Month: October 2023

I just picked this chapbook up in April, so reading it in October represents reading it right away at Nogglestead. As you know, gentle reader, over the years, my autumn reading has drifted toward poetry chapbooks and art monographs that I can browse during football games. However, this year, we have opted out of the NFL Sunday Ticket package because it’s on YouTube TV. Instead, I have gotten the NFL+ package, but due to the scraps of streaming rights that the NFL swept up after making big deals elsewhere, I can only get games that appear in the local market and only on hand-held devices. So it’s hard to hold a book while one holds an iPad and struggles with the deficiencies of the NFL app (stopping it, restarting it every couple of minutes when it bogs down). Which is just as well as I have not collected a bunch of monographs recently. So I have been reading chapbooks recently by themselves.

Now, this book must come with an interesting story. It is a chapbook copyright 2013, but the copyright page indicates that some of the poems within it were published in the mid 1990s. Which would seem to indicate that the poet took almost thirty years to come up with a chapbook’s worth of material. Gentle reader, my first chapbooks appeared in 1994 and 1995. It did take me almost thirty years to work up a full length collection, though. Well, not exactly–most of the material in Coffee House Memories comes from the middle 1990s. It just took me thirty years to get up the desire to enbooklenate the poems. And it might be another decade at my current pace to cough up enough for another chapbook. I have to wonder if the poet here experienced something similar. Or maybe it took thirty years to save enough money or for the cost in rights for a Peter Sellers movie still on the cover.

And the poetry? Overall, pretty good. A couple of them are meta poems about poets writing poetry, a couple of reflections on other works (including a Peter Sellers movie moment), but the lines are long enough to convey meaning, and the poems rely on images although sometimes a bit obscure. Still, leaps and bounds above most of the things I read.

This is her first chapbook, but Finishing Line Press has a number of later ones listed. I will keep an eye out for them.

A book review of F.M. Busby’s Cage A Man, the first part of the Demu Trilogy, prompted me to pick up this book (as I prophesied a couple weeks ago). It’s the first half of a two-book set which I purchased in 2011. So it’s been, um, a couple of years since I read the Demu Trilogy in my early adulthood.

This book takes place in a far future world where near faster-than-light travel exists, possibly stolen from an alien race. A corporation has taken control of the Earth and its outworld colonies and looks to eliminate its rival corporations and foundations on Earth. Members of one such rival foundation get their young son into a military service academy under faked papers to keep him safe, but he endures hardships in the brutal training academy. He shows aptitude in ship piloting and fighting, though, so he graduates despite two stints in the special torture cell used as punishment. He gets posted as a cadet to a ship whose captain notoriously “spaces” cadets, throwing them out of the airlock for small offenses. Bran survives and thrives in his next posting.

He learns that mutiny is not uncommon, and that after mutiny, the mutineers rename their ships and head for Hidden worlds–worlds that the corporation does not know about but whose locations are shared by the Escaped captains. When the captain decides to punish Tregare’s friend and lover for an infraction, he triggers a mutiny that liberates a ship. A counter-mutiny by captured corporation loyalists elevates Tregare from third in command to captain of his own ship, and he vows revenge upon the corporation and hopes to build a wider rebellion.

Part of the world-building going on is that the spacers, who travel at near light speeds, take the Long View because their calendar time differs from the experience of time for residents on planets they visit. We don’t see much of this in the books as most of the books and characters are on the same ship, but although it tries to handle this, it’s a little wonky. The personal calendars of individuals are going to differ based on how long they travel at near-light speeds and how long they spend on planets. Forget the people on the planets, who are going to age decades for every couple of months that the spacefarers travel–the other space farers are going to age at different rates as well, but this book kind of overlooks that. And the trade–basically, the ship is going to load up 40 or 50 years before it will reach its destination in real time. What goods and services will those planets need in a hundred of their years? The book is vague on the trade goods, but one wonders how that would work. It’s a shame to introduce the Long View when it’s not all worked out, but I guess it added a touch of novelty and verite to the book in 1984.

It’s not bad for rocket jockey kinds of science fiction. However, unlike some of the juvie stuff, the books contain sex–not especially graphic, but it’s there, so if you’re put off by that, the book might put you off. But not bad for its time.

I must confess to you, gentle reader, that it took me three tries to make it through this book. The first, no doubt, was during or not long after our vacation to Florida which included a stop on Sanibel Island in 2016. I am not sure why I powered through this time. Perhaps because access to my library was limited for a bit. Perhaps my new reading habits allowed for it–although I did not take this upstairs to read whilst stretched out on the sofa. Perhaps my present “reading habits” also includes dodging my dilligence in reading a little bit of the Story of Civilization every night. But I made it past page 50 (of 232).

Okay, so, the plot: A Russian arms dealer blackmails an attorney into helping him take over land left by a Sanibel-island resident to create a nature conservatory (along with others in various places) so that he can store biological and chemical weapons that he’s selling. Local and part-time Sanibel residents including a couple of government and quasi-government officials, a potter, the former judge handling the estate, and the main character, a marketing guy who has just written a book and was instrumental in the incident of the Sanibel Arcanum (a previous book) work to thwart the Russian. I mean, the plot has some interesting twists to it–the blackmailed attorney plans to double-cross the Russian. Okay, that’s the twist.

