Cambridge Poppies
The woman in
The bottom of
The canoe shakes
The wet branches
And for a moment
All beauty seems to
Die in her awakening
And yet she still wants
To see this instant
The lovely mixed up sight
Brick streets and bald professors
All pouring down into Green pond
ACROSS THE REGION
_____
Stolen Jesus statue found in alley
Someone tried to sell it back to church
_______________________________
DETROIT
________________________________
By Naomi R. Patton
Free Press Staff Writer
__________
They will now have to answer to Jesus.
An 8-foot statue of Jesus that was stolen from the cross at the Church of the Messiah on Detroit’s east side was found in a alley near the church.
The Rev. Barry Randolph and Patricia Bower, a woman who lives in the neighborhood, decided to take a shortcut home and found Jesus "in a bush, between two trees" Wednesday night.
Randolph and a church member went to pick up Jesus and found the green-hewed [sic], weather-beaten statue with only a hand missing.
"We are truly grateful," Randolph said Thursday.
But in a twist, someone advertised the statue for sale on the classified ad Web site Craigslist on Wednesday. Then, presumably the same person called the church to try to sell it back to the congregation for $1,000. Randolph said he declined. The statue had been found by then.
The statue is made of a strong plaster, but a thief or thieves may have mistaken it for copper. A parishioner called church staff Tuesday morning and told them the statue was missing from the 107-year-old Episcopal church at 231 E. Grand Blvd. The cross on the side of the building was badly damaged.
"We got calls from all over the world," Randolph said of how fast the news spread.
The church will have the statue and cross repaired and will host a "resurrection celebration" when it is put in place. Randolph said the church will post a sign next to it: "Jesus is not copper. Do not take him off the cross."
Somebody give that statue a hand!
Man, I just found out that one of the guys that runs the barber shop down the street got killed in a motorcycle accident. His brother did the honors last week, but he’s cut my hair as well as my son’s many times and was an extremely righteous dude…here’s to your memory, a great barber and a great person, Steve Bigelow. Peace, bro.
I guess a 27 year old guy getting cut down like that will bring perspective to the week’s other shocking news, which was the long awaited wave of firings at the Titanic of the book world, Borders Inc. They showed good judgement in sparing my remaining friends, but Joe Gable the legendary manager of the State Street store was finally shown the door. True, his attitude has sucked for decades, but he was there from the very beginning, and is as responsible for the store’s success (remember that?) as anybody. There was a rumor that the Borders brothers made his continued employment a condition of sale, but the once proud company has been sullied by several hands since then. Joe always reminded me of the titular Joseph Conrad character Nostromo (and not just because they are both Italian), who did all the work but was denied the riches. The now ubiquitous set up for the super-book store was really Joe’s idea, and he made it work. Like Nostromo Joe’s ego ultimately messed him up, and, unlike Nostromo, he never had the guts to float away with the silver barge, but it’s a historic day one way or the other when he leaves the building. Later, dude.
Do not all the achievements of a poet’s predecessors and contemporaries rightfully belong to him? Why should he shrink from picking flowers where he finds them? Only by making the riches of others our own do we bring anything great into being.
– Goethe
Give us the teachings of his majesty, we don’t want no devil philosophy.
– Bob Marley
A revelation, faster than thought and too fast for him to grasp it properly, flashed through his mind, leaving in its wake a dull sense, rapidly fading, that ‘time’ is nothing more than a fiendish comedy, which an all powerful, invisible enemy conjures up in the human brain.
– Gustav Meyrink
America’s enormous technology is marvelously adept at making the tool, and is incompetent at providing the purpose.
– Loren Baritz
All state education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popular mind, for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed to be most effective for state purposes.
– Henry Adams
When they were no longer able to make poetry, they devised rules for it.
– Heinrich von Kleist
It is dangerous to desire to be virtuous in a corrupt century.
– De Sade
The falsification of everything has been shown to be one of the characteristic features of our period.
– Rene Guenon
If someone calls you an artist that’s a compliment. If you call yourself an artist you’re in trouble.
– Waylon Jennings
Faith is to the thoughtless, doubt to the thinker.
– Melville
Although I have never understood it, her decision was understandable.
– Suzanne Berne
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective, Kate Summerscale, Walker, $24.95.
From the very beginning real and fictive crime have had an inseparable relationship. Novels have influenced the way people think about crime almost as much as actual crimes have influenced novels. Obviously detective fiction couldn’t have started before there were detectives, but once it did, the public perception of what detectives are and what they do was very much determined by mystery books.
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is a fascinating work, not only for its vivid portrayal of an intriguing true crime in 1860’s England, but also for its deft examination of the parallels between the emerging real life detectives of the time and their literary doppelgangers. When three year old Saville Kent, the son of a prominent local functionary, is taken from his nursery and later found brutally murdered, it seems like the perfect set up for a classic English country house mystery.
