RadioFreeUBU

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The eternal in woman is the gleam we follow.

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.