Stephen McClurg's Blog, page 46

Little Billboards #87

[image error]I tried to get away
with the dark ages again.
The television interrupted.

Stull’s Silly Symphonettes #3

A matinee of “Dust and Butter” from Stull.

Stull exists in two realms: One is as a improv rock trio and the other is as a recording project based on a process that begins with Tracy’s percussion/field recordings. You can hear them woven together in the Stullification playlist.

The new track is below. Thanks!

From the Eunoia Archives: The Terror Test: Test Prep #1

Test Prep is a series of essays that I occasionally write to complement episodes of The Terror Test, a horror podcast. The guys are currently setting up a new website (actually, they are currently on a “monster trip” in Europe, and then they’ll be setting up the new website–I’ll provide links when it goes live). You can hear episodes wherever you listen to podcasts.

Stalking Tall

Test Prep is an extension of The Terror Test Podcast. This piece is part of the Phantasm and Phantasm II episode.

In the summer of 1991, I lived with my grandparents in Michigan. I had moved to Alabama recently and made a few friends, but didn’t fit in1. I wore Eraserhead and Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part II shirts to school2, collected silent films, and listened to Bach, Jaco, and Carcass. I still loved the Muppets. In eighth grade, because of my height, I was asked to escort high school girls at a local pageant. I declined because a new episode of Twin Peaks was airing that night. I found out years later that some people believed I was a Satanic, homosexual drug dealer. That sounds much more exciting than my reality, which involved staying up late after working at a restaurant, eating pizza rolls and drinking soda while watching movies. However, I was just as likely to watch Harvey as I was Faces of Death.3

Like most teenagers, I was a music junkie, and the first Lollapalooza tour was that summer. Even my grandparents knew about it. They asked if I wanted to go to the concert or to Fangoria’s Weekend of Horrors. The thought of standing with my grandfather through a Butthole Surfers set strikes me as particularly funny now, but I chose the horror convention because I wondered if there would ever be another chance for me to meet Tom Savini or The Tall Man from Phantasm.4

Phantasm has always been a favorite horror film of mine. It’s striking and strange like Cronenberg films of the era, but it also has a goofiness that lends it a charm that’s hard to explain. The plot has been called “muddy,” but there are images and sounds that never leave a viewer. The silver spheres, obviously. The zombie dwarves. Reggie. The inter-dimensional portal that looks like a giant tuning fork. The theme!

And then Jebediah Morningside, The Tall Man.

He’s probably entered pop culture consciousness more as an influence on the Slender Man mythos, but Angus Scrimm’s monster is one of my favorites. And thinking about the horror icons of roughly a decade—Leatherface, Pinhead, Freddy, Jason, Michael Myers—The Tall Man is often an afterthought. But unlike the others, he has no mask and little makeup, yet still holds up as a terrifying, supernatural presence. That’s an impressive feat. The scenes of him walking in slow motion probably creeped me out as much as anything else in any other horror film.

I was lucky enough to hear Scrimm give a talk and then have a short conversation with him later that day. Scrimm was warm, sophisticated, generous with his time, and kind. He had scared the hell out of me as kid, but I couldn’t resist talking to him when I saw him walking around the convention. I don’t remember what we talked about5. I know I told him how much I loved the movie and particularly his performance.

Meeting Angus Scrimm was like encountering a character from a Hammer horror film. He was a gentleman who seemed to have stepped out of a time machine, barely escaping some kind of Gothic horror, barely creasing his suit. He was a classic, as many of the friend and fan tributes have affirmed since his death in January.

And speaking of classics, Scrimm6 wrote the back cover notes to Meet the Beatles and won a 1974 Grammy for his Korngold: The Classic Erich Wolfgang Korngold liner notes. He wrote for various entertainment periodicals and Capitol Records, even after his first run as The Tall Man. As a fan and critic, he rented a warehouse for his record collection.