Though there are several inconclusive clues, the local police are baffled and, just like in the books, are forced to appeal to a famous detective from Scotland Yard. Soon Detective-Inspector Jonathan Whicher, a well respected sleuth with powers of detection and observation bordering on the miraculous, arrives, and, after a meticulous examination of the scene of the crime and the various suspects, renders his unshakable opinion as to the identity of the guilty party.
But here’s where reality and fiction part ways – although the Victorians glorified the concept of the brilliant detective, in practice their rigid social codes and maniacal demand for the appearance of propriety wouldn’t allow them to accept the sordid facts revealed when the streetwise Whicher peeled back the facade of the Kent household. The press and public simply couldn’t handle the truth, especially when, given the primitive state of forensic science and the fact that the suspect was spared rigorous interrogation, there was no conclusive proof.
But just when the reader becomes apprehensive that Summerscale’s narrative will limp to a rather deflating conclusion, further twists and turns emerge, including a denouement that any fiction writer would envy. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is an absorbing, expertly written and constructed book, one which provides not only an exciting real life murder mystery, but also a heady immersion into the Victorian milieu and a unique portrayal of the emergence of the modern detective in both fact and fiction.
POLICE BEAT
_________________________________
_________________________________
_________________________________
Naked man accused of towers break-in
A naked Ann Arbor man is accused of breaking into a 10th floor downtown apartment from the high rise balcony this morning – but police don’t know how or why he got up there.
A resident of Huron Towers Apartments called police at 1:30 a.m. to report a man breaking through their sliding glass balcony door, said Detective Sgt. Richard Kinsey.
The intruder was naked and wet. He ran out of the apartment through the front door and did not confront the residents.
Officers arrested the 42-year-old man in the parking lot and referred him to the University of Michigan Medical Center’s psychiatric ward for evaluation.
Kinsey said investigators learned the man previously lived in the building, but could not explain why he was there and how he managed to reach the 10th floor from the outside.
"We can’t figure out how he got there or what the intent was," Kinsey said.
And here’s the event of the week for all you little dolls…
Clinton
Dolls can catch the 10:30 train
The Ann Arbor Doll Collectors will hold a presentation about dolls and their history on Saturday, June 7, at the Southern Michigan Railroad Society Railway History Museum in Clinton.
Residents can bring a special doll to "Take Your Dolly for a Train Ride" on the 10:30 a.m. train from Clinton. The train will pick up Tecumseh passengers at noon, so all riders can view the dolls on display between 12:50 to 1:50 p.m. at the Clinton museum. The train departs at 2 p.m.
Another Itasca
It’s here of course in
The blondes all the blondes
In sunglasses and jean jackets
That barefoot girl running to
Some assignation carrying
Her sandals the braid flapping
Down the middle of her back
Or the other the brunette
Standing with sad stoic patience
Now one legged like a stork
Waiting for what she’s not
Really sure
Let’s shake some heavy stuff out of the Quote Bag, shall we?
IN THAT YE ARE CANNIBALS, what meat should I offer?
– Austin Osman Spare
Feeble puffing is not my forte. It will do these fellows good to hear the truth, and stimulate them to worthier efforts.
– E. A. Poe
Cerebral play is only a mask. Underway beneath this mask is the invasion of the brain by forces unknown to us.
– Andrey Biely
Full speed through the darkness, no helmet, with a deep conviction that life could only get more and more fantastic.
– Johan Theorin
The animals, plants or inanimate objects, are no sooner confident of success and security than they are utterly destroyed by some superior and usually unconscious agency.
– Sir Kenneth Clark
I said to myself: you’re all excited, aren’t you? You kid yourself that she’s merely literature to you – yet that wizened soul of yours put out fresh shoots the moment she’s friendly to you and starts looking at you with those eyes of hers.
– Knut Hamsun
Tess Durbeyfield did not divine, as she innocently looked down at the roses in her bosom, that there behind the blue narcotic haze was potentially the ‘tragic mischief’ of her drama – one who stood fair to be the blood-red ray in the spectrum of her young life.
– Thomas Hardy
Once her perfect beauty had blinded others. Now they were blinded by her disarray.
– Thomas H. Cook
Sexual preoccupation is an imperious thing, and when it’s in full color, it makes all other preoccupations look slightly beside the point.
– Suzanne Berne
There was no face in the world so utterly satisfying – no, not one, among the lovely clever good ugly silly wicked faces of this world, all anxious, all selfish, all mean, all unsatisfied and unsatisfying.
– Baron Corvo
She was as lovely as only an Irish woman can be, having that in her bearing that betokened quiet pride, having that in her eyes that betokened great longing, having that in her body that betokened happy promise.
