The Madhouse Bell
Dark Flow
Hairy Trotters
Cult and Myth
Concupiscence
Entrancing Day
The Event Group
The Decay Scene
My Place in a Few
The Madhouse Bell
Unbalanced Thinking
Hyperbolic Nonsense
Licenced and Insured
The Climax of Matter
Fresh Bloat Active Dry
Noumenal Psychopomp
The Old Trunk Routine
Commercial and Residential
Eros is Not a Devil But a God
The Absolutely Becoming One
The New Vibration of the Light
A Species of Paranoic Literature
Grim Details Emerge in Beheading
Gotta go? Forget finding the nearest log.
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4 family members held in break-ins
A Whitmore Lake area family of four has been arrested on suspicion of breaking into vehicles parked in church lots during Sunday services over the last month in four counties.
On Sunday, surveillance teams from the Brighton post of the Michigan State Police, The State Police Investigative Support Team, the Livingston County Sheriff Department, Green Oak Township Police and Brighton Police were at area churches and caught the family members committing thefts.
The suspects are a 50-year-old woman, her 23-year-old and 16-year-old son, and her 29-year-old daughter-in-law, Sgt. Mark Thompson said. He said the adults were held in the Livingston County jail pending charges. The teen was released.
Thompson said the mother drove the others to the church parking lots and waited while they broke into the vehicles.
Hey, don’t fret true believer but ole UBU is going to be hitting the road, silent running with NO RADIO CONTACT for about a week – the longest I’ve been out of this burg since we moved here…
For all you UBUheads who camp out in parking lots awaiting one of my public appearances rumor has it I’ll be moderating the following panel on Friday, so you better fire up the microbus and get the road trip to Charm City started!
Sheraton Baltimore City Center
4:30 P.M.-5:30 P.M.
INTERNATIONAL A
Why great endings are so important.
Harlan Coben, Susan Dunlap, David Ellis, Brent Ghelfi, Mike Lawson
See Ya,
UBU
I leave my job in the parking lot (we’re never busy anyway) to sneak a quick lunch with Rowe. She’s very depressed, in worse shape than I’ve ever seen her, down and bedraggled, very glad I’ve come to support her, almost pathetically grateful, even kissing the side of my hand as I take hers consolingly, hanging on to me, not in a romantic way at all, but a needy one.
She also hands me a lengthy letter, four pages on post it notes shaped like a heart, her handwriting scribbled all over. Obviously, I’m dying to read it and want to spend more time with her but decide I’d better run over and check on the lot first.
When I get there it’s chaos – long lines of honking cars, trying to get in and out past the closed gates at the entrance and exit. My boss is there too and he’s quite angry. I make up a quick story – I had to run home to get something important and my cat got out and I had to chase it around the neighborhood, it’ll never happen again, usually there’s no one here at this time of day, etc. and as I’m usually a model employee he grudgingly forgives me as I straighten everything out quickly – but I never get back to Rowe and, of course, wake up before I can read the letter.
Police use Taser in bizarre incident
Ypsilanti Police used a Taser to subdue a 24-year-old Ypsilanti man who grabbed a woman during a bizarre incident early this morning in the 600 block of Armstrong Court.
Ypsilanti Police Sgt. Deric Gress said police were called to the scene at 4:10 a.m. on a report of a man chasing a woman outside an apartment complex. When police arrived, the man stripped his clothes off. He had what appeared to be a knife in one hand, police said, and he asked police to kill him, then quickly changed the subject.
Officers ordered the man to lie on the ground, but he instead went toward an officer, who fired the stun gun at him. The man fell and let go of what officers had thought was a knife; it turned out to be a large pen. The man pulled one of the Taser probes from his body, then ran toward a female bystander, whom he grabbed. Police ordered the 24-year-old Ypsilanti man to the ground again, but he ran off, so police used the Taser a second time and were able to bring him under to control.
He was taken to a hospital for psychiatric evaluation.
No one was injured.
Stabbing Victim mum on details
A 37-year-old man refused to give Ypsilanti police details of how he was injured after police were called to St. Joseph Mercy Hospital about 2:30 a.m. today.
The man said he had been poked in the eye, but he had been stabbed in the face and lost a lot of blood. Police said the man gave them several locations were he said an unknown person "poked" him. Then they said he refused to talk to them, or seek prosecution.
