Meeting

Posted on August 19, 2006 by ubu507

Meeting

 

Tonight Sally and I are hanging out at school, sitting on the cabinets in the teachers lounge, waiting for everybody else to show up, feeling like we don’t belong even though we technically do, Sally’s skin onion paper white in the florescent glare. "What’s important is not what you think about, it’s what you see," she’s saying. And what do I see? Out the window is that blond woman smoking, the secretary, the one with the receding face, as if she were a horse, or at least had been kicked by one at some point. After you’ve seen a face like that you don’t forget it. There’s something in the way she takes a long drag off her cigarette, tilting it up 45 degrees, grimacing and bored, that makes me think that that’s the way the Mannequin would do it, even though I don’t know how the Mannequin does it, or even if she smokes. "Proust would say it’s what you remember but can’t help remembering," I say. "He was wrong," Sally says. "It’s what you see. It’s what you see and can’t help looking at." The Mannequin is what we call our colleague, a beautiful woman named Mary Quinn, who I reflexively dislike because she is so perfect and because I think she dislikes me. Lately she’s been more attentive, but it’s just her attempt to be hip and we both know it. Still I’m intrigued and to some extent turned on to know someone like that is reading my stuff and using it, and even her acquaintance with me, as a badge of honor.

Maybe when she shows up I’ll feel more at home tonight. What are Sally and I doing here, anyway? We hardly ever go to anything that’s not mandatory. Now the Mannequin does arrive and on her (high) heels is her friend, the one with the nice, normal, even streetwalker legs terminating in a vast, soft, wide marshmallow body. Actually she’s not really the Mannequin’s friend but they know each other. All the principles have arrived, (including the principal) and things get going, but soon enough Sally and I slip away into the dark hall, looking for, we decide, the usual things.

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In My Father’s Gun Are Many Chambers: Quote Bag

Posted on August 18, 2006 by ubu507

In My Father’s Gun Are Many Chambers

 

All your America is like a dense Balzacian hive in a jewel point.

– Jack Kerouac

 

The torn Madras handkerchiefs of negresses, and the red gowns of yellow girls, hanging in tatters from their naked bosoms, mixed with the rent dresses of deep-rouged white women, and the split coats, checkered vests, and protruding shirts of pale, or whiskered, or haggard, or mustached fellows of all nations, some of whom seemed scared from their beds, and others seemingly arrested in the midst of some crazy and wanton dance.

– Herman Melville

 

How like an iron cage was that which they called liberty.

– Nathaniel Hawthorne

 

Crime is not a crime in country of criminals

I will perish – I cannot become vulgar – nor cater to vulgarity. Therefore, the mob will eat me.

– Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

 

These days young people don’t seem to experience pleasure unless they’re committing an anti-social act.

– Stephen Greenleaf

 

Sixty days ago she was such a lovely child and now here she is with a gun in her hand.

– Randolph Apperson Heart

 

It wasn’t drugs that drove me crazy, it was people.

– John Hinckley, Jr.

 

Shower, keep clean, enjoy colors and animals. People if possible.

– Sylvia Plath

 

To diagnose, through Plath’s poetry, the pathological aspects of our era that make death of the spirit inevitable – for that era and all who believe in its assumptions.

– Joyce Carol Oates.

 

Poor quality is the natural and necessary result of sound financial management.

– Jerome Doolittle

 

It made Poole wonder where it would all end, the fathers and the sons, the fast-food joints, and if there was a way to disconnect both the gene pool and history, to let nature take over again.

He could always scratch out a living. That wasn’t the problem with modern life, modern America. The problem was something else.

– Gaylord Dold

 

What he seemed to have in mind was a sort of bicycle socialism, as if here, too, there should be a limit, and the bicycle would be a good place to stop. He spoke of our automobile-TV culture as of something distastefully gross and heavy; Vietnamese ethics are permeated with ideas of lightness and swift pliability: bamboo, bicycles, sandals, straw. As though society’s burden of goods should be no heavier than what a man can carry on his back. With a full lipped contempt very like the contempt he showed for danger, he rejected the notion of a socialist consumer society.

At the time, the implications of this were not clear to me, I was only conscious of a feeling of happy agreement, remembering the ominous meeting between Mr. Krushchev and Mr. Nixon in the model kitchen, like a domestic spat in the infra-red setting of some future One Hell.

