Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Well, I found this book on my stacks four years later; I said when I bought this book with a couple others:

At any rate, it should give me a couple of handy collections of poetry to read out back in the evening. If I can find them again easily once I move them off of my desk and into the stacks of the Nogglestead library, where books just disappear.

Well, one of the other two books was Milk and Honey, which I read later that year. The other was 100 Bill Harvey Poems which I held in my very hand a couple of days ago when trying to pick a collection of poems to read while watching a football game.

I’d brought this book down from my bedroom reading chair because I’d been working on it for a while, but it was not really good browsing material. For one, it’s a loving edition of poems published posthumously by the founder of the Christian Science movement. This book is a former library edition, but its stamps are illegible and its checkout pocket has been removed; one presumes it was in a Christian Science Reading Room (I think there’s still one in Springfield; I’ll have to look to see if it’s still there when I go down Glenstone again). But it’s got gilded pages and drop capitals on each poem, and they’re…. Well, they’re mid-18th century poems harkening back to older forms. She’s imitating older styles, and she uses “ye” incorrectly.

I mean, it’s a cut above most of the 20th century grandmother poetry that I read and surely above Milk and Honey because of its decent rhythm and poetic sensibility. But I won’t remember anything of it once I put this book on the shelf. I didn’t flag anything, and I don’t remember any lines making me think they were especially well done. I mean, Riley and Dunbar are almost contemporaneous, and their vernacular poems are fun and their serious poems are markedly better.

Ah, well. In 100 years, nobody will be reading my poetry from 1990, so who am I to judge?

Ah, gentle reader, I have done it. Again. After three years, I have completed The Life Of Greece, the second volume in The Story of Civilization series, most of which I picked up in 2019 (I finished the first volume, Our Oriental Heritage, in August 2023). At this rate, I will finish the eleventh volume in 2053 and will be able to move on to Churchill’s history series or Summa Theologiae.

The book covers the history of Greek civilization from roughly 3500 BC to the mid-first century BC. Early chapters deal with early civilization on Crete and the legendary period of Greece, including the events that would have triggered Homer’s epics and whatnot. The book really gets going with the formation of the city-states and the machinations of Athens and Sparta and the other states that rose and fell with some peaks only being decades–a lifetime. It talks a lot about individual personalities and their contributions, and a lot of the material overlaps with An Introduction to Greek Philosophy which I just listened to and the current, almost complete history of the philosophy of science course I’m listening to now. Plus I know some of the players from reading some Plato, not enough Aristotle, and as far into Copleston’s The History of Philosophy. So some of it was review. Not that I’ll remember too much of it except for that which was reinforced by the other things I’ve listened to recently, particularly the philosophical distinction between being and becoming which is something that has traded predominance in philosophy and science for decades.

The same thing I said about the first book I shall repeat here: Durant (or Durants) is (are) old school leftists, so a lot of asides in favor of socialism and throwing off the shackles of religion (in the Greeks’ case the old gods of mythology, but sometimes Christianity as well, but not the Greeks, although he does draw a line from Stoicism in its Greek roots to Christianity). He also has a tendency to go back and forth in time as he breaks eras and epochs into different silos, such as science, philosophy, painting, sculpture, and so on, so he’ll exhaust one silo and start back in another. Undoubtedly, this will become less of a problem when the individual volumes of the series compress into decades or centuries–the next one is Caesar and Christ which might only be a couple of hundred years (although who knows how far it might stretch if it includes the Byzantine empire), and others collapse into even smaller chunks of time. But in these first two books, where he covers millennia (and, in the first, the same or similar millennia spread across several cultures), the reader gets a little whiplash. Maybe the scholarly reader, or the merely educated before the 1970s reader, would not have the issue. But compared to educated men a hundred years before my birth, I’m a dunce.

So I have already placed Caesar and Christ on my chairside table, which defeats the purpose of my drive to finish off some of the thicker books on that table which have languished there for a long time. How long will Caesar and Christ remain there? I know, we’re all in suspense, gentle reader. Time will tell. But I will read some other books, or perhaps a couple of hundred, in the interim.

