Musings from Brian J. Noggle

This book was previously published as Karate for Young People, and if I had read the back of the book when I picked it up in August 2019 at ABC Books, I would have seen that the book describes itself as being for all young people between 10 and 17. Maybe I did. I am not sure it would have dissuaded me. I certainly do pick up the martial arts books for young people at ABC Books. But not the ones for old people. I assume that’s the market for the tai chi walking books that are piling up because I’m not buying them.

At any rate, this is a very cheap paperback–almost pulp magazine quality more than a book–which offers a list of the basics of karate. Stances, strikes, kicks, blocks, and sparring. The techniques are shown with a series of three or four pictures, each of which takes up most of a page with a paragraph of explanation. The photos are not as helpful as the ones in Boxer’s Start-Up, but that books pictures and diagrams in that book really set a high bar. This volume has a couple instructive ones.

As I have said before, these books really serve to supplement an actual class since the motions are hard to learn from mere pictures. I mostly read them to draw comparisons with the martial arts class that I study. Some of the main differences that I see are that the karate ready positions tend to have a more closed stance (hips are aligned toward the opponent) and the hands are lower. But I’ve seen many of these forms already, but not lately–as I’ve mentioned, the school has focused a lot on boxing over the last couple of years.

But, still, there’s something to learn. One combination strike is called the U-punch, which is thrown from a front stance (which my school has never emphasized) and involves a cross and a backwards uppercut. It reminds me of my Matador combination, which is a knifehand toward the head from the forward hand with a low cross coming under it almost simultaneously. Although I haven’t really sparred in over a year with the way things have gone, this was one of my favorites. But, again, we’re not focusing on tae kwon do strikes these days.

So a good review over a couple of hours where I wasn’t at the dojo. Which I haven’t been much the last two weeks with the weather and whatnot. I need to get back so that I don’t fall further behind and I can wear my business gi again sometime.

It’s been six years since I read Saylor’s Last Seen in Massilia. I bought a bunch of these at a garage sale or something, and when I read Last Seen in Massilia, I had them together on the bookshelves, but I had put the first two I owned of the series out of order. Since then, the shelves upon which I’d put them in order collapsed, so they have kind of been just piled onto the remaining bookshelves. When it came time to find books to fill out the Winter 2021 Reading Challenge categories, I grabbed the Saylor book that was on top. This one.

It takes place well after the events of Last Seen in Massilia. After Caesar defeats Pompey. Gordianus, the protagonist, is returning to Alexandria, Egypt, with his wife, a native of that land, as well as his two adopted charges and the hulking mute brother of Gordianus’s recently deceased lover, whose ashes she wanted spread on the Nile. As they see the light of the Great Lighthouse at Pharos, a storm comes up and blows their ship into the remnants of Pompey’s fleet. Pompey hates Gordianus (Caesar is not terribly pleased with him, either), and he looks forward to executing the Finder (Gordianus’s nickname) after he returns from the shore expedition where he (Pompey) hopes to ally himself with the Ptolemeic royal family–but Pompey is assassinated before he reaches the shore.

The Egyptian fleet chases off the remnants of Pompey’s forces. Caesar arrives, and Gordianus finds himself caught between Caesar, Ptolemy, and Cleopatra in their various intrigues.

Basically, I thought the book was going to just come down to a historical intrigue book and not something hinging on a crime, but on page 209 (of 323), one of Cleopatra’s food tasters dies from drinking poisoned wine that she and Caesar were going to share, and suspicion falls on Meto, Gordianus’s adopted son who went missing in Massilia and whom the Finder disowned at the end of that book for throwing in his lot with Caesar. So Gordianus leaps into action to try to find out who really did it. Which he does in the back quarter of the book.

You know, I couldn’t help but think that this book is just like The Good Girl’s Guide To Murder (I mean, they even both came out the same year). The first half of the book deals with familial relationships, the pressures of mothers/daughters and fathers/sons (respectively), and the reader expects a crime but gets a lot of rumination until, yes, there it is, somewhere in the 200s, something happens (a murder/attempted murder). Then, very quickly, the protagonist solves it without an awful lot of legwork. You see? Exactly the same.