The samples of U.S. technology that had been showered on the North were mainly in bomb form, yet the ordinary Vietnamese was able to make a connection that eludes many American intellectuals between the spray of pellets from the "mother’ bomb and the candy hurled at children in the South by friendly G.I.’s, between the pellets and all the Saran-wrapped products of American industrial society which can no longer be separated into beneficial and deleterious, "good," and "bad."

Since nobody can live in a vacuum, nobody, whatever he thinks, is free to "drop out" — poor blacks rioting carry home whiskey and T.V. sets.

– Mary McCarthy

 

Tell them what? That the mystic warrior was a freak out side show?

– Sonny Crockett, Miami Vice (T.V.)

 

Blessed is he whose life has not tasted of evil. When god has shaken a house, the winds of madness lash its breed till the breed is done.

– Sophocles

 

Everything is functioning; only man himself is no longer.

– Hugo Ball

 

Whatever happens, we shall remain stupid.

– Gustave Flaubert

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Kerrytown Bookfest!!!

Posted on August 17, 2006 by ubu507

Here’s my short article about the bookfest for the Current magazine — god knows what the editors will do to it…

 

Don’t ever confuse a Book Festival with a Bookfest! While the Ann Arbor Book festival is a rather august affair backed by a passel of corporate heavy hitters, The Kerrytown Bookfest is conducted in the much more communal spirit of a bunch of kids getting together to put on a show in their backyard. But what a show! Billed as a "celebration of the art of the book," the fourth annual Fest will feature booksellers, author panels, book binders, book repair tips, book appraisals, calligraphers, kids activities, music and food.

One of the 2006 edition highlights will be the annual conclave of the International Miniature Book Society. "This will be the first time the event has ever been hosted by a book festival," says Bookfest board member Joan Knoertzer. "Members are coming from the Czech Republic, Germany, England, Canada, Russia and all over the world." Miniature books are defined as less than three inches in any dimension, and there will be numerous examples on display at the Fest, as well as presentations from the artists who create them.

This years author panels focus on genre fiction with romance, science fiction, comic art, gay and lesbian and mystery writers discussing their works. "I’m particularly pleased to have local authors of the caliber of Davy Rothbart, Loren Estleman and Beverly Jenkins on hand," says Robin Agnew, owner of Aunt Agatha’s Mystery Bookshop, who oversees author programming. "We’re also thrilled to have Jeff Mallet, whose comic strip Frazz is one of my favorites."

Another popular portion of the Fest has been the demonstrations by the Hollander’s School of Book and Paper Arts, which this year include nationally know book artists, binders and printers talking about their unique work.

For the kids there’s a children’s tent with book making, fish printing, paper making, paper marbling and storytelling as well as music provided by the Ann Arbor School of Performing Arts. And all of that is in addition to over a hundred vendors, whose wares span the book universe from rare volumes to comic books.

The Kerrytown Bookfest will take place Sunday September 10th from 11-5 PM at the Ann Arbor Farmer’s Market in Kerrytown. Visit www.kerrytownbookfest.org for complete information.

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Coming Attractions

Posted on August 16, 2006 by ubu507

Coming soon:

 

         The Next Work

                  of the

           Immensely Successful

Beautiful and Extraordinary Author

               who adds

           Another Laurel

              to his already

WORLD WIDE REPUTATION

        by his artistic rendition

OF GREAT PROTEAN CHARACTERS

        in this famous extravaganza

The Greatest Drama of the Day

        No Pillow For Marguerite

                          or

           THREE FAST WOMEN

new features               new characters

new songs                    new conundrums

new jokes                    new dances

          NEW MODES OF FUN

 

Here’s Adventure – Here’s Romance

Here’s

            THE CHALLENGE

         OF TOMORROW

           Hubris – Miasma – Catharsis

        DIVERSIFIED AG SERVICES

      Mysterious Cults of the Megalith Builders

              Be Mesmerized by JAH

Cope with TEN of life’s toughest PROBLEMS

ANCIENT SECRETS REVEALED FOR THE

            GOOD OF MODERN MAN

All in color

For only a dime

 

void where prohibited by law

 

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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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