Celebrity Wedding

Posted on August 14, 2006 by ubu507

This is one of the first artworks I’ve done where I used my methods to try to make someone look UGLY rather than beautiful. To me Pam Anderson is a grotesque freak composed of make-up and silicone — she seems more like a female impersonator than a female — as a member of Motley Crue said, she looks like she was hit with a very expensive ugly stick. That she is considered the height of female beauty now just shows the rotten shallowness of our culture. As George Bush (and I believe Kid Rock is a conservative) and his coven ape out hyper masculinity Pam inflates femininity to ridiculous proportions. The whole celebrity culture is sick with so much inauthenticity — people are famous for being famous, have no talent, and are applauded for the silicone they’ve had injected or the tummy tuck they’ve had done. And most people just sit there slack-jawed, applauding, hailing the naked emperors while ignoring war and ecological destruction.

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The Mysteries of Knut Hamsun

Posted on August 11, 2006 by ubu507

The Mysteries of Knut Hamsun

Farrar, Straus and Giroux has put out a new edition of Mysteries by Knut Hamsun, which is a good excuse to discover this great book, or to re-read it if you’ve already found it. Although it’s not a new translation, it’s a nice, attractive “quality” paperback, and this new edition should make it easier to find at the local bookmart for a while (but please BUY INDEPENDENT if at all possible). There’s a new introduction by Sven Birkerts, but it’s not very penetrating, in fact completely wrongheaded when Birkerts suggests that the main character Nagel has no comprehensible character. In our current academic literary environment an author is supposed to present a character’s entire resume, genealogy, and life story instead of revealing character through ACTION, as Hamsun does. Nagel is an existential character, as we all are, whose essential nature can seem to change from moment to moment, depending on the circumstance, life being an improvisation not an academic tract.

There’s also the hoary old essay by Isaac Bashevis Singer from 1967, here presented as an afterword, that Hamsunphiles will remember as the introduction to those beloved paperbacks that introduced us to the master back in the day. Singer is quite right in insisting on Hamsun’s pervasive influence on ALL subsequent modernist writing, including Hemingway and Fitzgerald. As the most famous Jewish writer of the time Singer was no doubt chosen to write the essay in order to cleanse the early Hamsun bools from the taint of Fascism, FSG hoping to catch the hippy crowd that were digging Hesse at the time.

And of course that is the essential, perhaps insoluble question about Hamsun – how could a person who wrote Hunger, Pan and Mysteries those magical, oh so human books, play so shameful a role as a Nazi sympathizer during World War Two? Singer makes the simple argument that the great young author who produced those books had ossified into an old hack forty plus years later. Reassuring as that reasoning is, it’s clearly specious. It’s much harder to find Hamsun’s later books, but they’re still great (except of course the one the literary establishment most adored, Growth of the Soil), even his final one On Overgrown Paths which shows a enduringly keen, insightful mind and a perspicacious writer after the war. The older Hamsun lacks the fire and vitality of his younger self, but replaces those qualities with maturity, objectivity, and worldly wisdom – the later novels are less PERFECT but more COMPLETE and hardly inferior.

So Singer’s answer to the big question is facile. The film Hamsun [and just as a sidebar, there is a movie of Mysteries – known in the US video release as “Evil Mysteries”! – it has its moments but is severely hampered by the fact that the obscure object of desire, Dagny, is played by soft-porn queen Sylvia Kristel trying to go legit I guess despite the gratuitous dream/sex scene] is a good look into Hamsun’s situation and the various factors that conspired to produce so grievous an error – his advanced age, deafness, ego, longstanding hatred of the English, misunderstanding on the Nazis, the Norwegian tradition of the writer as great man on the nation, overestimation of his own influence – and also dramatizes how he dissed his admirer Hitler to his face in a way that no other man did and lived.

But in the end there’s NO EXCUSE for Fascism. It’s the cancer of Modernism, not just as a political and economic system but as a hateful way of thinking and an emotional disfunction (still quite prevalent in people like Ann Coulter – it’s sadly ironic that Bush’s latest epithet for “the enemy” is Islamic Fascists when he and his buddies could similarly be described as Christian Fascists). The sinister symbiosis between Fascism and Modernism has yet to be fully examined by literary critics, who prefer to avert their eyes, to pretend like Singer that it only attracted bad writers, thereby marginalizing great figures like D’Annunzio, Pound, Celine, Malaparte and Hamsun. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a card carrying Modernist, even in this god forsaken post-mod age, and find Fascism, far from being fascinating nauseating at the most profound level, heck, EVERY level – but we must find a way to zap the tumor of Fascism without crippling the corpus of Modernism.

