Out Of Office

Posted on July 1, 2009 by ubu507
Well, America, for your birthday we are once again wending our way true North to Ultimackinac Thule to watch the evening star droop and shed her sparkler dims…so RADIOFREEUBU will be off the air until Tuesday…please, no tears….
Posted in Travel | 5 Comments

Crime Beat: The Ypsilanti Show And Go

Posted on June 30, 2009 by ubu507

Man ticketed in exposure incident

A man exposed himself to people waiting at a bus stop in Ypsilanti, late Saturday morning, police reports said.

A 28-year-old Ypsilanti woman called police at about 11:50 a.m. after seeing the man walking around the bus stop in the area of South Hamilton and Ferris streets with his pants down, reports said. He did not make any contact with anyone.

Officers confronted the 51-year-old man, who was then clothed, and issued him a ticket charging him with disorderly conduct. He said he was just urinating in the bushes, reports said.

Posted in Crime Beat | 2 Comments

Sophia: Goddess of Wisdom by Caitlin Matthews

Posted on June 27, 2009 by ubu507

Geez…if I’m going to be this busy I’d at least like to make a bunch a money in the process to repay me for so much time spent deprived of the privilege of communicating with you, dear reader, but the tale of the register tape reveals a mere fraction of what I deserve to accrue for so much laborious human contact. Ah, well, looks like this week the better half will cop the Caddy the Aunt bestows on the top salesman of the week. It’s the steak knives for me and as for Marty – well, maybe G.M. is hiring.

ANYHOW. At the Kiwanis sale, which I went to for the month or so that there wasn’t a library sale, someone unloaded their Goddess literature collection, a subject even the most casual peruser of this page will know I’m interested in. A lot of that stuff is too stridently feminist or too nicey nicey new age for my taste, and a look at the cover of Sophia: Goddess of Wisdom by Caitlin Matthews made me wary, (I didn’t even buy it the first go round) but it proved to be an erudite, densely thought out opus, written by someone who seems to have read everything. Matthews sticks to academic probability and harsh reality, but is not afraid to make a case for the necessity of the return of Wisdom to our world, which, come on now GREG, can’t be such a bad thing. What really intrigued me was that she covers a lot of the stuff I’ve been working through lately, not just the obvious stuff like Ephesus, Gnosticism and Marian apparitions, but also German Romanticism and Russian Symbolism, and even, yes reader, snakes and caves.

So now UBU presents, torn from the pages of his notebook, thangs from the book, starting with Matthews’s words and followed by quotes copped from her quotations:

In pre-patriarchal times, the wisdom of the Goddess was understood primarily though the body. The rituals which bound humankind to the Divine Feminine were enactments of sacred sexuality: a state wherein wholeness is experienced.

Knowledge, in both Christian an Gnostic Fall narratives, is preceded by sexual relations. Gnostics literally ‘contracted wisdom’ within sexual embrace.

Simon was undoubtedly possessed of ‘the secret fire’ by virtue of his partnership with Helena. Esoterically, it is the female who possesses the initiating fires of creation, and who may initiate her partner into its secrets. There are many references to other Gnostic sects who utilized Tantric means of identifying with their deities.

For at the end of the world, sexuality and knowledge are united and for Sophia it is the beginning of another world.

The cave is undoubtedly the prime temple of the Black Goddess. Oracular caves, incubatory underground chambers and stone vaults are all associated with her worship. Orthodox icons still depict Mary giving birth in a shepherd’s hill-cave, with the star of revelation shining down into the darkness both of the cave and of her womb.

It has been in the shape of a child, a maiden barely out of girlhood, that Sophia has chosen to make her appearances in the Christian world.

Those who look upon the Goddess unveiled are stricken with death, madness or transformatory wisdom.

The veiled Goddess is an image of the Black Goddess – she who cannot be looked upon. But when her veil is drawn, the Goddess reveals herself to be beautiful. This vision does not provoke sexual desire, although that lies at the root of all longing, but an intense and profound understanding of beauty as wholeness and perfection.

– Caitlin Matthews

　

Deo’s orgies and the terrifying Hekate nights I experienced…

– Sabina

　

Erotic energy is the eternal source of creativity. The erotic shock is the way of revealing beauty in the world.