Except that this book has a lot of flourishes of interesting historical locations and events, even basing some of the dialog on things recounted in Caesar’s account of the Civil War (which I read not long after Last Seen in Massila). So it’s more relatable to me than the McBride novel.

Which is good. I have several others in the series hidden in the piles on the to-read shelves. Hopefully, it won’t take me six years and a prompt from a Winter Reading Challenge to get to them. But one thing I have recently rediscovered is that I have a lot of really cool books to read, starting with the partially finished David Copperfield (which I paused early in January so I could get a coffee cup from the library’s Winter 2021 Reading Challenge.

Oh, and things I marked:

I Feel Smart
The book talks about Crassus, the other part of the first triumvirite.

Pompey was not her first husband. Her previous marriage had been to Publius Crassus, the son of Marcus Crassus, the lifelong rival of Caesar and Pompey. When the elder Crassus set out to conquer Parthia some five years ago, he took his son with him; both perished when the Parthians massacred the invading Romans.

I am listening to an audio course lecture series called History’s Great Military Blunders and the Lessons They Teach; one of the lectures is on the battle at Carrhae. So by the time I read this, I could talk about that particular battle in detail.

Me, Too

“I am a slave–of Isis. I serve the goddess and belong to her completely, body and soul, in this world and the next.”

Yeah, me, too. That’s what I get for naming a cat Isis.

Not a lot marked here, but what am I going to complain about, the description of Alexandria? I will say of the two Civ IV Great Wonders from Alexandria, I prefer the Great Lighthouse to the Great Library.

Thank you, that is all.

When I went to the library to get a book about food for the Winter 2021 Reading Challenge (Chocolate: The Consuming Passion), I also got this book, a collection of poetry by a Native American woman who, it turns out, is the current Poet Laureate. Which might explain why this book is in print nearly forty years after it or its content first appeared.

Well, her poetry lines are generally longer than those of Linda Hogan, whose book I read in December, short before I knew I would need to read something by a Native American author in the beginning of 2021.

But the same knocks I applied to Hogan, except perhaps the short lines, although some of the poems in this book also have short lines. But the poetry is not concretely evocative. It’s lyric in spots, and probably works better in performance than in reading from the page. But, come on, if the poetry depends upon a predetermined interpretation and delivery, it’s only so good.

The first paragraph and sentence of the introduction say:

What do the horses mean is the question I’ve been asked most since the first publication of the book She Had Some Horses in 1984. I usually say, “It’s not the poet’s work to reduce the poem from poetry to logical sense.” Or, “It’s not about what the poem means, it’s ‘how’ the poem means.” Then I ask, “So what doe the horses mean to you?”

Like most poets, I don’t know what my poems or the stuff of my poetry means exactly.

Spoken like a professional academic poet.

Maybe that’s my problem. I do know what my poems mean, and it’s my job as a poet to convey the meaning poetically, through words that feel good when you read them out loud, not that sound good when I read them out loud (although back in my open mic days, they did–or maybe they were just loud). Of course, I am not a professional poet, although I did get paid $100 for a poem once. Between that and my other sales to national magazines a decade ago, I am entitled to the professional tier in various writers’ guilds when I have been known to join.

At any rate, most of the poems flowed over me like water and back into the bookearth from which they came. I don’t expect to pick up another of her works, although the author is also a musician and a saxophone player, so perhaps I will catch something of hers on YouTube and order a CD.

Or maybe not. A little too Native American-influenced for my tastes.

Brian J., you might ask, exactly how low will you go to complete all fifteen categories in the Winter 2021 Reading Challenge? Well, gentle reader, I went to the library the other day to find a short collection of poetry by a Native American author and a book on food since I can’t find the book I pulled from my personal library about food. And I found this book on the shelves of the library in the food section. It’s a short humor book with lots of illustrations, but, c’mon, man. It was in the library’s own Food section, and not the kids’ food section. So it counts.