Maybe the truth is, though it’s yet another truth our PC paralyzed intelligentsia refuses to engage, that bad people can write good books, and we should disentangle our politics from our aesthetics. And that’s the thing about a great book, isn’t it? Despite the sea of nonsense surrounding it, Mysteries still floats, potent and inviolable, eternally intriguing and, well, mysterious. Just read the darn thing and you’ll find out.

YR PAL,

UBU

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Crime Beat: The Cat Shaver of Ann Arbor

Posted on August 9, 2006 by ubu507

Traveler returns to find cat shaved

An Ann Arbor woman said someone shaved her cat while she was away on a business trip for several days, city police said. The woman, who lives in the 1100 block of Norman Place, said she was out of town in late July, and family members were watching her cat. She said they went to her apartment on July 25 and discovered her shaved cat outside.

Someone in the neighborhood told the family members a nearby resident took the cat and shaved it to be cooler in the hot weather. The woman said she spoke to an apartment manager who admitted to allowing a teenage girl into the apartment because she said her cat was inside.

Police said they are attempting to determine who shaved the cat, which was otherwise uninjured.

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The Gross and Net Efficiencies of Small Amplitude Jumping in College Age Females: Quote Bag

Posted on August 8, 2006 by ubu507

The Gross and Net Efficiencies of Small Amplitude Jumping in College Age Females

Compiled by Dr. U.S. of the Oracular Islands

 

The writer’s sole business today is to be a laconic witness to the death of man.

– Nathan Scott

 

Kafka knows two things – that there is no god and there must be a god.

– Erick Heller

 

From the discovery of that necessity which inevitably reduces man to nothing, we have shifted to the scornful contemplation of that nothing which is existence itself.

– Michael Foucault

 

O Generation, Keep on Working!

– Allen Ginsberg

 

My brain was as if lacerated or disjointed, and sown with the seeds of some poisonous weed, which had to be raked up before it began to take root. And when I came home to my loneliness, with its silence, I regained my own self, wrapped in my own mental and intellectual atmosphere. In this I felt as much at home as one does in a well-fitting garment, and I sank into an annihilating sleep, liberated from desires, yearnings and will-power.

– until at last I felt the great satisfaction of hearing the silence and of listening to the new voices that are to be heard in it.

– August Strindberg

 

…the movement was toward myth, towards a revival of the cultic, the mystical, the sacrificial, the prophetic, the sacramental, and the universally significant. In short, towards fiction.

– Paul Fussell

 

True knowledge is experimental and the poet knows this intimately.

– Wallace Fowlie

 

He had been given insight to the most concrete, scientific sort of problem through what amounted to an essentially psychotic hallucination.

– Craig Holden

 

With Eskimo chain

I’ve tattered my brain

– Syd Barrett

 

Cornell began and ended with his dream, and his dream, as he found confirmed by Freud, was always in an unfinished state.

– Dore Ashtom

 

Breadth

has gone, as Beckett was among the first to recognize – the only real possibility that remains to us is depth. Down we must go, with Kafka down in the burrow, out of the big world and into the dark underground of our selves.

– John Banville

 

I add this to be on the safe side. These things I say, and shall say, if I can, are no longer, or are not yet, or never were, or never will be, or if they were, if they are or if they will be, were not here, are not here, will not here, but elsewhere. But I am here.

– Samuel Beckett

 

Imagination rules the world.

– Napoleon Bonaparte

 

That was the day I had first looked into a mirror and discovered a bitter, demented clown.

– John Franklin Bardin

 

No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.

– Sigmund Freud

 

That cold tendency, between instinct and intellect, which made me pry with a speculative interest into people’s passions and impulses, appeared to have gone far towards unhumanizing my heart.

– Nathaniel Hawthorne

 

Every good artist paints what he is.

– Jackson Pollock

 

Written with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the Great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academic bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow.