I knew nothing of his music background, but if I had, I would have talked about Bernard Herrmann or Mahler. Instead, embarrassingly, I asked him to “do the voice.” Rather than shrugging off a kid who had overstayed his welcome, his face twisted and he instantly became the malevolent presence at the end of the first film. He bellowed “Boyyyyyy!7” and it was a wonderful mix of fear and joy that washed over me.

Up until that point, he was one of the few adults outside my family who wasn’t judging me and wasn’t condescending or disgusted by my interests. He fully engaged with me, barely a teenager, and made me feel, if not important, at least comfortable with who I was and wanted to be for those few minutes talking to him.

He may be remembered as a monster, but I’ll never forget the man I met that day.

1 That’s not because of Alabama, though that’s part of it. And it was a little more than the normal teenage angst. I moved a lot, my father committed suicide, so I had some things I was working through and would have been wherever I lived.

2 I wore a lot of Three Stooges shirts, too. “Just Say Moe” was a favorite. I was, and still am, a complete dork.

3 I had an obsession with Jimmy Stewart’s films in high school that I still can’t explain. Maybe I just related to him more than someone like Cary Grant.

4 Adolescence would see music win out. I went from wanting to be an amalgam of Harryhausen, Savini, and Romero making Lovecraft films to practicing bass for at least three to seven hours a day.

5 I feel like we discussed a mutual admiration for Poe, since that summer I was reading his collected works and Scrimm was known to recite Poe’s poems from memory.

6 Angus Scrimm was the stage name for Lawrence Rory Guy. He published as “Rory Guy.”

7 Another piece of juvenilia combining horror and music was Mr. Bungle’s “Squeeze Me Macaroni.” It not only sampled Frank Booth, but also The Tall Man. It featured the bass work of Trevor Dunn. He still has a versatility and facility on the instrument that is inspirational, though he’s more often heard on upright these days. Bungle’s Disco Volante is one of my favorite records, but it was not liked in general as much as their debut. I had a high school friend recently ask me if I still listened to music that “sounds like vacuum cleaners” and I suppose I do, so don’t take my advice. Anyway, vacuums, lawn mowers, and weedeaters often sound like Gyuto monks to me. Maybe it’s not always what we listen to, but how we listen.

Learning Love Late

A few years ago, I started reading St. Augustine’s Confessions and just put it down because it wasn’t the right time. A few months ago, I picked it back up and the experience has been much different. The voice of it just grabbed me this time. I’m interested in tracking down some different translations as well.

Part of the book is an autobiography of Augustine’s life of sin, his time with the Manicheans (a religious group that in my brief reading sounds a little bit Zoroastrian and a little bit Buddhist, but had certain relationships to Christianity as well), his conversion, and his relationship to his mother, Saint Monica. Another part is Augustine’s exploration of metaphysical concepts like the nature of God. He also attempts to understand how we know what we know (I particularly like his exploration of memory), and how perception works. This part reads strongly like Aristotle or was at least influenced by him, with some Plato mixed in. I feel like Descartes borrowed from, or at least was influenced by, Augustine, especially in terms of the cogito argument and Descartes’s method of using doubt as a starting point. Having looked at the descriptions of the chapters in the table of contents, the book ends with an exegesis of the beginning of Genesis. I don’t know if that was supposed to continue, was lost, or just never finished.

Below is Book X, Chapter 27, which I found beautiful. The obvious read is religious, but I think the sentiment could be extended to whatever gives us strength in this world. Love. Art. Music.

“I have learnt to love you late, Beauty at once so ancient and so new! I have learnt to love you late! You were within me, and I was in the world outside myself. I searched for you outside myself and, disfigured as I was, I fell upon the lovely things of your creation. You were with me, but I was not with you. The beautiful things of this world kept me far from you and yet, if they had not been in you, they would have had no being at all. You called me; you cried aloud to me; you broke my barrier of deafness. You shone upon me; your radiance enveloped me; you put my blindness to flight. You shed your fragrance about me; I drew breath and now I gasp for your sweet odor. I tasted you, and now hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am inflamed with love of your peace.”

