Stephen McClurg's Blog, page 57

roland who’s the jazzman in my mind

This summer has been exhausting, but in mostly good ways. First, there’s potty training. ‘Nuff said. Second, our dog needs surgery and while we are thinking positive, it’s likely 50/50. We’ve got a little over a week until her surgery is scheduled. She may be blocked with diaper filling. We hope the mass in the x-rays is diaper filling. It’s taken several months and several doctor’s visits to get to this point, so the summer budget has been destroyed. Nuked, really.

I’ve always intended to write more frequently here, but right now I’m in the middle of several writing projects. I’m not sure how much detail I can give yet, but I’ll be co-writing two comic books. One will be out this year, in a matter of months actually, but I have a lot of work to do on it. The other may be out this year or next year. Both, as far as I know, will be specialty one-off stories. For now.

I have another story for a comic that is “in process.” One production company out of two has given a thumbs-up. I’m just waiting on the other “okay” or “no way.” If this goes through, I have to do some revision, but the script itself is in draft form.

This summer I’ve also been co-writing some stuff that is making it into “production meetings.” This is good, just not definite.

A friend and I are trying to find an agent for another project that we have finally satisfactorily finished. It’s taken us several years, but I think it’s a good project and I hope it finds a home.

Little Billboards is close to hitting #100.

I started writing book reviews recently, but am not writing those as fast as I thought I would. I have one in process.

Also, I’m working on a new curriculum for my class. I teach AP classes and we just received our scores. My students broke all of my personal goals that I had for the next few years. My students scored at or above the national average on every section of the test. I’m trying to dig in and find ways of increasing my overall passing percentage, while staying true to principles that I have that are beyond test-taking.

While writing or cleaning up after my toddler, I’ve been listening to a lot of music. It’s nice to get back into listening again. I took a break for a few months. Barely listened to anything. Writing in the house or in coffee shops has meant headphones and using my own music to block out everything else.

The Sun City Girls. True trickster-shamans. Beautiful and brutal. Beware.

Omar Khorshid:

I need to wrangle children. Which reminds me of “When the Children Cry.” I preferred “Wait.”:

 

 

 

spring reading

This weekend I met a few deadlines and finished the novel portion of a 21st century reading list. We picked five novels, five short story anthologies, and five essay collections. Our previous readings have focused on particular authors and we agreed to go back to that format and intermingle our 21st century choices among those books. Reading a single author’s works and thinking about how they develop over time has just been more satisfying than the list of critically-acclaimed novels we chose. This summer we’re going to finish War and Peace and then dive into Faulkner. Most of that will be rereading for me, but I’m looking forward to it.

Here’s what we read in order of my favorites:

Asterios Polyp: David Mazzucchelli

Telegraph Avenue: Michael Chabon

Oryx and Crake: Margaret Atwood

The Book Thief: Markus Zusak

American Gods: Neil Gaiman

1. Asterios Polyp: David Mazzucchelli

A brilliant graphic novel. I was going to write something about it, but I found this and this and they say it better than I could. The second link is to some thoughts on the book by Scott McCloud and he recommends reading the book at least twice before reading his comments. Not a bad idea.

2. Telegraph Avenue: Michael Chabon

Chabon is a writer that makes me sick sometimes because of how good he is. I love wishing I had written some of these sentences or the 40,000 word sentence that makes up the central chapter of this book. Having worked in a used CD/vinyl store off and on for almost ten years made the record store scenes particularly fun for me.

3. Oryx and Crake: Margaret Atwood

I haven’t read a lot of Atwood, but I have lots of respect for her. She’s a great writer, but not always my taste, although I appreciate what she’s doing. I may have come to this with too much baggage: I love plague and dystopian novels. It was hard for me to get into and I felt my attention waning here and there. Ultimately, I enjoyed it. What I didn’t like was probably more my fault than the writer’s.

4. The Book Thief: Markus Zusak

I’ll have to add this to a long list of books that friends say is “wonderful” and even say is their “favorite,” but is one that had little effect on me. That said, I don’t think it’s a bad book–it’s just not for me. I liked I am the Messenger better.

