Month: July 2024

Like Post Scripts Humor, I picked this book up in Clever last month and used it as a break from reading Walden (which itself is a break, a long break, from The Life of Greece and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, both of which I will finish this decade, maybe). I’ve read fewer Calvin and Hobbes books during the lifetime of this blog (The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes in 2004 and Calvin and Hobbes: The Sunday Pages in 2015) than Dilbert for some reason, which is odd, as Calvin and Hobbes would be more universal and timeless. Well, except that sometime in this century, Calvin’s adventures would have been nothing but staring at an electronic device of some sort.

So this is a contiguous arc of stories dealing with Calvin duplicating himself and Calvin locking the babysitter out as well as shorter, one-offs or couple of days’ worth of Spaceman Spiff and whatnot. Given that the book itself came out in 1991, presumably these appeared in newspapers while I was in high school. A couple of years later, they’re still relatively fresh and amusing.

I mentioned in one of the other book reports (for The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes) that you could still find unlicensed decals of Calvin peeing on auto logos and whatnot–ten years after the strip ended. Well, I guess it’s twenty more years later, and you don’t see them around much any more. So the hold on the public imagination is fading. The more the pity. But I have used the word transmogrify in conversation recently, and it’s not because I ran across it in a 17th century tome. Although with me, I suppose that’s not out of the question.

Ah, gentle reader. I have tasked my youngest with reading Walden this summer (unlikely), so I have started a re-read of it myself. What that means, though, is that you’re likely to see numerous short humor book reports before a report on the Thoreau.

I just picked this book up at the end of June, so it was on top of the stacks. Unlike The Best Cartoons from the Saturday Evening Post from 1998 and “One Moment, Sir!” Cartoons from the Saturday Evening Post from 1957, this book has not only cartoons but little gags from the one page of jokes that the Saturday Evening Post ran. Do they still? I am pretty sure I let my subscription lapse a decade ago by now, so I cannot speak to what the magazine offers now. But back then, it was increasingly left pablum, medical advances and ads for old people (older than I was then, and even still older than I am today), and the Post Scripts page.

Again, some of this material was inner chuckle-worthy, but it’s all dated by now and based on what would have been situations to poke fun at in the middle of the last century. So it’s probably best read by someone who would, you know, have read The Saturday Evening Post.

Aside from that, one noteworthy bit about this book is that a previous owner, perhaps Mr. Brengel who signed his name inside the front cover in 1979, marked the margin of some of the jokes and wrote some one-liners based on the gags in the margins. One must presume that he was mining this particular book for gags that he could include in his own talks, whether professional talks or his turn at the Toastmasters or something. I mean, he could just have highlighted the ones he particularly liked, but something about it suggests a more practical application. I’m not sure that it’s common practice any more to look to books for humor bits for talks, but back in the 20th century, a whole genre of books existed for it–I almost remember the name of one such series whose material often appeared also in Readers Digest. But that was a long time ago.

At any rate, something to fill a little time after reading a segment of Walden and going to bed.

I bought these books last weekened at Rublecon where Cody Walker was the only author or comic book artist (actually, he’s both) present. And as I was done with The Emerald Elephant Gambit shortly thereafter, I delved into these books in fairly short order.

I dived into Hang Me If I Stay Shoot Me If I Run first. It’s a short (122 pages) book which includes the title novella along with a handful of short stories set in the fictional town of Pinhook, Missouri, which just happens to be up the road (Highway 13) a piece like Bolivar, Missouri. Where the author is from. In the novella, a kid from the area returns with a dead dog in his trunk and holes up in a local motel. He has just burglarized a home in the Rivercut neighborhood (just east of Nogglestead). He meets up with the housekeeper/night manager of the motel, a woman of her own ill repute, and they decide to rob a local church run by a preacher with a predilection for philandering and then the local fair run by a man whose money and influence comes from dodgy sources, including the manufacture of meth. When the final reckoning comes, though, the young man is willing to sacrifice himself for revenge. Other stories in the book deal with a gay couple trying to live their lives in secret in Pinhook; an older woman finds that strangers unburden themselves to her; a young woman deals with the attentions of young men and a skeevy uncle as she hopes for college acceptance which will take her away; an older man has had a health episode and is supposed to be resting, but he wants to go to the coffee shop to trade knives; and a young couple seeking to get married finds some resistance from the church.