At any rate, it is an update of a 1985 volume that contains the sort of thing one would find in an “I Am….[Food Type]” article on Reader’s Digest if anyone besides me subscribed to it in the 21st century. You have information about how cacao is grown, how it is made into chocolates you can eat, where to buy the best chocolate, how to store it, all presented with a sense of humor and a lot of drawn hippopotami. Strangely enough, you can learn a lot from this book if you’re interested. It includes steps to grow cacao beans–step one is basically live in Africa or South America–and also recipes. So the book has it all.

But, yeah, it’s a very short read–it took me an hour or so. As I said, it’s more of a long article with the cartoons. But still informative.

I did flag one thing, though:

The new millennium has brought with it a quiet but insistent counter-trend to mass production: exquisite artisan-made food and drink. Wine, cheese, coffee, beer, bourbon–each has drawn a fanatical core of small-batch makers who strive for new vistas of nuanced taste experience. In turn, those makers attract a core of deeply devoted followers.

And so it is with chocolate.

The chocolate that these driven iconoclasts make is kown as “bean to bar” or “craft chocolate.” The makers begin at the beginning, working directly with smale-scale cacao farmers to determine how to grow and nurture the best possible beans, and how to optimize the methods by which these beans are sorted, fermented, and dried.

She’s talking about Askinosie Chocolate based here in Springfield, Missouri–and she does mention him in the thank yous at the end.

So I am down to two books to read in the next nine days. I am starting to feel very confident that I will complete the Winter Reading Challenge the hard way.

I first read this book fifteen years ago (or, at least, I first reported on it fifteen years ago). That was when the book was fifteen years old, so basically its age has doubled. Mine, almost, too. Or so it feels sometimes.

At any rate, this book precedes Widows, and as I mentioned, I spotted this volume on my bookshelves right after I read that book. I ordered this book last spring from ABC Books during the beginning of the Ongoing Unpleasantness; I got it because it is an autographed copy.

Not only is it autographed, but it is inscribed.

Much like the English copy of The Caribbean Mystery, I have to wonder how it ended up in Springfield, Missouri, for me to pick up.

The book has two unrelated plots: Carella and Hawes investigate the murder of a priest, and they have a bunch of suspects: A member of the congregation who has a beef with the priest; a member of the Satan-worshipping church down the street, whose rites are described in some tawdry detail; members of the the church staff; a local drug dealer who might have hidden drugs in the church; local youths/drug distributors who chased the drug dealer into the church after the drug dealer stole the drugs; someone who might be having sex with and/or blackmailing the priest; and the eventual murderer. The second features Marilyn Hollis, the former prostitute who is involved with Detective Willis, whose past catches up with her in the form of two South Americans who want the money she stole from her former pimp when she killed him.

The first plot moves a little recursively, as the stories of each person change according to the other peoples’ stories, until Carella returns to the scene and uncovers additional evidence that allows him to solve the mystery pretty quickly; the other meanders to a conclusion abruptly.

So not the best of the lot, but still an engaging read, and I read it in three nights, so pretty fast for my modern pacing.

I ended up picking it up because, when I was handling Widows, I saw that it was a selection of the Literary Guild. Which is a book club. So this is my Book Club Selection for the Winter 2021 Reading Challenge.

Oh, and I did mark some things as I went along.

Anachronism Alert

“This was late in the afternoon,” Krissie said, “this black kid came running into the church with his head all bloody. Hald a dozen white kids were chasing him with stickball bats and garbage can covers, chased him right into the church, right up the center aisle to the altar.”

I am not convinced a twenty-two year old woman from Minnesota would use the term stickball bat, especially since everyone else in the book calls it a baseball bat.

Attacking George Bush
I might have mentioned that in the 21st century, McBain let some sucker punches into his work. But here in 1990, he also criticises the earlier George Bush:

The black man in America knew where it was at. And where it was at was not here, not in these mean streets. Where it was at was uptown someplace, so far uptown that the black man had never been there, could not even visualize it there, knew only that uptown was a shining city somewhere high on a hill, a promised land where everyone went to Choate and Yale and a thousand points of light glistened in every cereal bowl.
Read my lips, Carella thought.