5. American Gods: Neil Gaiman

This was a surprise. Several friends have told me to read this book. I’ve read a few of Gaiman’s short stories and liked them. I’ve read his blog and watched a few hours of interviews and talks that he’s given. I like Gaiman, but I found this book unreadable. I read about 30% and I just couldn’t do it anymore.

 

 

 

 

 

 

more break than spring

The past few weeks have been insanely busy with the end of the grading period plus stomach virus misery in the McClurg-Vineyard camp. I’ve had several projects cooking at once, and several of them I just can’t talk about yet. For one of them, a friend of mine is going to be knocking out some high profile and exciting stuff and I may be involved–or not. Either way, an incredible artist I know is about to be making some waves and that’s really cool.

I got to crank up some Napalm Death, etc. for inspiration for some recordings that may or may not see the light of day. If anything, I may be helping another good friend develop his blast beat chops. This has allowed me to check out some music that I haven’t listened to since I was thirteen. Blast beat etudes.

I’ll be reading at the Slash Pine Poetry Festival and I’ll have a poem in the commemorative anthology! The poem I turned in to the anthology is an important one for me. In some ways, I feel like it’s the best thing I’ve written, but, boy oh boy, has it racked up a lot of rejections. That’s just how it goes. I’m really excited about this especially since I gave my first poetry readings in Tuscaloosa at what was once the oldest bar in Alabama (The Chukker, R.I.P). Actually, I helped present a weekly reading series there, but I haven’t read there in about fourteen years and I haven’t done a poetry reading in about four years.

I have a new piece of flash fiction over at The 500.

My visiting writer series ended yesterday with Emma Bolden. Wow. She’s developed a great strategy for combining various inputs, including TV, into versions of found poetry. She’s fiercely intelligent and wonderfully down-to-earth. She’s also a great teacher!

I hope my students have gained something from this reading series. Every writer so far has taught me something.

One of the projects I worked on desperately needed some Anthrax. I went with Fistful of Metal:

And I’ve listened to lots of Swans lately:

potentiality

Several interesting possibilities may be coming up, but for now they are all potential energy. It’s been a busy few weeks and I hope that some of the work pays off, but I also know that sometimes it just doesn’t.

One of the projects that I know will pay off is getting ready for our second visiting writer TJ Beitelman, who just birthed a novel into the world. Good stuff! Has a mood not unlike Lynch directing some O’Connor or McCarthy. He’s going to be great with my students and I’m excited to hear the conversation.

I unfortunately abandoned the first title in our Great Books of the 21st Century reading list. American Gods just wasn’t for me and felt like a total chore reading. I’ve only read some of Neil Gaiman’s short fiction and have liked it and I find him inspiring as an artist and fellow human being, but I just couldn’t manage Gods.

I think the group is set to discuss my failure and to start The Book Thief.

I’ve written a little about this elsewhere, but I was totally flattered to have my project Little Billboards get a nice mention from the Found Poetry Review.

I think I’m still working in the spirit that I started the project. While I haven’t abandoned “traditional” haiku formats, I’ve been having a lot of fun working in found poetry/humument territory. I wish I had time to do more sound poems (or whatever they are). Regardless, I’m trying to update two to four times a week. I was a bad art student once, but this project has been a great excuse to play again. My two-year-old daughter often helps or works alongside me. The good stuff’s probably hers.

One of the more interesting titles I wrote and worked to this past week:

 

 

a new denomination ain’t a thing but a name

A highlight of my week was having Abraham Smith jump-start the visiting writers series I’m developing for my school. On the day he spoke his new book came out and we got to hear him read from his own work and from greats like Dylan Thomas. I hope my students enjoyed interacting with him as much as I enjoyed their interactions. A great day at work.

There’s so much in the hopper right now. I’ll elaborate as I can.

