Musings from Brian J. Noggle

I am not sure why I picked this book up so soon after buying it and thought it would be a quick read. Perhaps because the collection of the complete works of Shakespeare which I have been ignoring on my chairside table starts with his comedies which are rather quick reads. But this book is a history play and one about a monarch with whom I was not familiar. So it was a little slow going, made a little slower by the fact that the characters call each other by their first name sometimes instead of their titles, which are the names that precede their dialog. So it was a bit of a Russian novel in that regard: Oh, Edmund is Kent and vice versa. That sort of thing.

So the plot of the play is that the King, Edward II, wants his pal Gaveston who was apparently elevated from less-than-noble status, and the real nobles think he’s a frivolous wastrel spending all the king’s money (which he gets from them) and diverting the king’s attention from kingly things. So he, Gaveston, is exiled, recalled, exiled again, recalled again, and then civil war breaks out. The king suspects his queen is having an affair with a Mortimer, while she pleads her innocence–come on, who outside of fiction dallies with someone named “Mortimer”? Crikey, I am having BBS flashbacks because one of the people in St. Louis signed himself as Mortimer, but I doubt that he read this play or history. Although it was the 1980s. People were better schooled then. Perhaps he had. But that’s neither here nor there. The nobles do not like Gaveston, so eventually they send him away and recall him, kill him, and then depose the king, placing his son on the throne–to Mortimer’s ultimate ill luck.

The play covers a long actual timespan in history, condensing it into five acts and adding a number of speeches on how much the king likes Gaveston (turned into many, many fine papers about latent homosexuality), the relationship of the king to the titled nobility, and whatnot.

But it lacks a little something compared to Shakespeare. Nothing is really stirring nor memorable except for the easy win of the they’re gay! for English majors in the past. I guess the Wiki says that it’s been staged even in recent past, probably again not so much for the monarch versus aristocracy themes.

I have Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, which I read in 2020, better.

You might be asking, “Brian J., why did you pick up a book on golf?” You know, I’m asking myself the same question; after all, I have played maybe seven or eight holes of golf in my life (when Iron Maiden Dave and I hit the local park’s nine-hole course, we abandoned the game far later than the other two guys who wanted to join us to make us a foursome abandoned us). I suspect my thinking was this: I saw Razor Girl by the author which I purchased this summer and thought I should read this book before I read the novel. A “how can you eat your pudding if you don’t eat your meat?” sort of thing. So I picked this book up and worked my way through it with some other books in the interim (which should tell you what I thought of it).

The schtick of it is that Carl Hiaasen, who played a little golf in high school and college with his old man, decides to pick up the sticks (as I’ve picked up the lingo) again in his middle age. Which is about the same age as I am now (so I am pleased to think I am not old). So I guess the theme might be the struggle to recapture one’s youthful glory or or man versus himself in trying to improve on a skill game (at a certain age). But I think the book is poorly executed.

Most of it is a diary of the first 577 days of his return to golf; numbered days (not all 577, just ones where he did golf things) give a paragraph or a couple of paragraphs of his golf experience for the day which might be playing a round or buying some new golf product he purchased and maybe tried. These little italicized bits are leavened with longer internally coherent pieces about other rounds of golf he’s played or the golf academy he attended or lessons he might have had. These longer pieces seem internally coherent, as I said, and I cannot help but wonder if they were individual columns or essays placed elsewhere, and they’re unrelated to one another. Case in point: One such essay talks about Hiaasen attending Leadbetter Academy for a day-long seminar, and then a later chapter mentiones playing on a course beside the Leadbetter Academy in Florida without mentioning he’d attended it–explaining it as though this was the first time the reader heard about it. Then, I guess the book feels the need to build to a finish which is bifurcated: Hiaasen plays in a tournament, and Hiaasen completes the book. No fooling; a couple of times whether he would finish the book is questioned and whether he could gut it out after getting discouraged.

So a bit slapped together, and one guesses that the draw is that it’s a Hiaasen golf book. Of course, since it’s a 21st century Hiassen book, it certainly slaps around the boogeyman of the day, George W. Bush. If it was written in the present day, undoubtedly it would be even meaner in its asides about the devil Trump. As it stands, Trump is mentioned on page 129, but only in reference to his rumored 300-yard drives which the author, about the same age, cannot match. A new edition, not that anyone would bother, would not be so laudatory.