Oh, and I did flag some things for comment which I will displense periodically as From the Durant posts. Except this one:

Carneades of Cyrene, coming to Athens like a Greek Abelard about 193, made like bitter for Chrysippus and his other teachers by arguing with galling subtlety against every doctrine that they taught.

I bring this up because after I read Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard” recently, I have seen or heard references to him several times, culminating in my picking up a biography of him last month. Which I might read before I finish Caesar and Christ or, at least, The Story of Civilization.

I guess I reclaimed this book from my youngest’s bedroom in January as it was on the top of the stack, relatively, and I don’t have it mentioned in any Good Book Hunting posts. By on the top of the stack, I mean that I have again begun stacking the books atop the books atop by bookshelves, blocking view of my bladed weapons collection again, which means maybe I should actually finish books instead of working through really long books in the beginning of long series of long books. Which I am generally good at, which means I have lots of long series of books which would be good to read which I will probably never get to. But collections of cartoons? I can browse that while watching part of a football game (the first quarter of the Chiefs game since we can get those on one of our streaming services).

So: This is a collection of Far Side comics which were all the rage in the 1980s, right up there with Dilbert as to things you were likely to see cut out of the newspaper and posted on a teacher’s bulletin board, classroom door, or cubicle wall. The humor was zany, often absurd, and dealing with anthropomorphic animals, aliens, and sometimes weird people. I associate it with the 1980s, but this collection came out in 1992, so it has some George H.W. Bush jokes in it or things from that time. Maybe Desert Shield/Desert Storm?

At any rate, the daily cartoon was pretty high quality for its time and provided some amusement, but in reading them all at once in an evening, I only got a couple of actual chuckles, and I only flagged one:

As I am purportedly studying multiple martial arts at two schools (when I can drag my carcass into them, which does not coincide when classes are cancelled, when I am traveling, when I’m having contractors over for a few or many thousands of dollars’ worth of work, when I have no car because my beautiful wife is out of town, or because I am plumb lazy), that struck me. Only one of the schools features board breaks, though.

At any rate, it’s a book down (70 so far this year), and I’ve also discovered I have a Superman collection/graphic novel to browse during football games or as interludes between chapters/sections of long books in long series.

As I mentioned, I streamed part of the Kansas City Chiefs football game yesterday because apparently we have streaming subscriptions to CBS and to NBC along with Spotify (at $35 a month now!) and, I guess, some other things that do not include football games (not that Spotify does, but it went from $12 a month to $35 a month awful damned fast for a family subscription). “Watching” the game gave me an opportunity to page through one of my recent poetry-and-monograph purchases.

This book is a 45-year-old collection of pencil sketches by an artist born in 1902 (see this bio if you are so inclined). Some of them were made from old photographs, but they generally track to the early part of the 20th century based on the cars and whatnot. Some are just scenes from a particular corner, but others are of St. Louis landmarks, and these contain a bit of text about the landmark. Just a couple paragraphs.

Interesting to look at, and because of the early 20th century topic matters, I thought about the James R. Wilder books set in the first part of that century; although the books are not set in St. Louis, in many of them the characters come to St. Louis for one reason or another.

Also, it became a bit of a quiz at least as far as the landmarks goes. Which ones have I been to? Well, the Arch features in a couple of them. I’ve been there a couple of times and even went up it once as an adult. I’ve been to the Admiral riverboat when it was a casino and the Goldenrod Showboat when Todd had a brief, non-speaking role in a revue. I might have been on the Becky Thatcher–the book brought to mind that my mother, brother, and I took a cruise on the Mississippi in one of the Mark Twain themed boats once, and my brother and I got to handle the wheel for a bit because we were kids and that’s what they let kids do. I’ve been to Union Station a number of times, although the number of times my beautiful wife and I went to Landry’s behind it might exceed the times I was in the building myself. I’ve been to the Public Library a couple times–once to do some geneology research with a family friend and once professionally when I was writing documentation for library software to see how the company’s first client did things. I’ve been over the Grand Avenue Viaduct. I have been to either the New Cathedral or the Basillica for a funeral for the father of one of my wife’s co-workers. I’ve been to the Art Museum many times, but not in 20 or 25 years. I’ve visited both Grant’s Cabin at Grant’s Farm and the Hawken House in Old Trees; I do not think I’ve been to the Sappington House, but I’ve driven past it. And I’ve been to Lambert field a couple of times. Not as often as the Springfield-Branson National Airport, though.