Pardon Our Poultry

7YO: Guess who?
ME: Who?
7YO: Chicken poo!

5YO: Daddy, guess what?
ME: What?
5YO: Chicken pee!
ME: I don’t think that….
5YO: Guess who!?
ME: Who?
5YO: Chicken glasses!
ME: I’m not playing this anymore.

7YO: One more! Guess what?
ME: Ok, one more. What?
7YO: Chicken butt!

ME: Ok.

5YO: A–S–S stands for butt.

MOM: Let’s not repeat that anywhere.

_________________

Despite slicing up the fictional chicken, my children have decided to become vegetarians. I think my oldest is doing this largely out of a big heart and deep love for animals. When she was two or three she wanted to be a mimic octopus for Halloween. She asked for plastic snakes and Wild Kratts figures for one Christmas. I think she’s been thinking about where and how we get meat and we’ve always been honest about answering these questions.

I’ll support her, but she’s young and we’ll see if she continues with it. She’s not the biggest vegetable fan, but she does like chocolate chip cookies and sides (she’s not interested in veganism). She asked about eggs, and is okay with eating them. Since her decision, she’s also been eating peas, Brussels sprouts, and other stuff she would normally complain about. She said, “It tastes like freedom!”

The youngest, well, I don’t know. She has mostly eaten vegetables and fruit on her own. On a vegetarian venture she ate a big plate of cantaloupe with a dab of mac ‘n’ cheese on the side. That’s normal for her.

They decided that once a year we will have chicken wings and I will make them biscuits and gravy. One of the few recipes I learned while watching someone cook was watching Meemaw make gravy. I never learned her biscuit recipe, so I need to learn a good one.

From the Eunoia Archives: Accidental Lyrics

When we started Eunoia Solstice, Eric and I wanted to post compositional prompts and games. We called it “The Goading,” but only managed to goad each other. Here is one of the prompts we developed and my response to it using song titles.

MyTunes Remix
a. Open iTunes and view your songs according to artist.  
b. Sort them randomly. 
c. Use the list as inspiration, reflection, or fodder for a found poem.

My Responses:

Upon Reading Kerouac, The Panda Haven Delivery Boy Begins To Write His Own Fortunes and To Secretly Place Them In the Restaurant’s Fortune Cookies

I.

If you see her, say hello
In a silent way

II.

One reporter’s opinion:
This ain’t no picnic

III.

I am the Resurrection
I am me once more

IV.

This is heaven
It tastes better than the truth

Live Improvised Verses Later Rejected By the Great Omaha Bluesman Dougie “Skinner” Swanson

I.

If I had you
All this and heaven, too
I’ll be waiting
I’ll cut a hole and pull you through

II.

“Please don’t be gentle with me
Please, Mr. Postman
Please Please Please”
–And the devil seized her ankle

III.

The King of the World
He won’t go
The angels hung around
At the air show
A bunch of lonesome heroes
Digging for gold

IV.

The street is an empty knife
Under the blacklight
Fools in love
Follow the signs
The butcher
By your side
One more time

Toast Ma’am and The Tractor Made Me Do It

The 7YO begins to poke at her breakfast toast, a nice deli loaf slice shaped like a long oval. She makes eye-holes and puts it on her face like a superhero mask.

7YO: I’m Toast Ma’am!
ME: Where did you get that from?
7YO: The toast.
ME: No, is that from a video or something?
7YO: It’s from the toast-es desire.

5YO holds toast up to face with a hole poked through.

5YO: I’m a one-eyed cactus!

_______________________

Probably two decades ago, some friends of mine were in an Arby’s and saw an exchange in which a man, frustrated with his roast beef experience, asked the counter-girl to, “Slap [him] some mayonnaise on this thing. It’s dry as a bone!”