I was extremely apprehensive Thursday night for the Palen/Biden debate. My emotional state was really most like my feelings before a Steeler playoff game. The difference between a football game and debate, however, is that at the end of the game there’s an objective score to tell you who won. To me this match up was obvious – I thought Biden credible and statesmanlike and Palin’s faux-folksy mugging and evasions merely freakish. Both the Republican and Democratic talking heads admitted afterward that Palin’s shtick was a coached and practiced act, but the question was, would the American public buy that act? After all they were able to be conned into believing that George W. Bush, the spoiled rich boy, Yale grad and son of the former President of the United States was just a regular good ole boy, an average upstanding cowboy. Palin effortlessly spewed the language of the commercials that bracketed her appearance, delivering empty sentimental generalities with a plastic grin, branding herself and McCain as "mavericks" with the insouciance of a manufacturer slapping a made in America label on a Chinese product. It felt like an important moment – Palin’s right wing radio style speech at the Republican convention apparently impressed a lot of people, as did her hokey "hockey mom" persona (as if she weren’t a governor living in a mansion), and even, for a short period, seemed to tilt the election in McCain’s favor. A closer look swung the pendulum in the other direction, and she quickly was in danger of become an out and out joke. A lot of liberals were completely sure that she’d embarrass herself as much in the debate as she had in her interviews, but I knew that that was overconfidence, that Palin was a practiced debater who knew quite well how to project her style in the face of substance and had the sinister ability of a former Beauty Queen to endear herself on stage to the judges with eye contact and a wink. Thankfully it seems like the debate was like most debates, mostly a draw, with each side believing their candidate had won, and the undecideds (and how can ANYONE be undecided when there’s been so many clearly defined differences between the candidates from the beginning) still undecided.
I know I’m not alone in thinking this election is the most important of my lifetime. After that weird millennial period in 2000 when there was no clear winner and then Bush was appointed, I’ve felt as if I’d slipped into another dimension, like one of those science fiction stories where the guy wakes up one morning to find that the world is ruled by talking dinosaurs. Somehow we’d slipped into a grim parallel alternate universe, a blind alley leading to a dead end. In a better place another me was saying Wow, imagine if that idiot Bush had won the election, but this unlucky version of UBU was living it. The familiar America I’d known suddenly changed into a place where an administration invaded other countries for bogus reasons, tortured without hesitation, spied on citizens, seriously attempted to end the two party system and generally wiped its butt with the same Constitution it so vociferously claimed to be defending. A television news channel claimed to be "fair and balanced" while delivering only high volume administration propaganda and personal attacks on those who dared disagree. Religious Conservatives whose superstitious beliefs were laughed off the intellectual stage hundreds of years ago were taken seriously while legitimate scientists were ridiculed. The working class gleefully supported economic policies that shoveled money out of their pockets and into the vaults of rich people who already had more than they could count. A couple of guys who weaseled out of serving in Vietnam portrayed a wounded veteran as a traitor. Dissent was the same as Terrorism, and the whole earth our enemy. And the weirdest thing was – most people seemed not to notice, and when they did notice they generally approved, as if things had always been that way.
Which is why Barack Obama really does mean hope to me. I think that the only way to shock the universe back to sanity is to make the radical, historical, unusually sane move of electing him president. So many crazy things have happened that I wouldn’t have swallowed in a Kilgore Trout novel that it really scares me to see a strange cartoon character like Palin emerge, like some sinister two dimensional insect carnivore released from the melting Arctic ice, a mutant praying mantis, whose weird screeching and bizarre mannerisms seem to hypnotize her naive victims, arriving on the national scene just in time to save her prehistoric cicada mate, the crabbed, anciently wicked John McCain, from the forces of good.
Yeah, well, I told you things seemed crazy, but it does seem to me that everyone I know with an ounce of sensitivity shares a amorphous anxiety about this election. On so many levels there’s just something essentially crucial about the result. Things look pretty good at this second, but god knows stranger things have happened recently, and I won’t rest easy until Obama’s safely in the White House. This time I want to be in the universe where I can speculate Can you imagine what it’d be like if those freaks McCain and Palin won? instead of having to live it. Heck, yeah, darn right, you betcha!