Well, in retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t treat it like a full quiz because it’s 158 pages divided by two for a total of 79 sketches, and I’ve not been to that many of the places after all.

Still, and interesting browse during a football game. And another book towards my annual (stretch) goal of 100 read.

Ah, gentle reader. I’ve mentioned that I have read a couple of books of recent acquisition (The Art of Emily McGee and Sheer Poetry, both of which I bought last weekend) whilst reading The Life of Greece–ah, given that it’s been on my chairside table in progress for several years, you can surmise all of my reading since Our Oriental Heritage in 2023 has been breaks from reading the second volume of the Durant. So this book, which I bought within that interim (in May 2025), is no big deal except that it’s the only book where I’ve read a couple poems and then thought, “Hey, how’s Greek history going?” and picked up the Durant again to end the night.

I mean, you know I love me some Ogden Nash, gentle reader; this blog has, what, seven (now eight) book reports on his poetry, the most recent being The Old Dog Barks Backwards in January 2025 and the oldest being Versus in September 2007, when I would read the collections to my young children whilst they played (although in 2007, I only had a young child). But somehow I rate-limited this book to a couple of poems a night until last night when I powered through the last of them.

The book might be a topical compilation from other works, as the original copyright dates range from 1931 to 1970 (with some renewed because, gentle reader, in the olden days, copyrights lapsed before Disney got tired of them). The topic: Illness and growing older. Since I’m generally a pretty healthy guy, not suffering a lot from colds or flu, and, because of the vaccine schedule in the 1970s, neither measles or mumps either, although I remember Cracked magazine making light of the swelling associated with mumps, so it was in living memory then–since I’m generally a pretty healthy guy, I did not get a whole lot from the illness/hypochondria poems, but I did feel a twinge from the growing older posts–although he puts that turn into old man in the middle 40s when I still felt pretty young, back when I would not pull a hammy doing a head-high round kick with pop to it (which I recently did, dang it).

A couple bits worth quoting, including “A Man Can Complain, Can’t He?” where he repeats, “Another day, another dolor.” I myself have said this, so either I read this in a collection almost 20 years ago and have been inadvertantly quoting it ever since or the two of us came up with the pun independently.

From “This Is Going To Hurt A Little Bit”:

Because some tortures are physical and some are mental,
But the one that is both is dental.

Ah, gentle reader. I was afraid of dentistry for a while until I got my teeth cleaned up twenty-five years ago, and now I go thrice a year for cleanings. But once you’ve lived with a filling rubbing on a dental nerve for weeks thanks to a sedation dentist who went a little deeper than he thought and only after picking a new dentist got emergency surgery where the numbing shot brought the first real peace in a month, after that, there’s little pain a simple dental visit can bring. Although my latest trusted dentist just retired. Perhaps I’ll go back to fearing it or avoiding it if the new guy seems eager to bill.

From “Let’s Not Climb The Washington Monument Tonight”, we get this then-contemporary allusion:

It is when you wouldn’t visit Gina Lollobrigida or the Aga Khan if it meant sleeping on a sofa or a cot

Ah, gentle reader. I understand the allusion not because I have a degree in English and Philosophy and continue to read them as I age but because I read Kim du Toit (link maybe NSFW depending upon your work).

At any rate, I have to wonder if Ogden Nash set out to lightly parody the vernacular poets popular in his youth, such as James Whitcomb Riley and Paul Laurence Dunbar, and then he got stuck in the wordplay because he, too, discovered that’s what audiences wanted. I suppose a real Nash scholar who has read all his papers and letters would know, but I am not that guy.

