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Skyscraper Pantheon: Surrealism, Magick, & Psychogeography in Atlanta & Appalachia
An innovative collection of essays exploring psychogeography, magick, and surrealism on the streets and landscapes of Atlanta and Appalachia. Drifting from occult memoir to surrealist game and through the neglected alleyways between, these writings invite you to see into the hidden dimensions layered beneath the skin of the familiar panorama.
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Published September 1, 2025
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December 30, 2025
OK so here we’ve got a collection of outings by the new generation of Paris Peasantry, namely Steven Cline and, unnamely, his parter, and whatever spectral familiars, guides, and companions they can conjure. These are dispatches from Atlanta’s gray zones and wild margins, the voice of utility tunnels and overgrown paths, of dead malls and nocturnal parklands.
Swinging like Tarzan on the loving ties between Surrealism and Magick, Cline & partner read and reveal these areas, constellating dreams, automatic poetry, mythic fantasy, synchronistic discovery, and other surreal facts into a numinous new reality. As the real warps to accommodate the imaginary, as the imaginary grows a prickly skin to find its place within the real, Cartesian duality dissolves; the distinctions between inner and outer worlds become immaterial.
Some beer and a pack Starbursts play their part in these adventures, too. And there’s a sore ankle to contend with.
Details like these aren’t unimportant, actually. Cline’s tone here is winningly easygoing (Southern? I ask myself) saving us from over-sincerity that might spoil the weird fun. He’s is just as likely to grin and shrug at an occult “hit” as fall lovingly all over it. But his imagination, full to bursting with folklore and Surrealist film and childhood memory, is really the royal guest here. Anything the imagination wants will be lavished upon it until its smiling teeth rot and fall out.
And do you understand how important that is! To pay the imagination all that deference? And this method, of re-imagining the world while you wander among very real rocks and grass and streets and public restrooms—do you understand the significance of this behavior in our overly virtual, overly mediated world!
Do this. Or–Surrealism and Magick aren’t everybody’s cuppa tea–so do something like it. And write it down. Show your work, even if you don’t arrive at an answer. And then tell me about it. I want postcards from that place you go when you are caught in a stare.
Swinging like Tarzan on the loving ties between Surrealism and Magick, Cline & partner read and reveal these areas, constellating dreams, automatic poetry, mythic fantasy, synchronistic discovery, and other surreal facts into a numinous new reality. As the real warps to accommodate the imaginary, as the imaginary grows a prickly skin to find its place within the real, Cartesian duality dissolves; the distinctions between inner and outer worlds become immaterial.
Some beer and a pack Starbursts play their part in these adventures, too. And there’s a sore ankle to contend with.
Details like these aren’t unimportant, actually. Cline’s tone here is winningly easygoing (Southern? I ask myself) saving us from over-sincerity that might spoil the weird fun. He’s is just as likely to grin and shrug at an occult “hit” as fall lovingly all over it. But his imagination, full to bursting with folklore and Surrealist film and childhood memory, is really the royal guest here. Anything the imagination wants will be lavished upon it until its smiling teeth rot and fall out.
And do you understand how important that is! To pay the imagination all that deference? And this method, of re-imagining the world while you wander among very real rocks and grass and streets and public restrooms—do you understand the significance of this behavior in our overly virtual, overly mediated world!
Do this. Or–Surrealism and Magick aren’t everybody’s cuppa tea–so do something like it. And write it down. Show your work, even if you don’t arrive at an answer. And then tell me about it. I want postcards from that place you go when you are caught in a stare.
Displaying 1 of 1 review