The Five Hundred is a cool website that I’m currently using to work some fiction muscles. The way it works: Every month you get a prompt for a five hundred word flash fiction piece. Contributors are kindly workshopping each other’s pieces. And that’s it. This month there was a bonus one hundred word prompt, so I wrote a ghazal. I’m pretty happy with it. You can read it here. I still consider much of my fiction apprentice work and some of it makes me cringe. But, what the heck, you can read my response here. Check out some other work on there, too. As someone without access to or time for MFA courses, this site came to me at the right time.

I’m still writing with music. More inspiration in sound from this week:

The Sadies:

Lots of John Fahey:

And Abe Smith himself turned me onto Washington Phillips:

 

 

 

 

 

you’re never too old to apprentice and 7+ pieces of audio inspiration

In order to hone my fiction chops, I decided to join The Five Hundred, a site that presents a prompt every month with the outcome being some form of flash fiction between 400-600 words. Next week, I’ll have a ghazal (based on a “bonus” 100 word prompt) and flash fiction piece called, “In the Cup of the Beholder.” Once the pieces go live, the writers treat the site as a workshop. I may not be able to submit each month, but I think I’ll enjoy the challenge.

Jeff McLeod suggested The Five Hundred. Thanks, Jeff!

With a two-year-old and a week-old newborn in the house, my writing time and process changed a little over the past few weeks. One, I’ve been mostly writing on a computer rather than in the notebooks I’ve kept for twenty years. It feels faster and time is something I’m short on. I don’t know if the quantity improves the quality of the writing, but I always write a lot and throw a lot away. The process feels more streamlined now.

And two, I wrote with music. In the past, it was pure distraction from writing. Maybe it’s all the life changes, but composing with music felt right, but I could only listen to certain pieces. With that in mind, I thought I’d share those here.

The prompt for the fiction piece was “Tear it down and try again.” One of the things I like about writing is research. This can send me into a spiral that I have to get out of quickly or else I won’t write anything. Initially, the prompt pushed me into writing an essay about the self and zen and I eagerly pulled book after book from my shelves until I realized that the topic was interesting, but not something I was prepared to turn into fiction. I abandoned that and looked at the Book of Revelations instead, which made me think of this classic by Son House:

Even though I mostly listen to instrumental music, Clarence Ashley’s version of “Coo Coo Bird” was on repeat. Maybe the droning effect of old time banjo kept this track from being distracting:

Erik Satie’s Gymnopedies:

Frescobaldi’s Fantasies: Book 1:

Vandermark 5: “New Acrylic”

Secret Chiefs 3: “Balance of the 19”

Also SC3: “Tistrya”

These artists share no blame in what they inspired.

Little Billboards #41–50

Check ‘em out.

a poem, an interview, some posts

I have a poem and interview available at Driftwood Press. My previous post is a reflection on a Hemingway reading project that covered fourteen books. And now I have a two-hour delay at work. Not a bad way to start the new year.

a farewell to Papa, for now

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”

Hemingway,  New York Journal-American (11 July 1961)

I’m lucky enough to have at least one friend who will devote time to reading projects. We just finished our Hemingway list started a year-and-a-half ago. Our goal was similar to the Vonnegut project: read the author’s works in chronological order. With Hemingway, we skipped the poems, letters, biographies, etc. and went to the book-length prose–fourteen books total.

Overall, what I find interesting in doing these extended readings of a corpus is how much these writers do that doesn’t fit with the generalizations often presented as critical summaries. These are necessary evils, I suppose, but they are also a shame. I know I’ve made assumptions about understanding someone’s work based on little evidence. For example, I remember the anthology commercials that played three seconds of every song and I assumed I “got” acts like Buddy Holly from those brief samples. I didn’t, and when I finally put the time into listening to Holly, I was pleasantly surprised about what I found.

With Hemingway, one of those stereotypes is his concise, sometimes telegraphic and repetitive, style. I believe he was a master of style, despite his quote about “masters.” He had plenty of quirks, some I like and some I don’t, but he wrote plenty of sentences longer than five words. There’s quite a range of syntax and diction in his work. Another benefit of reading through so much of someone’s work is you get to see the masterpieces and the mistakes. Our “masters” are human, after all.