– Nicholas Bedyaev

　

The ancients not only considered a cave as the symbol of this generated and sensible world, but as the representative of every invisible power.

– Porphyry

　

She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her.

– Proverbs 3:18

　

The Son is the cup, and the Father is he who is milked and the Holy Spirit is she who milked him.

– Ode of Solomon

　

Those who seek truth from that female being who is truly wise will construct for themselves wings so as to fly.

– The Book of Thomas

　

Visit the inner earth; through purification you shall find the hidden stone.

– Basil Valentinus

　

Such a union we find in sexual love, and therefore we grant it an exclusive significance as the requisite and irreplaceable basis of all future perfection.

– Vladimir Soloviev

　

The eternal in woman is the gleam we follow.

– Goethe

Posted in FROM THE QUOTE BAG | 1 Comment

I Think We All Know A Veronica

Posted on June 26, 2009 by ubu507

Posted in art | 3 Comments

Bury Me Deep by Megan Abbott

Posted on June 24, 2009 by ubu507

Bury Me Deep, Megan Abbott, Simon and Schuster, $15.00.

There’s a lot of chatter about noir these days, but it’s easier to drop the term than to define it, and even harder to recreate a noir novel without seeming quaint or mannered. There’s even a trendy publishing house devoted to reprinting old noir and introducing contemporary neo-noir, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred the older brew has a kick that puts the newer vintage to shame. As far as I’m concerned there are only two authors out there now who can credibly keep up with Chandler, Hammett, Cain and the rest of them on their own turf – James Ellroy and Megan Abbott.

Although Ellroy’s brilliant prose stylings are unmatched by any living writer, in many ways Abbott is more approachable, just as dark and trenchant, but less willfully perverse, able to inhabit the shadows of the past in a way that always seems immediate and only too real.

Following on the heels of her Edgar winning Queenpin, Abbott’s latest book is Bury Me Deep, a brilliant fever dream inspired by the real life "Trunk Murderess," Winnie Ruth Judd, the central figure in one of the most sensational crimes of the depression era. Abbott’s Judd stand-in is named Marion Seeley, and the reader quickly gets into the skin of a naive young woman conditioned by grinding poverty and a strict fundamentalist upbringing, unmoored by the nightmarish men of her dreams, and possessed by a romantic joie de vivre which will doom her in a grey and unforgiving society. Every detail – the slang, the setting, the clothes – rings perfectly true as this innocent creeps closer and closer to an unthinkable act.

It’s a measure of Abbott’s skill that by the end the crime that has so baffled history seems not only inevitable but even understandable. There’s also a brilliant coda that supplies a much more satisfying conclusion that real life could manage.

It’s not necessary to know anything about Winnie Ruth Judd or even noir to enjoy this book. Anyone with an appreciation for good crime fiction will find more than enough to satisfy in Bury Me Deep.

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Crime Beat: No Parking MEANS (whack) NO PARKING

Posted on June 23, 2009 by ubu507

 

U-M security vehicle damaged

A University of Michigan housing security vehicle was damaged by someone who struck it with an uprooted parking sign near the Central Campus this morning, campus police reports said.

The windshield of the unoccupied vehicle was reportedly smashed shortly after 2 a.m. in the 900 block of South University Avenue. A U-M police report indicates a nearby sign that was uprooted was used and no suspect descriptions were available.

And here’s my favorite violation from The Restaurant Inspection report:

the inspector observed an employee accidentally spilling condensation from a fan onto a tray of unprotected desserts

 

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Like

Posted on June 20, 2009 by ubu507

 

 

"See anything you like?"

"Huh?" It took me a second to realize that Tekla had caught me looking down her blouse as she leaned over the table, and another second to become completely and paralyzingly embarrassed. "Uhhhh…."

But Tekla just laughed. "Oh, don’t worry, no big deal, I’m used to it. There’s a couple of boys in my class who spend half their time sneaking peeks. Can you believe it, at their age?" She laughed again. "And mine!"