I might have a collection or two of his still floating about, but I probably won’t jump right into it even if I discover it. After all, I re-seeded my stacks last weekend with small collections of poetry that I will likely get to first. But: Maybe not before I finish The Life of Greece–I have determined that the volume contains almost 100 pages of notes, bibliography, and index, so I am doner than I thought–so I might power through it in the near term.

I got this book at the Friends of the Library book sale last weekend, and it wasn’t the first book I picked up (The Artwork of Emily McGee was), it was the second I began on Sunday night whilst watching the football game. And, to be honest, it’s not the collection of poetry that I picked up recently as a break from The Life of Greece. But because it is poetry interleavened with photos, so it was a faster browse and….

You know, the poetry is pretty good in it.

I might want to build out a rubric for how I score poems. The poems in this volume have pretty good rhythm; have line lengths that vary between the shorter, couple of words lines and the longer, near-sentence complete thought lines I tend to favor; have a little of the small-i thing going on, but not so much “i did this” or “i went there” as opposed to just a way to start a poem–which is how I’d like to think I do it (but probably don’t); don’t have end rhymes or formal structure; and evoke rather than tell. This book would score pretty highly.

Or I guess what I’m saying is that I enjoyed it. Probably my second favorite collection of poetry so far this year after the works of Paul Laurence Dunbar. But I guess “second favorite for the year” is not a high bar given that I really only read one or two collections of poetry that I actually enjoy in a given year.

The photography is okay, too; black and white landscapes, still lifes, and closeups.

I’ll have to try to remember the name Toler and look for their work in the future. Although, sadly, when looking for information about them just now, I learned that she passed away last week. Kind of a downer to end a book report on, but I can do worse; I also discovered a scam site that mimics the official funeral home Web site and collects money in the name of the deceased, and if you’re a family member, you can “make a request” that they give some of the money to you.

What a fooking world. I actually looked at filing a complaint with the state attorney general’s office, but this has not affected me personally, so they will not take it seriously. And when it does affect me personally, I’ll be too preoccupied to be incensed then.

I picked this book up over the weekend. You know, I used to load up at the autumn Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale on art monographs, brief humor/joke books, and poetry for browsing during football games. Since the NFL has optimized its revenue by requiring almost all possible streaming subscriptions to watch a bunch of football at the casual viewer’s, well, expense–which means the casual user such as me is not watching two or three football games on Sundays and maybe another one or two during the week–well, since the financial wizards made that optimization and since a cynical viewer might think that the games are now optimized for billions in sports betting (The Bears scored how many in week one? Wow, a lot of money to be made on the over. They scored how in week two? Wow, a lot of money to be made on the under. Is it me, or are more games going to overtime or won at the last second now? And if not, does reality make a difference?), my football watching has fallen off the cliff. Still, you would not know by what I bought on Saturday, and since the Sunday night game is streaming on Peacock, one of the handful of such subscriptions scattered amongst Nogglestead that cost what cable or DirecTV did before we cut the cord–well, since it was on, I put on a bit of the Chiefs game if only to hear Friar saying, “Shut up, Colinsworth!” in my head, and I picked up this book.

As I mentioned, this is not really a monograph; although it does include a number of Ms. McGee’s works, more importantly or interestingly, most of them show stages of their development, from tracing to working region to region. And she does not put in hard outlines and then work from them; instead, she does maybe part of the head and then works out from there.

She is a local artist who does (or did–the Web site in the book is not longer active, and a quick Internet searches led to a Facebook page that was active until 2022) commissions, and she’d work from photographs, which is where the light tracing comes in. I’ve seen artists like this with booths in Relics–some samples for sale and information about how to have your own photo turned into art. The book itself might be promotional material as well, as it does include information on how to commission work.

I hope that has not fallen off of a cliff as much as it probably has with the new AI-generating tools because being able to create works like these from scratch is amazing (said the oft-attempting poetaster).

At any rate, I only made it to the half, so it will be a day or so until I complete the other book I started on Sunday night. But even without football, I’ll probably work in a lot of the books I bought this weekend. If I can find them in the stacks. Because The Life of Greece is long, and the next volume in The Story of Civilization ain’t short, either.