I like and dislike as many of his men as I do his women and he wrote with sensitivity and emotion beyond simple masculine chest-thumping. He could sometimes write about food and wine as well as he could about war or bullfighting or hunting.

I think Hemingway’s ultimate masterwork is the short stories. I think it was difficult and rare for him to achieve the brilliance of the short stories in longer forms. Then again, I think it’s difficult for any artist in any form to achieve what he does in some of the short stories. Technically, they weren’t part of our reading project since we both had read the collected short stories before making our list.

Here are my top five of what we did read:

1. A Moveable Feast (haven’t read the 2009 edition)

2. Across the River and into the Trees

3. The Old Man and the Sea

4. For Whom the Bell Tolls

5. Garden of Eden

I guess I would argue that these are also his “best,” though that could change depending on the day.

Torrents of Spring:

If you follow the link, you can read a post I made right after reading Torrents. I think I may have been unfair about Hemingway’s humor writing. I think his “satire” (or was this a way of getting out of a contract?) is terrible, but Papa could be hysterically funny sometimes.

The Sun Also Rises:

Hemingway said that he wanted to redeem the lost generation and that he wanted to recreate the rhythms of the King James Bible. Ultimately, I don’t believe he’s successful. We read Lady Brett as a matador and Jake as the bull. This metaphor gets used later and altered. The artist becomes the matador in later works. He repeats “in the fiesta” three times in two sentences. That’s one of the stylistic burps that bothers me in the book.

A Farewell to Arms:

Mostly like this one, too. Some of the dialogue is awful. Catherine is almost grotesque at times. Henry’s decision-making, especially about the baby, just doesn’t make sense to me. The war writing in this book is really good. Many consider this the quintessential World War I novel but I can’t speak to that subject. I feel like Sun and Farewell are the most popular novels, but I just didn’t feel like they were as successful as some of the later ones.

Death in the Afternoon and The Green Hills of Africa:

Overall, really good books. Some of Hemingway’s finest passages are in these memoirs, especially when he veers away from the main subjects of bullfights and safaris. Not great books, but essential for Hemingway fans, I think. Surprisingly good. Death has a section entitled “The Natural History of the Dead” that is one of my favorite Hemingway pieces.

To Have and Have Not

This book is so much fun at first, like a Florida-noir novel or something like that, and then tanks. I read that the opening was originally made of two short stories and they were pretty good as is. The novel brings up some interesting ideas like communism, but Hemingway doesn’t pull off the multiple perspectives in the way that someone like Faulkner could. Uneven.

For Whom the Bell Tolls, Across the River and into the Trees, Old Man and the Sea

These books represent three different stylistic peaks for late Hemingway. I think For Whom is the best of the war novels and achieves something stylistically and structurally that he had been trying to do in the novel form since Sun. However, there are some really annoying quirks in this one. The Spanish rendering of familiar address as “thee” and “thou” achieves almost the opposite effect of the one I think he wanted. I understand why he does it, but it’s clunky. The “mucking muck” swearing sections are mucking awful to read and come off as silly. Again, I understand what he is doing, but I don’t think it works ultimately.

Across the River to me is possibly his best “literary” novel. It’s what happens when the war hero faces down his own death coming upon him from within rather than without. I feel like this is a “sleeper” hit, in the way that Mother Night is for Vonnegut. It’s a quiet, beautiful book.

Old Man is the book that I think achieves the KJV style he set out to replicate in Sun. It’s biblical and mythic. The symbolism here is handled at times about as well as C.S. Lewis could handle it, and despite that, the book is a deceptively simple masterpiece.

Islands in the Stream

Islands feels unfinished or at least feels like he hadn’t quite tweeked it enough. He worked on this book for a long time. I think it’s a reversal of To Have but much better. It redeems that work in some ways. There are some, possibly purposeful, stylistic shifts between sections. The third section, where the main character is referred to constantly by both of his names has echoes of For Whom. By the way, I hate that aspect of both books. When I’ve read 400 pages about a character, I will understand if you call “Robert Jordan” or “Thomas Hudson” by his first or last name.

