Stephen McClurg's Blog

Timon and Pyrrho

What’s a cotter pin?
It ain’t no Fraggle.

Gotta rock in my hand.
What’s your skull sound like?

You can get the rest of the poem and the playlist at The Drunken Odyssey.

I was lucky to see the shorts blocks from this year’s Brooklyn Horror Film Festival thanks to Horror DNA. You can read the review for each block below. It was an excellent selection, with many standouts including “Barlebas,” “Far from the Plains,” “Alice & the Little Green Men,” and “Belloe.” “Jeff” was my personal favorite.

Head Trip
Nightmare Fuel
Death Grip

In his introduction, Brandon Grafius recalls being ten years old and attempting his first cover-to-cover read of the Bible. He found himself not shocked by the dull stretches but by the strange, violent, and uncanny bits never mentioned in Sunday school. That early discovery stayed with him, eventually inspiring his work on a PhD in the Hebrew Bible. In Scared by the Bible: The Roots of Horror in Scripture, he argues horror isn’t a modern invention, but rather one of the Bible’s native storytelling modes. The Bible, he notes, is a collection of genres, and the discomfort new readers often feel when approaching scripture comes from viewing it solely as a moral handbook rather than a multifaceted text where terror and transcendence can coexist….

You can read my full review over at Horror DNA.

Waiting for Our Song

I’m not alone
in sensing the pressing
of the almighty delete….

You can get the rest of the poem and the playlist at The Drunken Odyssey.

Bindled

Barely awake, dressed
from the night before, dense fog
settles on my eyes and chest…

You can get the rest of the poem and the playlist at The Drunken Odyssey.

If you’re interested in a genre-heavy lineage of women behind the camera, I Spit on Your Celluloid is a rich, wide-ranging resource. It spans from silent cinema to today, covering international, art, and micro-budget horror, with a range that eclipses many genre surveys. A few layout quirks aside, it’s an excellent guide for discovering new films and forgotten pioneers. I plan on working through the filmography I haven’t seen.

I should note that I have a non-UPC copy, so other editions may be edited and designed differently than the regular copy.

Michael Lentz’s Shattenfroh is a challenging, 1,001-page experimental German novel about Nobody, who sits imprisoned at a table by his father, wearing something like a plague mask. His name is a nod to the Latin nemo and the Cyclops episode in The Odyssey. I’m barely gesturing toward the amount of wordplay here, much of which I likely missed. The story unfolds through Nobody’s “brain fluid,” producing prose that echoes Samuel Beckett, while incorporating touches of Franz Kafka’s magical existentialism, among other flavors.

Nobody becomes and interacts with various beings in art history. There are glorious appearances by Hieronymus Bosch’s hybrids. Episodes occur inside other famous paintings as Lentz explores German and religious history and the many ways states and groups have inflicted torture, particularly through crucifixion. There’s a wild, cruel humor reminiscent of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, a story that includes a giant urinating and flooding a town. 

The title Shattenfroh plays with several German words, especially Schadenfreude—pleasure in others’ suffering. Much of the novel grapples with witnessing and complicity. One striking section reproduces Nobody’s handwritten list of people who died during Allied bombings of Düren. When faced with a list of the dead, do you read the names? What does that act mean? If you ignore them, are you erasing them again? This recalls Pasolini’s Salo, which also turns the viewer into witness and accomplice—but Lentz’s version, for me, cuts even deeper. The novel has a bizarre balance of humor and horror, like watching Michael Haneke and Terry Gilliam films at the same time. Maybe Mad God is a better comparison.

For all its density, Shattenfroh is continuously engaging and, in one sense, easy to read. It’s episodic, and the individual set pieces (1,001 pages/nights/events) are easier to comprehend than grasping the larger narratives and themes on first read. In the end, this maximalist work feels like an infernal history of Germany, perhaps even civilization itself, and an unflinching meditation on what it means to see, to suffer, and to bear witness. Nobody in a Purgatory reliving history as a kind of Inferno. But I imagine, with another reading, Nobody will reveal something else.

Low Windows

Cinnamon mornings,
when my heart beats in paunchy
pentachord warnings…

You can get the rest of the poem and playlist at The Drunken Odyssey.

I was thrilled to get this in the mail. Vintagia is an oracle deck built for creativity and inspired by the I Ching, an ancient Chinese divination text. The design is part early VHS, part early Atari, with imagery from DOCUMERICA, a 1970s photography initiative by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which provides both nostalgia and inspiration. Sereptie, the creator and part of Acid Horizons, suggests that this version may see updates down the road based on feedback. 

While I haven’t had the chance to use the Vintagia deck yet, its beauty is undeniable. The guidebook, fecund with possibility, promises a rich journey. I can already envision its potential when paired with musical ideas. My previous year of working with the I Ching was a source of inspiration and a learning experience, using two translations: one by Wilhelm/Baynes and another by Bi/Lynn.

It was difficult at first, but eventually I could read the hexagrams as images, much like looking at the pictorial elements of the Tarot. Since I’m more in a writing mode at the moment, I’m interested to see if Vintagia sparks anything. I’ve been able to use various oracle and Tarot decks for working with music (and have had little success with Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies deck, though I cherish my copy of it). I have also been unable to translate pictorial ideas into written words.

The I Ching itself has an interesting tradition in American creativity. I was first made aware of it through John Cage’s music and writing. Subsequently, I learned that Philip K. Dick used it to help plot The Man in the High Castle.

Soft Skills
What’s wrong with his teeth?
Perfect Euclidean squares
though rotten underneath…

You can get the rest of the poem and the playlist at The Drunken Odyssey.

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….

You can get the rest of the poem and the playlist at The Drunken Odyssey.