– Samuel Johnson

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At Nietzsche’s Party

Posted on August 5, 2006 by ubu507

At Nietzsche’s Party

 

At Nietzsche’s party on New Year’s five years ago. We argued, I don’t know, someone playing guitar, someone changing records, someone leaning on their horn in the driveway. Well, talk to me, you said, let’s have a conversation. O.K. I said. Problems? someone else, probably Nietzsche, said. We sat on the bare hardwood floor cross-legged, leaning against the wall, saying something, not saying anything. Forget it, you said finally, lighting a cigarette in that affected way – you were new to it then. I took it from you. What did I do with it? I took a puff, took a puff then ground it out on Nietzsche’s floor. A slow record, Marvin Gaye, we slow-danced like everybody else, our last New Year’s together, we stepped apart and you were crying

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From the Pen of UBU

Posted on August 4, 2006 by ubu507

Wedge

 

The wedge of shadow

That comes and goes as

She stands swaying

On the front lawn

Shining like a dryad

On the crowded grass

Her sweet gravity

Has a kick to it

Partakes of an ecstacy

Intricate beyond concealment

Not completely desirable

Or even very likely

This is how things get out of bounds

Dizzily conscious fumbling insensate

In the shade of the lonely palm

All history circling the drain

 

 

The Superstition of the 13

 

Slow inhalation

To disintegration

Filaments glowing

Remember

The Italian girl

The first day of class

Cold smile

She says

13 at the table

One of us will die

She gets up and leaves

I follow

The enigma of choice

The man on the bridge photographing us

Side stepping as we veer out of the frame

The embroidery at the hem of her skirt

Harvest sun and moon indistinct

At opposite ends of the sky

On the riverbank

Birds peck at bread

Deep colors emerging

Shining from the hall of light

Slow vibration

The grass waving

Wheat glowing

At the root

An Ohio born mystery

Of planetary opportunity

 

Department of synchronicity:

Because of the role that Ibsen’s "The Wild duck" played in Dag Solstad’s Shyness & Dignity (reviewed in this blog 7/28/06) I decided to pick up a copy (There’s a nice Dover Thrift Edition out there for a mere $2) as I had never read it. Idly opening it the first exchange of dialogue that struck my eye went as follows:

Werle (in a low voice, dejectedly).

I don’t think anybody noticed it, Gregers.

Gregers (looks at him)

Noticed what?

Werle. Did you not it either?

Gregers.

What do you mean?

Werle.

We were thirteen at table.

Gregers.

Indeed? Were there thirteen of us?

Dodododo Considering I’d just resuscitated and illuminated my old poem "The Superstition of the 13" which appears above I think you can safely cue the Twilight Zone music here….

 your host,

UBU

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Quizzo-Critical Gabble: Quote Bag

Posted on August 2, 2006 by ubu507
QUIZZO-CRITICAL GABBLE
compiled by A. Cackle Bladder
brought to you by
Crowley’s Cyclonic Carnival, Inc.

"Progress is our most important product"

 
 
Perhaps it was in a cave in some bare and wind-swept hill, perhaps some inmost recess of a great forest and there the Sabbath was held attended by a companion, a shape of glamour and unearthly allurement beckoning him apart, to share in joys more exquisite, more piercing than the thrill of any dream, to the consummation of the marriage of the Sabbath.
– Arthur Machen
 
The vista was so beautiful that it seemed like the country-side itself was having a gigantic orgasm in the arms of Mother Nature
 
She had never seen a building devoted to the true spirit of mankind: that of sex, Sex, SEX!
– Alex Raymond
 
She did not feel that she was a fine person – at that moment the definition of a fine person eluded her. All definition eluded her, save how she felt at the moment.
– Jim Layne
 
She would never be satisfied until every conceivable act of copulation had taken place.
– J.G. Ballard
 
The object of the lover’s desire is a phantom unknowable, unseizable, ever present during the hours of his sleep as well as the hours of consciousness. Only the phantom is real and yet Swan knows that she has nothing to do with the young woman whose name is Odette.
– Wallace Fowlie
 
For there was a singing in the way she rode, erect and sure, her head high and proud; and he heard that singing in her blood while she brought her father’s ashes to the spot the dead man she loved had chosen, to this high meadow pressed against the sky.
– Ben Ames Williams
 
