Crime Beat: Ypsilanti Checkout

YPSILANTI

Naked man steals book from library

Ypsilanti police say a library patron took off his clothes and exposed himself to an employee before fleeing with a handful of children’s books.

The 58-year-old librarian told police she was working at the Ypsilanti District Library when she assisted a man in selecting books.

She returned to her desk and looked up to see the same man step out from behind a bookcase, completely naked. The man "thrust his hips" in her direction but made no other movement toward her.

The librarian went upstairs to call police. By the time officers arrived the man had fled through an emergency exit, taking his clothes and the children’s books with him.

The man has yet to be located by police.

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Quote Bag: The Flesh of Our Youth

When a man sees a woman deserving of erotic attentions, he at once begins to desire her with his whole heart. Then, the more he thinks of it, the more he feels himself imbued with love until he reconstructs her entirely in phantasy. Then he begins to think of her figure, he perceives her limbs, imagines them in action and explores the private parts of her body.

– Andreas Capellanus

 

How can it be that so large a woman has been able to penetrate my eyes, which are so small, and then enter my heart and brain?

– Giacomo da Lentino

 

That man can think soul is a great strange wonderful thing

– Gregory Corso

 

What is it about reality that enables objectivity and subjectivity to coincide in the sensuous image?

– Allan Janik

 

We needn’t be sick in mind, or believe in God,

To love the flesh of our youth

– Robert Lowell

 

One night almost say that, for him, sensuality an philosophical thought were inextricably linked – the physical and mental manifestations of passionate arousal.

– Ray Monk

 

In the garden of poetry there is no forbidden fruit.

– Victor Hugo

 

I believe the mission of art is the mission of love.

– George Sand

 

But Mediterranean was what you could call horny, tho that is too crude an explanation for what she was experiencing – a kaleidoscope of feelings stemming from her deepest artistic, political and spiritual urges. And the outlet she sought for these tumultuous feelings was sexual, the perfect knowing that life and its meaning can be contained in one orgasm.

– Cypress

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Red Telephone

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Crime Beat: The Ypsilanti Michelangelo

YPSILANTI

Man agrees to remove ‘obscene snowman’

A man who helped build a snow structure "resembling that of the male anatomy" destroyed it Tuesday after someone who was offended called Ypsilanti police.

An Ypsilanti police officer responded to a North Summit Street home about 3:31 p.m. to investigate a report of an "obscene snowman."

Someone reported the large snow structure, which was in the man’s front yard, was "offesnsive" and in "open view of the kids."

The 20-year-old man destroyed the structure in front of the police officer, and the officer asked him to refrain from such behavior in the future.

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Quotebag: Wittgenstein

 

I know

That this world exists

That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field

That something about it is problematic

Which we call its meaning

– Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

I believe that a certain feeling of amazement that anything should exist at all, was sometimes experienced by Wittgenstein.

– Norman Malcolm

 

I told Wittgenstein he was mad and he said God preserve me from sanity.

– Bertrand Russell

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Overheard Conversation of the Day

Don’t tell Kaitlin cause I don’t think she wants to know that both her parents are fucking locked up.
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An Ypsilanti Nap/Returning To The Scene Of The Crime

YPSILANTI

Man steals, abandons car

A man abandoned the car he stole from a store parking lot in Ypsilanti when he discovered a woman sleeping in the back seat, police said.

The woman was unharmed , and police were able to identify a suspect from the store surveillance video and arrest him.

A man reported his 1992 blue Honda, which had been left running, was stolen from a store parking lot about 12:40 a.m. Thursday. He told police his girlfriend was sleeping in the back seat.

Police began looking for the car and found it parked at an apartment complex. The woman was awake inside the car and unharmed. Police believe she slept through the entire incident.

Police identified the suspect, a 42-year-old man from Ypsilanti Township, from surveillance video at the store. A store clerk later told police the suspect was back in the store. Police arrested him. He was held at the Washtenaw County jail.

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Quotebag: For a Good Time Call Unrealized Futility

 

Flaubert clearly saw the real, the devastating emptiness of men’s hopes and dreams and aims and plans as they so often work out. What he did not always sufficiently convey directly in the path of realistic truthfulness is a sense of the fact that people may have a very good time, may really heartily enjoy their depressingly commonplace actions, as seen from other points of view – actions undistinguished, vulgar, stupid, and in the long run utterly futile even in respect to the pitifully worthless ambitions which inspired them – actions of which the one redeeming virtue is perhaps the very fact that their futility was not realized and the enjoyment of them thus made possible.

— John Garber Palache

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Print the Legend by Craig McDonald

Print the Legend, Craig McDonald, Minotaur Books, $24.99.

Considering that it revolves around Ernest Hemingway’s 1961 suicide by shotgun, I suppose it would be indelicate of me to say that Craig McDonald’s Print the Legend blew me away, but in the noir spirit of the book I’ll say it anyway. Most of the action takes place four years later at a 1965 academic conference about Hemingway in Idaho, close to the scene of the crime. Slimy University of Michigan professor Richard Paulson, his spunky wife Hannah, Hem’s friend and fellow manly writer Hector Lassiter and shadowy FBI agent Donovan Creedy all come together with widow Mary Hemingway and a gaggle of fatuous academics to struggle for the great man’s legacy and shed light on his death.

Everyone has their own agenda, Paulson trying to prove that Hemingway was murdered, Creedy seeking information damaging to J. Edgar Hoover, and Lassiter looking to bolster his own literary reputation as well as protecting that of his friend. Things get wild and wooly quickly, McDonald effortlessly spooning Hemingway fact and legend into a mix that includes booze, stolen and forged manuscripts, LSD, gunplay and murder – the most shocking scene of all occurring in our very own Ann Arbor after pregnant Hannah’s return.

The academic world is novel territory for noir fiction, but McDonald makes it his own with truly impressive originality and ingenuity. While not quite achieving the immersive period authenticity of Megan Abbott or the twisted, dark vision of James Ellroy, McDonald carves out his own patch of the neo-noir landscape in Print the Legend, and, like Hemingway himself, does it with breathtaking brio.

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Happy Valentines Day!

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