Man, I’m a little freaked out by the proliferation of “lightning source,” a.k.a. print on demand (POD) or what used to be known as vanity press books. There are more and more every month, and there are probably more people self-publishing books than reading them. Although a teeny-tiny percentage of these “authors” break through, it’s something of a racket, and these publishers, along with the MFA programs, costly writers workshops and editors for hire exploit the apparently universal desire among people to become published authors. Not that UBU’s any different, but I would NEVER pay some outfit to have my stuff published then pulped. I get inquires from these authors and “publishers” all the time to carry their ugly books or to give the authors a signing and they go straight to the garbage can. I’ve read some examples of POD writing, and let me tell you, there’s usually an obvious reason that no real publisher will print them. Maybe these November examples add significantly to the majesty of the written word – you be the judge – but to me they seem a little, well, bizzaro! (In the interest of accuracy I’ll point out that some of these are from micro publishers who actually pay their authors.)
Cattle Drive Administration by John L. Castleman (Authors’ Discovery Cooperation)
A College level satire on management, leadership, educational administration, supervision, and interpersonal relations, these resources are loaded with entertainment and cowboy music. 164 pp. Paper $19.95 (Study Aids/College Guides, Business & Economics/Leadership, Disciplines/Linguistics)
BiC’s Baptism
by Robin K. Khoury (Little Light Press)
Every time BiC (Babe in Christ) thinks about baptism, his tummy tickles just like he is on a roller coaster. He doesn’t see why he should have to, and he is also afraid. Can Disciple Dan, Mr. Owl, the Old Lady in the Funny Hat and Pastor Windy help BiC learn what baptism means? Can BiC learn to trust God with his fears?
Baptism is presented from a mainline evangelical point of view and is shown by immersion. BiC’s baptism does not depict infant baptism. The character BiC is shown as a baby to symbolize the fact that he is a baby in Christ. 32 pp. Paper $12.95 (Juvenile Fiction/Religious/Christian)
Condor One by John Simpson (Dreamspinner Press)
A gay president and his top Secret Service agent realize they must find a way to balance their roles and personal relationship before stress and responsibility tear the two men apart. 212 pp. Paper $11.99 (Fiction/Erotica/Gay, Fiction/Political)
Hinterland
by David Barnett (Immanion Press/Megalithica Books)
Acclaimed as an astounding debut of reality noir fiction this work asks the questions: What is the shadowy beast that roams the lonely moors? Why does a mass-produced painting leave its owners horribly dead? Why does noone speak of the lost girls living on a small island in the middle of the duck pond? 304 pp. Paper $20.99 (Fiction/Fantasy/Dark Horror/Duck Ponds)
The Millionth Moon by W. Edmund Hood (Llumina Press)
An orphan girl struggles to understand the life around her. A local butcher wants to kill her, and she doesn’t know why. She doesn’t know where the kids who come to play with her live, or who takes care of them. Then there are the Star People and this Mr. Lucifer person. She can’t understand what all this has to do with her and some prophecy about the Millionth Moon. 272 pp. Paper $14.95 (Fiction/General)
Computer Worship & Pod Dragons in Rune County
by K.L. Raines (Booklocker.com)
A fantastic abundance of things float from the pink sky of Rune County: silicon chips and Motherboards, floppies in containers, passwords, and packages of seeds that sprout. Reincarnated nerdy pod dragons are on a mission to study the Brainfill world. 48 pp. Paper $12.00 (Computers /General, Humor / General, Comics & Graphic Novels /General, Body, Mind & Spirit / Reference)
The Radical Critique of Liberalism: In Memory of A Vision
by Toula Nicolacopoulos (Re.Press)
Working through the theories of prominent liberal theorists, the author demonstrates that an adequate appreciation of the deep structural flaws of liberal theory presupposes the application of critical reconstructionism. 292 pp. $40.00 ( Philosophy/Political, Political Science/ Political Ideologies | Conservatism & Liberalism, Political Science/ History & Theory/Radical Thought)
Player’s Handbook Vol. 3: Make Her Squirt! a Quick and Dirty Guide to Female Ejaculation and Extended Orgasm
by Tommy Orlando (Secret Life Publishing)
Orlando offers a guide for helping women reach powerful sexual releases. 88 pp. Paper $9.95 (Self-Help/ Sexual Instruction, Family & Relationships/Love & Romance, Psychology/Human Sexuality)
And I haven’t even included my favorite author names like Sip Sip, The Literary Artist, Squire Babcock, Thurston Comstock, Myrna Fay Flick, Katanga A. Bongo, Jason A. Dingus, John P. Cock and Venom Patton or characters such as Gustaf Hissler, Adolf Hitler’s doppelganger. But despite that noir duck pond, the following HAS to be the most terrifying vision conjured up by the POD people this month:
I’m sure every book addict has felt it – that sudden craving, that fierce irrational (irrational? a book lover?) itch for a certain book – the overwhelming urge TO HAVE IT. I must admit that it wasn’t really love at first sight when my book seeking confrere, the legendary Sheridan of Cross Street, first brought my attention to it. Robert Anton Wilson, I said Whoop-de-doo. I mean there’s a lot of RAW out there. Being a paranoia/conspiracy fan I’ve always sort of wanted to read one of his illuminati books, but like a lot of sci-fi/speculative fiction there are so many series and books in series and spin offs of series that I wasn’t sure where to begin. There’s also a sort of fey/twee/smart aleck quality about that kind of stuff that slightly nauseates me….but then Sheridan said "But it’s his non-fiction. You don’t see that all the time." That certainly piqued my interest – I mean the man was an infamous conspiracy polymath and I’d be more interested in reading what he seriously thought unadorned by the cutesy stuff.