I was reminded of that recently in a bookstore. I saw a sunburned man in a tank top/belly shirt and a braided rat-tail down to the top of his shorts. I’m not a fashionable person and I don’t live in a very fashionable area, so I knew he wasn’t going for irony. He had been with this look for a long time. I admire people who have strong fashion sense, couture or otherwise.

As I walked away from the aisle, I heard him tell someone, “Woo-ooo! Oooh boy that tractor wore me out today!”

I know I bought a book, but I don’t remember what it was. I remember that guy, though, and why I still like wandering through bookstores and libraries.

From the Eunoia Archives: An Interview with John King

This was originally published on May 28, 2013. The Drunken Odyssey is still going as strong as ever and John’s first novel, Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame has recently been published.

The Drunken Odyssey came to me at the perfect time. I had just had a baby and had started to write again after realizing that my chances for Wordsworthian recollection in tranquility were slim to none. I wanted to talk about books and writing, particularly with other writers, but with teaching, taking care of a newborn, and lacking the web of support (or commiseration) of an MFA program, I was having a hard time finding a time, place, and even people for these discussions.

John King is a writer, professor, and host of The Drunken Odyssey.

Then I heard The Drunken Odyssey. I instantly became a fan and, full disclosure, a sometime contributor. For almost a year the show has been a part of my weekly schedule. I look forward to the discussions on craft, reading, and artists as diverse as David Sedaris to Miles Davis to Laura Ingalls Wilder. Thankfully, host John King was able to take some time out of his schedule for Eunoia Solstice.

What was the impetus behind The Drunken Odyssey?

I describe my time at NYU as literary fantasy camp, because while earning my MFA I had three areas of shocking stimulation: one, the world’s best writers in English in the same room as me when they gave readings, two, amazing teachers who managed to wow me with their knowledge even though I already had a PhD and was considered a Very Bright Pony myself, and three, a boatload of insightful peers.

Two years after the MFA, I was teaching at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida, and those three areas seemed unavailable. 

I mean, I was teaching my ass off, and commuting from outer space, so I wasn’t as curious as I could have been about the local writing scene, but I was missing having the same kinds of writerly conversations, except for occasional chats with Jaroslav Kalfař, who at the time was an office assistant. (Apparently our bosses liked to eavesdrop on our conversations, so literary talk was slowing down up to four people at once in the world of rhetoric and composition.)

And then, in UCF’s Faculty Multimedia Center, I was introduced to The Whisper Room.  This is a soundproofed recording studio, and this satanic person named Ryan Retherford convinced me that doing a podcast would be easy.  I thought about how many friends and acquaintances I have through the MFA program, and the local writers I had befriended, and thought, what the hell?  Let’s have some conversations.

As a writer, have you taken anything away from this experience–positive or negative?

The thing that consistently impresses me is the humility of all the writers I’ve interviewed so far.  I mean, if you are going to keep at this ludicrously impractical activity, you have to be willing to heave your ego under the bus all the time.  No one finds this easy, and so whatever separates the critically and/or economically successful writers from those of us who are still trying to get noticed isn’t that.

Of course I feel this humility all the time, perhaps more so because of the podcast.  I’m not usually enamored with the sound of my own voice, and the chronic deadlines, somehow trying to seem like a human being at least at the start and finish of every show, sometimes really wears me down.

But the show also forces me to write when I am really too tired to write.  Because I try to let listeners in on what my progress has been as a writer each week, I feel shame when I haven’t written anything—when normally I would feel simply exhausted.

The Drunken Odyssey has forced me to do more writing and reading than I am really capable of, teaching four writing-intensive classes every semester.

As a listener, I find it extremely valuable and refreshing that you talk to writers at various stages in their careers. Your guest list moves back and forth between grad students and authors like Martin Amis. Was this diversity planned or has it just been a matter of practicality?