So I was not impressed, but I’m not exactly the target audience, which is a golfer who would read anything about the sport and maybe relate to some of the author’s experiences. The title page and dust jacket do not indicate whether one should consider this a humor book or a sports book, but you should consider it the latter.

As you might remember (because it’s only been a week or two, which is at the outer edge of my memory, gentle reader, but I expect more from you), I bought a stack of old Edna St. Vincent Millay hardbacks at the Friends of the Library book sale two weeks ago, and I have already (re)read Renascence.

This is a later edition of her second book (first edition is 1920) and includes four sonnets at the end and poems not found in the first edition. You know what? If I had to pick a volume of her poetry to call my favorite, it would be this one (although ask me again when I get further into the stack and you might get another answer). After all, I know two of the poems by heart (“First Fig” and the sonnet which begins “Love, though for this you riddle me with darts…”) Not only did I memorize the latter, but I used it to open up my set at poetry open mics when I played a new venue; I’d approach the mic like a normal shy poet who hadn’t read much before with a sheaf of papers, and I’d leap from the stage or in front of the mic, reciting this poem angry and throwing the papers and sometimes my hat as I did so. I also recall the other sonnets from the book (although I don’t think I ever performed them).

The other poems are pretty good to great; they have rhythm and they have rhyme, but not so much the inner- or inter-line wordplay that I use these days (although I’ve mostly abandoned the end rhyme).

Some thirty-some couple of years after I’ve read the book for the first time, I still enjoy re-reading it. I’ll probably re-read it again as I’ll be tempted to buy any other copy of it I see in the wild, and if I end up in a good place financially, I might look for a proper first edition/first printing for my real library in those days. Otherwise, I’ll have to look forward to grabbing whatever copies I find in the wild. Now that I’ve gotten ahold of the other Millay collector in Springfield’s copies, I guess it will have to be when I travel.

And note that I will probably finish another of these Millay collections before I finish another Louis L’Amour book as they’re shorter.

This is the first of the Louis L’Amour paperbacks that I picked up in Clever in June but the second overall that I’ve read this year (Last of the Breed being the first). And, you know what? It wouldn’t surprise me if I picked up another one or two before the end of the year.

This book centers on the title character, Hondo Lane, a frontiersman who spent five years living with the Apache and who has worked as a scout and a dispatch carrier for the United States Army. He has lived alone for a long time except for a mostly wild dog that accompanies him. A spot of trouble costs him his horse, and he happens upon a ranch in a valley populated by a woman and her son. Trouble is brewing with the Apaches as they’re raising all of their tribes/lodges for war after the white man breaks another treaty. He looks to buy a horse from her, and although she says her husband is away for the day, he sees that some things are falling into disrepair which indicates the husband has been gone for a long while. He fixes up the place a bit, and sparks fly between them. Hondo has to return to the fort/camp with his dispatches warning of war, though, and the woman and the boy wonder if he will return. When he gets to the fort, he encounters the husband, a gambler and all around not good guy, and gets on his bad side. The man accuses him of being a horse thief, since the horse has the man’s brand on it, but the authorities let Hondo go since he says he is returning to the ranch with the horse. Meanwhile, the Apaches approach the ranch, and they are ready to attack even though the woman reminds them they have lived in peace for so long. When the six-year-old boy fires a pistol and grazes a subchief, the big chief and the tribe are amused, so the big chief becomes a blood brother to the boy and offers his protection to the ranch. But, eventually, he says that if the woman’s husband does not return, she will have to take an Indian brave as a husband. As Hondo heads out, the husband follows him with a partner, as they hope to rob and kill him, but through the timely intervention of Apaches who also want to ambush him, Hondo kills the husband, complicating his relationship with the wife for whom he has developed feelings. One Apache escapes, and then they hunt and capture Hondo, and….