Her hips worked smoothly at the fabric as she walked. When she turned around, the effect was equally interesting.
– Frank Kane
 
She turned very slowly and her body made a smooth, fat curving flow so that the sight of her as she faced him was thick and juicy, richly sweet and deliciously bitter.
– David Goodis
 
Mike allowed his eyes to lock with Elizabeth’s. He would later claim he felt a tingling sensation, the kind you supposedly get just before lightning strikes.
– Rena Vicini
 
Something deep inside him responded to the crude appeal of the strange woman. The pure evil of this wickedly attractive woman touched something dark and primitive deep within him. Something too strong to resist, a part of him he prayed Laura would never know.
 
He could smell her exotic perfume and see into the deep valley between her wide-set breasts and feel the brush of her knee against his leg. He knew he should push away from her at that moment and run for the door, before the spell got any stronger, before he started the trip through hell…yet he was powerless to move.
– William Moore
 
"You’ll never get to heaven."
She shuddered at the very thought. "It must be awfully damn lonely up there, don’t you think?"
– Cornell Woolrich
 
The obscene thought of the unnatural forbidden act that was going to take place in front of her caused Tina to moan in dread and fascination wanting to see this depraved act.
– S. Blake
 
The world was full of ominous shadows and everywhere he turned a new shadow fell, the bars of a cell that one by one were dropping into place.
– Harold McCoy
 
From out of that pall of velvet darkness which hung below the clouds came for a single moment a vision of violet light. It rose apparently from nowhere, it passed away into space. It was visible barely for five seconds, then it had gone. Garnet spoke with a little sob. "My God!" he murmured. "They’re coming!"
 
Birth, life and education count for nothing when the great days come, when the mother voice speaks.
– E. Phillips Oppenheim
 
She knew nothing now but the swirling vortex of sensation, the multi-colored veil of ravening desire that devoured her senses, dropping her to nature’s level of performance.
– J. B. Thompson
 
The universe, or cosmos, was accordingly most appropriately represented as a vast assembly of gods in human form, an assembly of divine wills.
– Milton Covensky
 
They were plunging to the way-out crescendo that was new and astonishing and ecstatic.
 
It was insane, Sharon thought in incoherent amusement, all of her geared to receiving this excitement. Nothing like this ever, she thought, bathed in passion, following blindly where the others led.
– Joan Ellis
 
Only two ways are open to the deepest levels of the psyche where the individual can communicate with the Absolute, with Genesis: madness, the pathological state of mind — and sex, desire and pain.
— Ole Michael Selberg
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Crime Beat: The Mad Dog of Ann Arbor

Posted on August 1, 2006 by ubu507

Man with box cutter arrested at Fleetwood

 

A 43-year-old man known for stealing food off customer’s plates turned violent early this morning when he waved a box cutter at a customer at the Fleetwood Diner in downtown Ann Arbor, city police said.

 

The waitress saw the man steal a plate of french fries at about 1:50 a.m. She asked him to at least return the plate, which the man did.

 

The man left, but returned a few moments later and began opening condiment bottles with his teeth. The waitress ordered him to leave and a customer also got involved.

 

Police said the man then took out a box cutter and started waving it at the customer while saying, "I’m a dog. I’m a dog." He also threw a chair and condiment bottles at the customer.

 

The customer picked up a chair to ward off the man, who left. Police found the suspect on William Street and arrested him. He was jailed pending authorization of felonious assult charges. Police said the man was visibly intoxicated.

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Six Poems — Four Japanese, Two French

Posted on July 29, 2006 by ubu507

One of the (oh, so many) good things about this blog is that it gives me an excuse the mine the myriad notebooks I’ve filled that have been collecting dust for eons – here’s some poems I originally dug about 25 years ago – the Japanese ones were translated by Kenneth Rexroth – I don’t know who did the French…

 

I think of the days

Before I met her

When I seemed to have

No troubles at all.

 

– Fujiwara No Atsutada

 

 

Others may forget you but not I.

I am haunted by your beautiful ghost.

 

– The Empress Yamatohime

 

 

The colored leaves

Have hidden the paths

On the autumn mountain.

How can I find my woman

Wandering on ways I do not know?

 

– Hitomaro

 

 

In all the world

There is no way whatever

The stag cries even

In the most remote mountain.