A little zinger for Reagan, too, who borrowed shining city on a hill from John Winthrop.

The Baddest Word
Clearly, there is a black kid in the book and it muses on racial questions, so we get the superbad word.

In the movie theater, sitting there in the dark with mostly white people, Hooper likes to wet his pants laughing every time Eddie Murphy does another one of his shrewd things. White people all around him are laughing, too. Not at any dumb nigger but at dumb Charlie who the nigger’s fuckin’ around. Hooper doesn’t completely understand why all these white people are laughin’ at theyselves, but he knows it makes him fell damn good.

Yeah, the superbaddest word of all appears throughout this book; it should be cancelled harder than Widows. But McBain does capture something of race relations at the time–Eddie Murphy’s characters were protagonists, black but relatable, and even white folk could identify with him. However, that’s not allowed or encouraged now–it’s not our shared humanity to discover and celebrate, but our assigned categories to defend.

Tie-In To Something I Just Saw

Marilyn wondered if there were such things as passionate, poetic men who looked like lions and made their homes in subway caves.

I just saw the intro for Beauty and the Beast when reminiscing about the New Shows of 1987.

McBain Knew No Goths

Carella recognized in the group of teenagers the two young girls he’d spoken to yesterday. They were dressed more sedately today, not in black–this was largely an alien color in a young person’s wardrobe–but in dark shades of blue that seemed appropriate to the day’s burden.

Apparently no metalheads either. In my high school years which ended in 1990, black was not uncommon.

Anachronism Alert (II)
One of the white local youths:

So we were, I don’t know, showing off for the girls, clowning around. I remember Allie was doing his imitation of what was supposed to be Tony Bennett singing I Lost My Heart in San Francisco, but he sounded more like Jerry Lewis, did you ever hear Jerry Lewis sing?

Probably not what a group of teens in 1990 would be doing, imitating Tony Bennett but sounding like Jerry Lewis.

Asimovian Self-Insertion

“Carlos Ortega,” Morente read out loud from the computer screen, and then turned to the faxed record and said, “Carlos Ortega,” and then kept turning his head from screen to paper like a spectator watching a tennis match, comparing records, speaking the facts out loud, “forty-two years old, born October fifteenth,” and said in an aside to Willis “Birthdate of great men” but did not amplify, “six feet three inches tall, two hundred and sixty-five pounds, brown eyes, bald with black sideburns, this is some kind of miracle, broken nose, knife scar over right eye, they sound like twins except your guy was born in Argentina and this guy in El Salvador.”

Ed McBain was born on October 15, you see?

White Privilege Alert
McBain also includes several slurs for white people and one for the Italians:

This was getting to be a regular reunion of WOPS, the World Order for the Prevention of Subterfuge, a watchdog society dedicated to the proposition that any American born with an Italian name must keep that name forever, neither changing it completely nor even Anglicizing it, lest he be mercilessly and eternally hounded to his grave with reminders that he is meely an ignorant peasant with hoity-toity pretensions.

As you might remember, Ed McBain’s birth name was Salvatore Lombino; he later changed it to Evan Hunter. Note that the aforementioned Tony Bennett also violated this precept and changed his name to a more American-sounding name.

So he is pointing out that anti-Italian prejudice and the reaction, Italians ‘policing’ themselves to find people who are not authentic enough, existed in living memory. Which, unfortunately, is not living memory to many people in the 21st century, or it would maybe give them some perspective other than what they’re given by the authorities.

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At any rate, I flag things to comment on just so I can give a little more to these book reports. I don’t want to be pedantic, and I don’t want to spend hours composing these book reports, so you’re getting, for the nonce, a comment on things that strike me while reading the book.

In sum, I liked the book, and I tried to keep the Doritos dust off of this since it’s a warmly inscribed first edition, so it might be briefly collectible until the remainder of us who like to read physical books and not just content delivered to our devices and managed/’curated’ by big tech companies. Especially books with bad words in them even when the thoughts were, for the time, good.