Finally I regained enough composure to say "I guess they grow up fast these days," in almost my normal tone of voice, quickly wishing I’d been cool enough to say something teasingly suggestive — Yeah, there are a couple of things in there that interest me, being the best that I could come up with after much after the fact thought.

Tekla taught third grade and I taught fifth. We had both started at Saint Martin’s at the same time, had gone to the same college and were often thrown together, at first by necessity and later by choice, natural allies while navigating the treacherous shoals of classroom and staff meeting. A real affection grew between us, along with the unsettling shadow of sexual tension, inevitable with a man so appreciative of female beauty and a woman so blessed with it.

To me she was as attractive at forty as she’d ever been, graceful and confident, with the kind of bedrock beauty that transcends age. We were both married, happily enough on my side, and apparently her’s as well, although I would learn in time that that wasn’t quite the case.

Intimate, but never physically so, we’d confined ourselves to an infrequent collegial hug, carefully overlooking the fact that I was a man and she a woman, a difference that can be ignored indefinitely in theory, perhaps, but only for so long in real life.

Tekla didn’t dress as suggestively as the second grade teacher, with half her blouse undone, or as primly as the librarian buttoned to the neck, or even as comfortably as the principal in her St. Martin’s sweatshirt, but stylishly, very aware of the impression she was making, clearly feminine but never overdone, with her bracelets and earrings and thin gold chains, her usual outfit a simple white blouse and black slacks, but varied with enough dresses and skirts that it never seemed like a uniform.

I’d read an article by a female academic in one of the journals which asserted with complete certainty that being a woman in our culture necessitated the conscious, forced assumption of an artificial and dramatic femininity, an imperative to play the role as conscientiously as a drag queen. As is common with many theories, I believe that statement says more about the person making it than the ostensible subject – certainly, although she had an inherent understanding of posture and presentation retained from her ballet days, Tekla’s femininity came quite naturally to her, laying lightly at even the most unrehearsed moment.

Obviously I thought about her a lot, too much probably, her clothes, her hair, the way she smelled, the way she said my name, those intermittently revealed legs. I certainly didn’t want to call it love, and it wasn’t, not in the sense of some irresistible, crushing romantic force, but there was undeniably a very real sweetness there, the kind that made me willing to get out of bed each morning and continue going through the motions of what had proven to be a disappointingly meaningless middle-class, middle aged life.

But all that was prologue. Inevitably, even in the most predictable, pedestrian existence, lines appear that must either be crossed or completely avoided, and it was then, with that one question that, despite all that had gone before, our relationship really began. See anything you like? At that moment I think we both knew, for better or for worse, that everything between us had changed.

Posted in From A hypnagogic Journal | Leave a comment

A Bold and Capital Manifesto from UBU

Posted on June 19, 2009 by ubu507

This is (at the moment) the FIRST KNOWN PIECE OF HUMAN ART! And what is the subject? A NUDE WOMAN, the depiction of which EVEN TODAY is considered CONTROVERSIAL by both the CHRISTIAN RIGHT and the POLITICALLY CORRECT LEFT. Even before the CHRISTIAN ERA some philosophers DEMONIZED the HUMAN BODY and TERRESTRIAL EXISTENCE (which, after all, IS ALL WE CAN KNOW). The CHURCH once in COMPLETE CONTROL exhibited an OVERT HATRED of WOMEN and the NATURAL WORLD, waging a CONCERTED CAMPAIGN against the DIVINE FEMININE and SACRED SEXUALITY, even marginalizing WISDOM HERSELF. As in this piece of PUREST ART we must RESACRALIZE the FEMALE BODY, NATURE and EARTHLY LIFE if we are to achieve a VIABLE EXISTENCE on this, our MOTHER PLANET and TRUE HOME.

Posted in Cosmic Verities | 3 Comments

Noir

Posted on June 17, 2009 by ubu507

This is a very good noir novel by the author of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

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the Beautiful

Posted on June 16, 2009 by ubu507

When one of her pupils fell in love with her, she displayed and threw before him one of the rags she used as a sanitary napkin, and said: "You are in love with this, young man, not with the Beautiful."

– Dennis Ronald MacDonald

Posted in Cosmic Verities | Leave a comment