 

– Fujiwara No Tashinami

 

 

I picked this spray of heather

Autumn is dead       remember

Never more on earth we two together

Breath of time           spray of heather

Remember I wait for you

 

– Guillaume Appolinaire

 

 

An old terra-cotta faun

Laughs in the middle of the lawns

Auguring no doubt a bad

Ending to these serene moments

 

Which led me and led you,

Melancholy pilgrims,

Up to this hour which flees

In a whirl of tambourines.

 

– Paul Verlaine

 

 

I never knowed a successful man who could quote poetry.

— Frank McKinney Hubbard

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Dag Shames American Authors

Posted on July 28, 2006 by ubu507

I don’t read many contemporary novels that aren’t mysteries or thrillers. To me it’s pretty clear that this isn’t an especially propitious era for art of ANY kind, and the "serious" novel I see seem to be either the same old ultimately uplifting middlebrow family romance melodramas (see Oprah books) or arid, unreal academic efforts that read more like classroom literary exercises than anything from this world. Either the writer’s imagination is spinning meaninglessly in cuckoo cloud land somewhere or mired in a kind of socialist realism that’s designed to reinforce beliefs rather than challenge them. Take the Detroit "alternative" weekly the Metro Times for instance, that just had a Fiction/Poetry contest. Instead of applying their usual generally perceptive counterculture derived critical apparatus, the one they apply to music and movies, they turned the whole thing over to the usual suspects – the academic establishment. The result was the winners, rather than being rock and roll, were about laid off auto workers and dead relatives, full of sanctimonious, politically correct sentimentality. I expect that kind of thing from the excreble winners of the always painfully PC Ann Arbor Current Fiction/Poetry contest but had hoped for more from the Metro Times. Proof positive: UBU didn’t even get an honorable mention! And look at the NYT bestseller list for 7/30/06 – at least 14 of the 16 books listed (I’m not sure how to classify Fannie Flagg – is anybody?) are genre – mystery, romance, horror. The only clearly "serious" work is "Water For Elephants" a piece of pretentious twaddle about a Depression-era circus. The reason for this is not the bad taste of the public, as the snobs would have you think, but rather their perspicacity. Genre fiction hasn’t surrendered its engagement with real life, with the way people actually think and live. In the future scholars can find out more about the fabric of our time from one mystery than from a hundred of the books cranked out by creative writing teachers. Genre writers respect the verities of plot, character and pace in a way that the newer literary artistes disdain, the same way that modern fine artists have forgotten how to draw. The professors may review the books of their circle as masterpieces, knowing full well that their book will be similarly treated, but the fact is that there’s no there there, and literature is in danger of becoming a tedious chore presided over by "experts" and semi-imaginative embalmers, like opera or classical music.

SO – it was with trepidation that I ordered a contemporary novel with the rest of my order from my book rep. The saving grace was that it was Norwegian, and since my favorite novelist, Knut Hamsun and my favorite artist, Edvard Munch are both Norwegian, I figured it might have something going for it., and I was right. Shyness & Dignity by Dag Solstad (Graywolf Press, $12.00) begins with Elias Ruckla, a high school master, teaching, as he has a thousand times before, a class on Ibsen’s "The Wild Duck," when he has an actual fresh, and to him exciting, insight into the play. But this insight becomes almost painful when he realizes that the modern classroom has become a place where insight and enthusiasm are out of place, and indeed dangerous to the carefully cultivated boredom and triviality. As he’s leaving a broken umbrella further reminds him of the intractability of things and he’s pushed over the edge, stepping out of his bland persona to lash out at the now lively students, before walking out, his life irrevocably changed. The rest of the book consists of his thoughts and memories as he meanders through Oslo, assessing and mourning his life.

Shyness & Dignity reminded me of several of my favorite authors: Saul Bellow, especially "Seize the Day," with its portrayal of an irrevocable moment of existential dread, Samuel Beckett for its painstaking examination of the world in so absurdly rational a way as to bring rationality into question, and Knut Hamsun, especially Hunger, in its presentation of consciousness, so vivid that it can be said that consciousness itself is the hero. It’s a novel so fresh and real that it puts the pallid productions of contemporary American academic "authors" to shame. Let’s hope more Dag Solstad gets published!

 

YR PAL,

UBU

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