Well, all right, I don’t want to give the whole plot away–there is some more to it than that. But it’s a good book. Mid-century westerns are definitely a cut above men’s adventure fiction or modern westerns like the Gunsmith or Longarm which are basically men’s adventure novels with horses. Given that L’Amour and John D. MacDonald came up about the same time, one can see the benefits of an early 20th century education in the writing styles. Or maybe they did not have monthly deadlines. Regardless, the writing and characters have more depth; perhaps they’re built from imaginations fired by books and stories and not movies/television and comic books.

The book also presents the Indian characters, at least as personified by Vittorio, the head chief, as wise and almost heroic and has a nuanced view of the cowboys and Indians dynamic. Hondo speaks highly of the Indian way of life and that they do not have a word for “lie” in their language and so on. So it’s entirely possible that the Boomer’s parents, those squares, were more enlightened than the gave them credit for. Certainly moreso than modern “thinkers” give them credit for. And even though he has rough edges, Hondo is a hero, and not an immoral one. He does not preemptively kill people, and he does get softened with his contact with a woman.

So, yeah, you know what? I might pick up another such book before long. I do have several more, you know, right on top of the stack.

Also, note the years in the title. The book was first published in 1952 and was still in print and in racks in the drugstore in 1985. Can you imagine a writer of the last part of the 20th century or the first part of the 21st who would remain in print that long? Stephen King, I guess. Maybe some back list Koontz and whatnot. But it’s a very short list.

I picked this book from the shelves on September 10, along with Dogs and Cats Unleashed as a palate cleanser after almost making it through a single lopsided question in the presidential debate that evening. As you might recall, gentle reader, I bought a stack of this fellow’s books at Rublecon this year and have already read his short novel Hang Me If I Stay Shoot Me If I Run and collection of poetry Loot the Bodies.

The subtitle of the book is “Poems for The Golden Girls“, so that should give you an idea of what you’re in for. The author/poet used the episodes in the seven seasons of the show with Bea Arthur as springboards/writing prompts, and this is the result. You know, I never was a fan of the show–it was on when I was in high school, when I still watched some television, but I was not the target demographic. In this part of the 21st century, for some reason it has become a cultural touchstone for members of my generation–I’ve seen Facebook images of a slightly younger cousin, her husband, and another couple dressed up as the quartet of the Golden Girls for some event or another. I mean, cosplaying the Golden Girls? Not something that even comes close to interesting me. And even though I’m watching some old series (The Streets of San Francisco and Red Dwarf, for example), I am not tempted to buy DVDs of this particular series. So perhaps I’m not the target audience for this book, either.

At any rate, the book breaks the series into its seasons and then has a poem for each episode. Most of them deal with the events of the episode and rely heavily on that knowledge of the series and the particular episode. I flagged one poem as being good standing on its own–Season 1 Episode 23 “I want to be the person I used to be”. I flagged another, Season 3 Episode 2, “I need a favor” because it kind of alludes to O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi”–or maybe the episode itself did the heavy lifting from American literature. Another one, Season 6 Episode 15, “Miles to go” riffs on a Frost poem (“Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening”, in case it wasn’t obvious). I get the sense that the poet kind of patterned other of his poems on different poetry styles and/or other particular poems as well. As I mentioned, it’s really a bit of poetical doodling more than a serious attempt at meaningful poetry (I hope).

HOWEVER, the poet does go out of his way several times to make clear that gun owners are bad, that people who are not fans of state-run schools are right wing nut-jobs, that Donald Trump is a bad, bad man (if not the devil), and that the series had too many jokes about communists back in the day when this was laughing defiantly in the face of what we were told was an existential threat and that we were on the verge of extinction by nuclear warfare (one wonders if the poet ever had to do an actual duck-and-cover drill in school like 80s kids did). Which is sad: Although he seemed like a pleasant guy at the con, he would dislike me if he knew I am all of those things he does not like in the abstract. Maybe he would not want me to buy his books. Maybe he won’t be the one deciding next time I see him at a con should I pass him by. And for what? Petty self-expression? Bah.

