Quentin's Weeknotes 10/26/19-11/1/19

This week:

• Yours truly, near the Salem Burying Ground and Witches MemorialThanks to my delightful and amazing wife, I went on a surprise trip to Salem, Massachusetts. Salem is an absolute zoo around Halloween, full of tourists, vendors, costumed weirdos, and local residents all ambiguously pulled together in a touristy mess centered around the town’s dark history. I had a great old time, not the least of which because my wife arranged for the Minister of Intrigue and his family to join us.
• I read this wonderful article about Nancy Rowe, an incredible woman I met in the brief time that was privileged to work for the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. Nancy is an educator, knowledge-keeper, and activist, not to mention the founder and keeper of the Akinomaagaye Gaamik lodge, and this article talks about her current work at decolonizing Ontario education around Indigenous Issues.
• Once again, the Yager Museum hosted its annual Halloween storytellling event “The Horror in the Museum." We had a great slate of student, faculty, and staff readers, with performances of works by Poe, Lovecraft, Atwood, and many others. Happy Halloween!
• Every Halloween, I try to make time to watch one horror movie that I haven’t seen before. This year, I watched the Banshee Chapter, an interesting but scattered film that draws on US covert experiments with mind control, the Lovecraft story “From Beyond”, and the life of Hunter S. Thompson (really!), and wrapping all of that into a found-footage pastiche. It was certainly entertaining Halloween fodder, amplified by a great performance by Ted Levine, though like many horror movies, it couldn’t really cash the checks that it wrote.