Unfortunately, the execution poorly serves the plot.

Most of the narrative structure is very short peeks into various characters. By “short peeks,” I mean sometimes we get two or three paragraphs before jump cutting to the next group. This makes it difficult to really tell the characters apart. And even the longer pieces are the groups getting together to talk about what’s happening instead of actual action. The characters come together and have dinner; they talk about biochemical weapons, which is the subject of the report that the quasi-government characters are working on and, coincidentally, what the Russian hopes to store and/or traffic from Sanibel Island.

At about page 70, the marketing guy/novelist goes to the Grand Cayman where the Russian has another home. The books focuses on this single character, who happens to be on Grand Cayman because he has a freelance assignment to write about the island. Not because he’s investigating the Russian, although he does while he’s there.

Even when focusing on the single character, the tone of the book shifts to a bit of travel writing with exquisite descriptions of the island and the food the character eats. A little action happens, and then the reader thinks, “Ah, a story!” But then after a bit of action, the character returns to his main home in Indianapolis, several months elapse, and then his family returns to Sanibel Island and we get dinner parties again. Oh, wait, no, the potter goes on a mission trip to Russia to a Siberian town where the Russian’s father coincidentally lives, and he gets info that will ultimately become important.

We get another burst of action/action in the book’s climax, but a lot of the book hinges on coincidences and improbable-to-poor decision making. It repeats some of its descriptions early and refers to the previous book far too often.

I did flag a couple of things in the book:

• The book mentions several times the bin Laden organization as a possible buyer for biological and chemical weapons; this book was published years before 2001.
• “We have established a strong environmental stewardship here. Thanks to the wonderful efforts of Ding Darling when he worked for the federal government.” To be honest, I was a little afraid to search the Internet for that name, but I guess you probably already know he was an early 20th century cartoonist who founded the National Wildlife Federation. The book is all-in on trusting the government and believing it’s a force for good–and perhaps that simply raising awareness of the dangers of biological and chemical weapons will change the world.
• “Hey, Dad, you’re on Amazon.com!” one of the children says. True fact, children: We did call it Amazon.com once upon a time.

The book is also very dated for its relatively young age. It goes into too much detail about computer use and the Internet–people sure are printing out a lot of Web sites–and it is before the Department of Homeland Security and the whole two-by-two/hands-of-blue/pats-for-you regime. So the bad guys wheel an incapacitated character onto a plane in a wheelchair and just walk through security like that in a fashion we cannot fathom now, where we still have to take off our shoes after that one thing twenty years ago.

One biography of this still-living author says he has a third book in the works, but I have not seen evidence of it online. He does have a blog which he looks to update monthly or a little more frequently with photos and musings from his life in California (not Sanibel Island). I’d link to it, but although he says the media is broken, he also says that those who creatively indict the former president are patriots who are sucking the poison out of our country. So, nah.

I thought I might have just picked this up at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale in September, but apparently it was part of my haul in April.

I guess that makes sense, as I picked up a number of chapbooks to plant on my chairside book accumulation point when the football season started so I could browse them whilst holding an iPad to watch football games on those rare occasions where my NFL+ subscription would yield a football game I wanted to watch but could only do so on the iPad due to NFL+’s limited streaming rights. That was a week before the book sale this autumn. I discovered one cannot really browse a book whilst holding an iPad, so I have not been able to browse the chapbooks during the couple of football games that I have caught on a mobile device. I still have them on the table, though, as I have invented a new reading habit this summer which finds me reading on the sofa upstairs to finish the evening. I have some First Things and New Oxford Review magazines that I’ve read up there–mostly reading The Story of Civilization in the chair downstairs–but I’ve also read some of other books such as Samurai Cat Goes to the Movies and Vengeance Is Mine! up there. So I brought this book up to read there. You know, I might have written a navel-gazing post on my new book reading habits (mostly, I finish the evening stretched out on the couch upstairs reading a book or magazine because that tracks with how I spend evenings on vacations), but, c’mon, man–you’re not here for my navel-gazing. You’re here for pictures of movie starlets in films I watch. Odds are you’re not even reading this, and Jeremy Daryl is going to wonder what the hell I’m talking about in this book report. If he can even find it when searching the Internet on “Jeremy Daryl”.

So that’s a lot of verbiage in a book report that’s not about the book, but I suppose that’s okay since I really don’t have a lot to say about the book. To be honest, it looks like it might have been the results of a high school or college introduction to poetry class that the fellow decided to dump onto print-on-demand. The layout is rudimentary–a series of poems with titles and lines in double-spacing with no breaks at the pages, no headers or footers, and no pagination. As you might recall, gentle reader, I have been lauded, well, noted for my bok design ability more than my actual poetry.

The poems themselves are, well, rudimentary. You don’t get the whole mélange of different types of poems–an acrostic, a limerick, a haiku, a tanka, a sonnet, and a free verse–all the poems look to be free verse with little to no rhyming on a variety of topics. A couple nice moments amongst the pieces

However, if the fellow chooses to continue writing poetry and reads a bit more of the stuff, I’m a little more optimistic for his development than your average Instagram poet because the poems are longer and have a little more room for thematic expansion and explanation than brain droppings not done by George Carlin. So maybe there’s hope, but probably the publication of this book was more of a lark than a serious endeavor.