Stephen McClurg's Blog, page 13

At Horror DNA: She Is Conann

I’ve got a review for She Is Conann over at Horror DNA.

Musicalia #86: When Your Arms and Shoulders Seem to Blaze

You can get the playlist, poem, and links at The Drunken Odyssey.

Musicalia #85: The Art of Mourning

You can get the playlist, poem, and links over at The Drunken Odyssey!

At Horror DNA: One for the Road

I’ve got a new review over at Horror DNA for a short film based on Stephen King’s “One for the Road.”

Musicalia #84: Zipkin Finds a Clue

The latest playlist, poem, and links are available over at The Drunken Odyssey. Thanks to everyone listening!

Marginalia #52: The Boxer’s Omen, Turn Every Page, The Meridian Brothers

I’d heard about The Boxer’s Omen for years but hadn’t watched it until recently. The movie opens in a way that makes you think it will be a version of Kickboxer, but that becomes a side story to the main event: a monk battling a black magic sorcerer. It’s a Shaw Brothers movie with the martial arts you would expect, but it also includes gross-out special effects and bat finger puppets. If that sounds interesting, don’t watch the trailer below and go in as cold as possible.

Sure, here is the revised text:

This documentary is perfect for book lovers. It features Robert Gottlieb, an influential editor who shaped American literature in the 20th century. He gained renown for editing Catch-22 and later The New Yorker. Robert Caro is known for his extensive biography of Lyndon Johnson, which also examines American political power. The documentary explores their fifty-year collaboration.

I don’t know much about the Meridian Brothers, but I’m enjoying their new album, a fusion of African and Latin music. One of their latest videos is below.

At Horror DNA: Blue Sunshine: The Novelization

My latest review is over at Horror DNA.

Mid-Year Book Freakout 2024

Best Book You’ve Read So Far In 2024

Based on how haunted I’ve been by the settings, characters, and prose, I’d have to say The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake. I wrote more about the collection here.

Best Sequel You’ve Read So Far In 2024

I don’t spend time with many series, so I don’t have an honest answer for this one. If I stretch the concept, Dolores Claiborne, as a spiritual sequel to Gerald’s Game, is my favorite this year. Besides the feminist themes that unite them, they were also paired initially with a third story for what I’m guessing would have been a giant novel in which all the characters were connected by the experience of an eclipse. Remnants of that idea exist in both books.

New Release You Haven’t Read Yet, But Want To

I didn’t even know this was out, which makes me wonder if people got tired of waiting for it or are disappointed.

Most Anticipated Release for the Second Half of the Year

I Spit on Your Celluloid: The History of Women Directing Horror Movies looks like a blast.

I’m also looking forward to Corpses, Fools and Monsters and anything Weirdpunk Books has coming up.

Biggest Disappointment

These are not the ‘squatches I was looking for.

Biggest Surprise

Being an Eraserhead fan and seeing “Mary X” in the subtitle of a book is going to get my attention. I have low expectations for celebrity books. I would have enjoyed the book for Stewart’s stories of her bizarre life working on Little House on the Prairie during the day and Eraserhead at night. As a bonus, I also learned more about Jack Nance’s complicated personality. I got to experience some of the Twin Peaks phenomenon from the inside (she was Mrs. Briggs). Before all this, she was drinking buddies with Jim Morrison!

Overall, I got to see how our experiences, no matter how they look, are likely experienced very differently. Stewart is open about Dionysian appetites and darknesses, but Stewart also expresses so much of the flawed beauty of being human. I was engaged in a way I rarely am with celebrity memoirs.

Favorite New Author (debut or new to you)

I loved this book and Charlene Elsby’s use of narrative voice. I’ve since read some short stories and am getting her other books soon. I wrote a little about Hexis here. I was recently re-reading Book I of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and found hexis in the wild, and I couldn’t stop smiling.

Newest Fictional Crush

Admittedly, this is an odd choice for this topic, but I just don’t read many books with crushable characters. My answer here should probably be Chuck Rainey, the studio musician who played the great bassline on “Peg,” which drove me into the Steely Dan catalog and this book, but he’s not fictional. Michael McDonald’s sweet background vocals are also crushworthy. Instead, I’ll go with Peg, an idealized beauty who can be anything the listener wants her to be.

Newest Favorite Character

My favorite character this year is the constructed persona of “A.R. Ammons” in his long poem Tape for the Turn of the Year. The work began as an experiment with materials; Ammons saw a roll of adding paper and wrote a poem within those physical constraints. He wrote on it from December 1963 until January 1964. I’m not sure how much revision was involved.