– Radclyffe Hall
What I woulda done to her shall not be allowed in this Bible. Yet it woulda been spelled LOVE.
– Jack Kerouac
In honor of their 25th anniversary, those Krazy Krauts at Taschen are republishing some of their finer volumes at a new low, low price. Taschen has always had a fine foreign eye for the pulp sleaze of the good old USA, and one of the reissues is a killer book called Men’s Adventure Magazines, which is mostly ultra-yummy covers from those classic slices of red, white and blue id. I couldn’t help jotting down a number of my favorite article titles, sprinkling a little UBU dust on them and artfully presenting them to you, my beloved readers. And remember it’s all true!!
Men’s Adventure or
Nympho Quartet vs The Sex Beast Of The Sea
7,250,000 Sex-Starved Man-Hunters On The Prowl
Nothing Can Stop The Strippers
The Vicious Vampire Vamps of Vera Cruz
The Hot House Hussies Who Teased A King
The Doomed Harlots In Hitler’s House Of Horror
The 9 Nudes of Count Perigrin
The Nude Bikini Debs Of The Death-Head Gang
The Underwater Nymphos Who Blasted Tojo’s Navy
The Golden Nympho Who Smashed The Luftwaffe
The Nympho Huntress Of Buckoo Reef
Nympho Gaucho Of The Mato Grosso
The Torrid Tiger Nymph Of Nyasaland
The Commie Hating Joy Girl From Yonggampo
Mme. O’Connor And The House Of Unique Cutlass Colleens
Love Saleswomen On The Loose
Nude Lust Slaves Of Hitler’s Russian Monster
Nude Goddess Of The Aborigines
Velvet-Skinned Doll In The Bonanza Bar
White Flesh For The Warlords Of China
Soul Mates Of Torment For France’s Monster King
Chained Nude For The Monster’s Rack
The Nude Swindles Of Piera The Playgirl
The Orgy Trap Of The Commie Brainwash Girls
The Ten Day Orgy Of Brazil’s Lost Women
The Fantastic Lust Plot Of The Nazi Harlot Spy
The Wild Rescue Of The Commies’ Top Sin Doll
The Sex Pills That Are Making Teenage Girls Nymphos
Stretch Pants Teens – Sex Revolt Of Suburbia
Passion Playgrounds Of The Teen Jet Set
Springtime Passion Rites Of Teenagers Gone Wild
Nude Coeds Reward Campus Rioters
Hell Night Orgy For High School Virgins
Torture Trap Of The Nympho Schoolgirls
Lethal Lust Of The Teenage Prom Dancers
Lust Slave Of The Teenage Passion Queens
Jap Water Torture Of Exotic Guerilla Girls
Nude Crossing Of East Germany’s Death Ship
Death Orgy Of The Doomed Vice Queens
Cannibal Crabs Crawl To Kill
Mad Monkeys Manned The Lifeboats
Fish With Human Hands Attacked Me
Slashed To Bits By Killer Bats
Chewed Alive And Screaming
Trapped In The House Of Nazi Dagger Girls
Trapped In A Blizzard Of Mink Clad Nymphos
Trapped By The Wild Nymphos’ Lust Orgy
I Was Trapped In A Beatnik Brothel
I Was Doomed By The Monkey Gods
I Was Captured By The Love Hungry Virgins Of Tibet
I Ate The Sex Plants Of Ponape
I Watched Myself Being Eaten Alive
I Fought The Queen Of The Switch-Blade Jungle
I Gave My Legs To The Maggots of Africa
I Saw Them Sacrifice Virgins To The Giant-Condors
I Led France’s Silken Harlots Of Slaughter
I Led The Nazi Nymphos Against The Red Hordes
I Led The Revolt Of Castro’s Hell House Harlots
I Sell Love And Passion To Way-Out Women
I’ll Roll You In The Passion Pit Palace
Kruschev’s Secret Wife Was My Mistress
Satan’s Pigs Ate Us Alive
Hophead On The Run
Harem Stealing Yank In Arabia
The Redhead Nympho Was A Cannibal
Nude Queen Of The Communist Cannibals
Never Marry A Cannibal
They Made Me Eat My Mate
Give Your Daughters To The She-Monster From Hell
Find The White Queen Of The Jap Guerillas
Swim Through Your Own Blood To Slaughter Beach
Lucky
We meet on the stairs
She’s always late has
A job selling candy
On the other bank
Just before class
She sits next to me
Stretching her legs
Tight white pants feet
In and out of moccasins
Outlined eyes under almost
Orange hair something
Startlingly lioness in
Her half assed amiability
Her effortless growl
Low and Bacall
Lucky I’m so good at
Having nothing happen