Hmmmmm I said taking it for an examination, and I think that’s when the craving hit me. It was called Ishtar Rising or, Why the Goddess Went to Hell and What to Expect Now That She’s Returning, the back cover copy describing it as "…a journey through esoterica and erotica, explaining why Eve in the bible and Eris in Greek myth were both involved with nefarious apples…why attitudes toward the female breast correlate with war and peace…why the Great Goddess of the ancients went to Hell, and why most of us go to Hell in our dreams occasionally…why female pacifists baring their breasts in front of the Pentagon were unconsciously repeating an ancient religious ritual…why celibates have burned so many ‘witches’…and more!" And then there were the pictures, which ranged from the Venus of Willendorf and my beloved Minoan Snake Goddess to classic nude paintings to vintage and modern tit shots. Let’s just say it called out to me, loud and clear.
But try getting a book away from Sheridan. Even in his store he’s often strangely loathe to part with stuff he has only one copy of, and do not believe it when he says he’ll look it over and maybe bring it back to you next week, because once it’s in his box you will never see it again. I knew I had to get that book then and there. We’re pretty good about trading books we’ve found during the sale, but I didn’t have anything in my pile that would dazzle him and I could tell this one wasn’t going to go for future considerations. I was so feverish with book lust that I actually peeled off a fiver and laid it on him, and even THAT didn’t quite overcome his reticence. But the true book fiend is shameless and I had the book in my possession and wasn’t letting go. Fortunately for a good friendship, Sheridan found another non-fiction Wilson title, and that plus the five spot consoled him.
Well, I’m not sure that this book was all that, but I did dig right in and dig it I did. It was a little disconcerting learn that the title of the original edition was The Breast Book and to read in the introduction that "This book, frankly, got written originally because an editor at Playboy Press asked me if I could write a whole book on the female breast." There is the quality to it of a bright kid trying to show you how bright he is with myriad references and also how cool he is with the occasional dirty joke, and, especially at the end, of writing just to fill space, but, despite that there is something profound about it. There’s good stuff about evolution, the goddess and, yes, the hidden centrality of the breast in human consciousness. It was revised in 1989, but is essentially a product of the heady openness and optimism of the sixties. Midway through Wilson goes on an extended anal/oral Freudian jag which seems a tad reductive, although every word about the uptight religious types rang true about the Bush regime, with special relevance to John Ashcroft’s amazingly puritanical act of covering the bare breasts of the statues in the Justice Department. Its hope for a immanent world of goddess returning liberation seems quaint now, but all in all I’m glad I grabbed it out of Sheridan’s hand.
Here’s a couple of passages I especially liked:
The force that made men out of apes is the force that makes a man stare at a nipple and makes that nipple harden proudly under his gaze.
On the level of verbal argument the cynics always win, have always won, and especially since Hiroshima must always win. The only answer to them that carries conviction is the spontaneous and unpremeditated surge of life when, always unexpectedly, Beauty and Joy manifest themselves and you know why you are here and what you must do. The illumination is always intimate, always sensual, and almost invariably sexual, either in the specific sense or in a more general way. No other power can withstand the paranoiac pragmatism that constantly reminds us that we must die, that all we build must crumble, that there is no point in anything.
For Autumn has found me
And thrown her arms around me.
She has breathed on my lips and I wander apart,
Dead leaves in my heart.
– Lord Alfred Douglas