Ammons has a unique voice that often shifts tone and subject within a single poem. Sometimes it’s colloquial, sometimes it’s academic and science-y, sometimes abstract, occasionally goofy, horny, or both simultaneously. He likes coffee, fudge cookies, pork chops and ham. This poem is partially a chronicle of thoughts and actions that sometimes work together and sometimes do not, like how most days and weeks and tasks and duties crash together.

I was studying one of Ammons’s other long poems with one of his former students when we got word that he had died. I’ve since felt a peculiar connection to his poetic voice.

Book That Made You Cry

Before I had kids, books rarely made me cry, except all the dead dog chronicles like Where the Red Fearn Grows, which we all seemed to have to read when I was growing up. After kids, it’s normal to cry during any Disney movie and sometimes even Publix commercials.

That said, I can’t remember crying much during my reading this year other than maybe during some expressions about love and aging in Stephen King’s Insomnia and The Green Mile.

Book That Made You Happy

I am writing a full review, so I won’t say too much. Bret Nelson’s Plan 9 from Outer Space: The Novelization blew away any expectations I had of a novelization. I love Ed Wood’s movies, and I’ve been a fan of Plan 9 since I was a teenager. Nelson is obviously a fan. He approaches the task of making a wonderful mess of a movie into a book with respect, love, and a sense of humor.

Most Beautiful Book You’ve Bought so Far This Year (or received)

While I see plenty of gorgeously printed books yearly, I don’t have the budget to get them. I might get one for Christmas or a random birthday gift. However, I am obsessed with the Anders Nilson covers for the Modern Library re-issues of nine John Wyndham novels. I finally got one of them and hope to get the others, along with a poster Nilson has made that features his designs.

What Books Do You Need to Read by the End of the Year?

Other than books I get for Horror DNA reviews or for work, I am reading through personal and group projects. I have an ongoing project based on the Great Books idea. I’m reading through significant works of philosophy–mostly chronologically–and I’m up to City of God by Augustine. I’m also chronologically working through several authors who I sometimes take years off from before I return to their corpus. That list includes Stephen King, Muriel Spark, A. R. Ammons, William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy–and maybe others.

I will start the My Novel Life Reading Challenge at some point with Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. The challenge has no time limit, and you read a novel published every year you’ve been alive.

Regarding necessary reading: I rush out and get anything new by Ottessa Moshfegh and David Sedaris. Even if I get a Sedaris paperback, I also get an audio version because hearing him read is a joy I can’t pass up.

Musicalia #83: The Dirt Should Be Piled Up Here Somewhere

You can get the links, poem, and playlist at The Drunken Odyssey.

Marginalia #51: War by Candlelight, Plan 9 from Outer Space, and KOKOKO!

I like to walk through my local library at least once a week and grab something I’ve never heard of. A few weeks ago it was War by Candlelight. I liked the title and was looking for a collection of stories after just finishing the collected Breece D’J Pancake.

Alarcón focuses on voices from or related to Latin America, particularly families, like his own, with connections to Peru. I don’t mean it negatively, but they feel like workshopped stories for literary magazines. That may draw you in or send you away.

Alarcón writes with a kind of narrative distance–or maybe it’s that the narrative voice holds a kind of objectivity or lack of judgment to it. Rather than getting traditional story arcs or deeper connections to characters, you get impressions of lives, sometimes journalistic profiles, and sometimes poetic snapshots. There are many moments of moving and marvelously written prose. I’ll look for more by Alarcón on the shelves.

When I was growing up, Plan 9 from Outer Space was “the worst movie ever made.” I’ve never felt that way and I’ve come to love the other Ed Wood movies I’ve been able to track down. There is a high level of incompetency in every facet of every film I’ve seen by Wood, but hours of confounding wonder and charm.

Plan 9 is a plot from aliens to resurrect the dead to take over or destroy human life before humans discover solaranite, an element or compound that will explode sun particles and could, if usedwrongly, destroy the universe.

Because of how bizarre every choice is–scenes go from day to night for no logical reason, Vampira wanders a graveyard as a resurrected ghoul, but is rarely in a scene with another person, dialogue that is sometimes unintentionally howlingly funny–the atmosphere and mood remind me of the dreamlike qualities of some of the Italian exploitation directors like Fulci.

I’ve also been enjoying KOKOKO!s new song “Bazo Banga” and the new album BUTU.