Variety was key.  I knew I could get some experienced writers on the air, because I knew them personally—some of them were my teachers—but I knew I also wanted to talk to people whose writing careers were just getting going.  I am thinking mostly about the conversations I want to have, and the conversations I think my listeners will want to hear. I am hoping to keep branching out to the wider writing community, including comedians, screen writers, scientists, musicians, philosophers, and others.  I want to celebrate all writing that’s alive.

In the latest episode, you mentioned exhaustion and being fed up with writing after AWP. You mentioned you still worked on a short story after this feeling. Given your family and work schedule, what’s your writing life looking like these days?

I’ve been writing more poetry than I’ve expected.  It’s not just the brevity of most poems that is the attraction, but the psychological compression involved in my existence these days lends itself to poetic observation—which is to say, my mind is a panicky state of triage most of the time, so that when I slow down and become more mentally alive to the moment, the result is often a poem, like when the stars stop streaking as lines, and become the constellations of shiny dots in the sky.  There. That’s what it should look like.

The short story I began in March I am still working on, not that it’s the sort of longer short story you might see in The New Yorker or anything.  I got stuck between scenes in the grading crunch before the approach of finals. The story itself is from the point-of-view of someone experiencing black outs during a tragedy in his life, so the perspective seems appropriate for the frazzled person I am these days—and hopefully I convey the immediacy of that—but the craft portion of my work as a writer is worried about quality.  My concentration apparatus is, um, not good right now. But I am devoting an hour a day to it now, in the morning, before I spend a few hours applying for summer jobs.

I am also, glacially mind you, working on being more active and systematic about querying agents about my novel, Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame.  The documents you need to gain an agent are different from what is normally needed in creative writing, and I want to make sure I am not doing a disservice to my book by having my query stuff be boring.  With this book, I only have one shot with each agent, sometimes only one shot with each agency, so I want to make sure the query materials are as good as the book. If I can’t sell the book because the book isn’t sellable, I can live with that, perhaps—but if I can’t sell the book because my querying is wretched, that will send me shrieking off into the horizon.  The paralysis I have experienced working on fiction also relates to working on these materials. I generally don’t have five clear-headed hours a week I can devote to my writing.

I did convene a workshop of peers to look over my query materials.  A very loud shout out is in order for Madison Bernath, Dianne Turgeon Richardson, and Jeffrey Shuster.

Now that I am in the summer, I am pouring my energies into finding work to pay my bills.  I teach in the second part of the summer. But I will have to use this little gap to binge-write, to get my query materials right, so that the novel can move forward in the literary marketplace, if it can.  Maybe I can finish the short story, too, before the exhaustion of my labors, if I can find any, overtakes my ability to conjure up stories.

I’ve been privileged to have some poet-friends, like Terry Ann Thaxton and Monica Wendel, give me feedback on my poems, and I am getting more systematic about submitting my stories and my poems and my essays to journals.  So really it’s a tornado of little things these days, and hopefully I can get the novel out there, and maybe I’ll be able to afford more time to write.

Any more shows with Jaroslav Kalfař? You two had great chemistry.

Jaroslav was local when the show began, and now he’s at NYU’s creative writing program, which seems symbiotic in a way, since I met him at UCF after I came from NYU’s program. I can’t wait to see what he has been writing this past year—he hasn’t shown me yet. He’s still a good friend, and who knows what the future holds?  These days, though, our interactions mostly assume the form of phone sex.

What do we have to look forward to on future episodes?

I am teaming up with another writer friend, David James Poissant; the two of us will respond to listener mail. That should be fun.  He has a wicked sense of humor and strong opinions, which means I’ll have the pleasure of telling him how wrong he is.

I also plan to increase the original video content on the website.  Right now I just have the Amis reading from Miami Book Fair International.

As for future guests, I don’t want to jinx any plans that are in the works!  You’ll just have to wait.

Do you have more live readings planned? 

My goal is to have one reading every season.  Summer means Bloomsday (June 16th), with readings from James Joyce’s Ulysses.  I am hoping Godrick the Giant will return this year.

Any upcoming publications?