I know, I know, you’re saying, Brian J., haven’t you taken some arch and snarky little shots at political opponents over the years? Well, yes, but this is a blog which is the medium for that sort of thing. And you’ll noticed I’ve tempered those kinds of posts and whatnot over the years as the atmosphere has become rather toxic. But I’d never (I’d like to think) do it in my poetry or fiction or even personal essays, gentle reader, because I’d like to make something that appeals to many people and gives people something to reflect on in the universal human condition, not what’s on the television or Internet right now. That ages like milk in a sippy cup left in the car in August.

I got this book a week ago at the Friends of the Library book sale. Again, I am not excited about the stack of books piled on my chair side book accumulation point, so I picked a couple of short books to read as I glacially move through those books I am compelled to read (or eventually throw back into the stacks). This promised to be a quick read, and it was.

It really is nothing more than a set of Web site listicles in print; one could easily imagine this as a blog posted over the course of time with a lively comment section, but looking on the Internet does not show anything blog about it. Blogs are so 2006 (but this book is from 2009, so coming out of the blog era). It features sections on Arts & Literature, Sports & Leisure, History & Politics, Entertainment, and Science & Nature (which makes it one Geography chapter short of a lawsuit from the Trivial Pursuit people). Some of the individual face-offs include the 80s vs the 90s, summer games vs winter games, Gandhi vs Mother Theresa, Smurfs vs Care Bears, and so on. Each has a set of snarky bullet points for each side, sometimes obvious in its preference, and it has some pages where it just lists challenges for discussion. This would probably be a good book for reading aloud during road trips–and back in the day, that was the sort of thing my beautiful wife and I did. But now everyone has headphones on and a personal device leaving the driver to listen to lectures and audiobooks unless driving on the narrow roads in Arkansas.

Some of the challenges have aged poorly and might seem in poor taste, but then again in 2009 contenders like Amy Winehouse and Eddie Van Halen were alive then. And the author doesn’t inject politics too much, although the contenders for Worst President are Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush (boy, do we have some new entrants for you). Does Donald Trump make an appearance? Oh, boy, mister, you bet he does: but as it is before his political career as the devil, it’s in the category of Balding vs Extreme Anti-Balding Measures.

Still, a quick and amusing read and perhaps worthwhile for a road trip if you can get your family from under the hood.

This would be Millay’s first book of poetry; she won a contest for her poem “Renascence” which brought her to the big city (New York) and let her be the phenomenon that she would become, both as a poet and as a young woman having experiences that would lead her to be the Taylor Swift of the Twenties. Well, not that much, but it did put her on track to professional poetry.

The book starts out with a couple of long poems, “Renascence”, “Interim”, and “The Suicide” which are heavily influenced by the long lyrics of the Romantic poets except that they have meter and rhyme. They’re not her best work, of course; I am partial to the sonnets, of course. This book contains “Bluebeard”, a sonnet that influenced me such that I wrote a dramatic monologue when I was in college with a similar theme (a lover pries into her hidden spaces and learns that she has fled him; in my monologue, a lover wants to know what is held in her lover’s closed hand only to discover it contains nothing, but that little bit of closing the hand kept a part of the speaker independent).

So I’ve read the book before, and I already have a copy (although a later edition from 1924). But I really was due to read it again, and buying this copy for only $2.00 gave me just the excuse I needed. As I mentioned, the book sale earlier this month had a number of Millay’s works, so I likely will be revisiting a number of her works in the near term. And by consolidating the previous owner’s collection with mine, I might well have the best collection of Millay in Springfield, if not Missouri.

This particular version has a previous owner’s name inside the cover: Priscilla Metcalf Glendora, 1930. The title page indicates it might have been a gift–I think it says Priscilla from with an illegible name following. However, the book is also stamped (former) property of Nathaniel Hawthorne College in Antrim, New Hampshire, which has a brief but interesting history–which begins with the college’s founding in 1962. So the book must have been donated or bought as part of a collection and hung out in the library there until maybe 1988 when the college closed its doors. How would it have gotten to Springfield? Well, Ebay or something. After all, a collector has got to have the first book by the author, ainna? And this is a nice edition with cloth pages. A fourth edition to go along with my sixth edition. I’ve taken a moment to look at Ebay to see what first editions run for, and they’re not terrible, but I probably won’t be shopping for them soon.