A Moveable Feast

One of my favorite books. Young ex-pats in Paris in the ’20s.

Dangerous Summer

Dangerous Summer is just okay. There’s a lot of extra to make this a book: photos, an intro that goes to page 40 (that’s mostly about Old Man and the Sea [Really?]), the glossary from Death.

Garden of Eden

There’s a lot here for Hemingway fans and some surprises for those who think Papa is just the stereotypical masculine cartoon image that seems to get in the way of his work.

Under Kilimanjaro

After two tries, maybe this manuscript should be left alone. Originally released as the novel True at First Light, Kilimanjaro was later put out as nonfiction. While interesting to read as a Hemingway safari journal, it never hangs together as a book.

Six Word Summaries/Responses

My reading pal suggested we write six-word responses to each of the books we read in celebration of the six-word story often attributed to Papa. Here are mine:

Torrents of Spring: “France was a long way off.”

The Sun Also Rises: Lady Brett’s running of the “bulls.”

A Farewell to Arms: Sometimes the rain isn’t a baptism. (Alternative: “Priest every night five against one!”)

Death in the Afternoon: Writing equals bullfighting without puncture wounds.

The Green Hills of Africa: Writing equals hunting without gunshot wounds.

To Have and Have Not: Should have left the stories alone.

For Whom the Bell Tolls: It tolls for thee, mucking fascists!

Across the River and into the Trees: Where the market becomes the museum.

The Old Man and the Sea: Life is great victory, great loss.

A Moveable Feast: A Gossip Girl for lit nerds?

Islands in the Stream: Sometimes I like the song better.

Dangerous Summer: A posthumous not-so dangerous bummer.

Garden of Eden: Behold! Adam and Eve . . . and Marita!

Under Kilimanjaro: For Hemingway scholars and completists only.

One for the record books. Literally.

I mentioned back in April that I was asked to write a poem for the yearbook. I did, but I haven’t seen the page since I have a new job. I’m assuming they used it. Either way, I thought I’d share it here. The theme I was given was “The Inside Story.”

The Story Inside

(For students past, present, and future struggling to become themselves.)

In school, we were asked what we wanted to become

and we answered “Teacher!” or “Mommy!” while stranger

inclinations hung inside like the wet underwear out back.

We were ashamed of the clothes closest to us. I probably smiled

and said “policeman,” but yearned to haunt the stories,

the old houses, the graveyards. If I had said “ghost” what future

was I cursing myself to? Ghosts rarely alter the future;

they are whispers in the past. How could I become

a Jedi or another archetype whose story was the story

of us all? I wanted to see in bull’s-eyes and carry strangers

from a burning world. My heroes were never far from a monster’s smile,

so I also wanted the atomic heart and armored back

of Godzilla. Even if my imagination took me back

to the West, where I could ride wild horses into a future

ripped open like a stained-glass horizon, I’d still spend miles

in swamps and mausoleums, more Poe than Gunsmoke. To become

an outlaw might be nice, a cthulu-cowboy nicer: the stranger

in an even stranger land. I realize I still wanted the ghost story.

But aren’t we all haunting or haunted no matter the story?

Like Kahlo, every mirror cracked like her fractured back,

painting blood outside the body, the self itself a stranger.

Her pain let me understand my own and she let me want a future

tied to the images created by hand and by thoughts like birds becoming

hearts melting in the snow of memory and lost smiles.

But then, I borrowed someone else’s answer, the smile

of someone else’s happiness and was told not to want a child’s story:

dreams and stuffed bears and board games become

cobwebbed and damp and dust and going back

to get them seems impossible, because it’s all future, future,

future. The neighbors are now no more than strangers.

And I find sometimes that there is nothing stranger

than the time between camera flashes, between smiles

that tell one story and the story inside. My imagined future,

regardless of what I told my teachers, is like the story

unread and waiting all the way at the back

of the anthology. The truth we have is what we become.

In old photos, I see a stranger who shares my story.

I had to learn to return the smile, to give back

a certain grace to a past smiling at the future presently becoming.