Eventually, “The Confessions of Guy Psycho, #1” is supposed to appear in a future issue of Bachelor Pad Magazine, when Jason Croft finds room for it.  My interview with Bunny Yeager just appeared in issue #23 of that fine publication.

Reprobate Rag is supposed to publish a poem of mine, except the journal is taking an exceedingly long time starting to exist.

Other than that, I am waiting to hear from many journals…

Thanks again to John King! You can find out more about The Drunken Odyssey here. You can find links to John’s work here.

Almost Overheard + Goodbye, Eunoia

This is a conversation that I heard about but didn’t hear.

5YO: Do you have any kids’ shows on your TV?
Grandma: Nope.
5YO: Why not?
Grandma: Grandpa and I don’t watch those shows.
5YO: You don’t even have the channels?
Grandma: Our TV doesn’t have those channels.
5YO: Why not?
Grandma: Grandpa and I don’t need them.
5YO: But didn’t you plan on having grandkids?
Grandma: Honestly, no.
5YO: Hmmm…

……

I worked on a project called Eunoia Solstice for about five years with two friends of mine, Jason and Eric. Like any project of the sort (a kind of a literary website–thingy), it ran its course.

Jason is working on a variety of podcasts that are worth checking out. He’s following his passions and concerns (one being a focus on local creators in Wichita) while working on his novels. His first novel The Evolution of Shadows is fantastic. The follow-up will be even better.

Likely, Jason and I will work on something together down the road. What that will be exactly, neither of us knows.

Eric (and Jon) will have a website soon for their horror podcast The Terror Test. If time permits (and the guys let me), I may try to write essays that go with some of their content, but we’ll see.

I’m currently transferring my earlier Test Prep essays and other work over to this site, so some of that work will start appearing here. Despite being in grad school for a third time, being in a new job, and having two kids, Eunoia Solstice was a creative and collaborative outlet at a time when I badly needed it. I actually enjoyed the editorial work I got to do on the site, including the work with one of my mentors, John Coker, who died in 2015.

Over the next few months I’ll be figuring out how I want to archive some of that material while working on new stuff.

Here’s to all your toes and fingers and keeping what you started with this celebratory season.

New Sounds + Words

Scott Bazar and I have started collaborating. Our first track has some spoken word elements from me, while his foundation track was improvised, partially with a microwave rotator.

The first time I played with Scott, I was at a festival and in a small theater. The instrument he gave me was a prepared metal garden rake that was also running through a small guitar amp. Scott makes recordings, compositional games, instruments, and awesomely weird short films.

If anything, at least I’m having fun with this and I hope someone else does, too. My influences so far on this are (as usual) film scores, but I also wanted to capture something like the atmosphere of the William S. Burroughs recordings of the ’80s and ’90s or the Weird Nightmare record that Hal Wilner did as a tribute to Charles Mingus and Harry Partch. Come to think of it, I did to dig back into some of those Wilner collections again.

Check out the track. Enjoy! Or not!

Currently working on more tracks for this project and a new Stull track. Some writing may be cropping up more here and elsewhere, too. More soon…Track notes and words below.

Notes:

The initial soundscape was improvised by Bazar using a guitar, eq pedal, metal straw bow, and microwave rotator.

McClurg wrote guitar, bass, and organ parts and contributed voice and words.

Rebus

The book fell off the shelf
and I saw your name on the page
in sentences written a century before.

In the light late at night,
thinking about reading rather than life,
it’s dark except for the porch lights 
killing the fireflies. Wickedness can be bright.

A different life drawn around the angels’ names
in old books. Muses that Milton updated
and Modernism tried to bomb away.
The coffee’s gone and the candle’s out.
Sin is what the others saw.

It’s fall somewhere. Find a name in leaves there.
He had notions of letters in the oceans
and reading waves. I chipped a tooth on a tetherball,
but her nail polish rarely chipped at all. 
The broken pieces were on the inside.