”