I mean, I can see a little bit of Winesburg, Ohio in it, albeit with a bit more modern sensibility and them to it. It’s not poorly written, but it does lack a little depth to it that I’ve kind of alluded to before. Kind of like college level classwork or stuff you might find in a writing group. Of course, back in the day–the early part of the 20th century–they filled whole magazines with these kinds of stories.

Loot the Bodies is a collection of poetry. Interestingly, most of the poems are pretty short–maybe the longest clock in at under 30 lines–but the book is printed on very large paper and not in 4×6 size, which means there’s a lot of white space in the 88 pages of poems. The book also includes a couple of short stories at the end; again, slice-of-life material. The poems are okay. Better than Rupi Kaur instapoetry and better than the grandmother poetry I often read. Again, the sort of thing that you might have spotted in mid-century general interest magazines in the 20th century.

Which is odd because the author looked too young to have spent too much time in the last century.

At any rate, I have, what, six more of the author’s books from Rublecon? I’m not feeling compelled to read them all at once, but they’ll be pleasant enough when I get around to them.

Since I just read the second volume in the Agent of T.E.R.R.A. series (The Golden Goddess Gambit), I figured it would be the best time for me to polish off the other volume in the series that I have. As the series total is four books, so I have now read half of the series, and I don’t own the others. Given that the series only lasted four books that came out in rapid succession (both books I read came out in 1967; the first came out in 1966 and the last in 1969 according to Fantastic Fiction), I probably won’t run across the remaining volumes in the wild, and I’m not inclined to order them.

So, in this book, a researcher embedded in Mohenjo-dara before the barbarian invasions is tasked with collecting information about the civilization for the home office. A couple of days before she is to leave because the barbarians are going to conquer and raze the village, a UFO appears in the sky, claiming to be Indra and offering to protect the village if the villagers will give up their gold and valuables as a sacrifice. The researcher calls for help, and Hannibal and Webley come to the past and uncover a plot from their enemies in the Empire to accumulate gold from the era. Hannibal has to put things back in order, including convincing Divodasa, the ruler of the barbarians, to settle down in the area as he did in the prime timeline.

So it’s an entertaining little yarn. It’s as though the author went through the first volumes of The Story of Civilization and poked his stories into the gaps in history. Well, not the Durants’ work; the book contains a for further reading section which does not include Our Oriental Heritage. But it could. Much of the book is adhering to the special rules of time travel, one of which is that a person cannot be present in the same time twice, which leads to some planning for jumping backwards and forwards for an hour or so.

Somewhere between rocket jockey juvies and men’s adventure fiction, but a quick fun read just the same.

I guess it has been nine years since I read a John D. MacDonald Travis McGee novel (three, actually, in A Tan and Sandy Silence and Two Other Great Mysteries which also includes The Long Lavender Look and Bright Orange for the Shroud) and five years since I’ve read McDonald at all (On the Run in in 2019). As I might have mentioned then, I’m pacing them out.

In this book, a wealthy businessman asks McGee and Meyer to go to Mexico to find out the circumstances in which his daughter was living before she died in an auto accident, perhaps while drunk or high. She had fallen into a bad crowd and had travelled to Mexico with them, and McGee and Meyer find layers of intrigue as they try to find her associates. The father of the other girl in the group has also come to Mexico to find his daughter and is also trying to find himself and get tuned into the youth culture. A wealthy woman emerged from seclusion, although the two girls were staying with her, to identify the body and has gone back into seclusion somewhere around the world. And the group itself descended into drug-fueled madness and free sex, culminating in a plan to use the dead girl’s savings to smuggle heroin into the United States. McGee and Meyer unpeel the layered plots over time with a lot of speculation taking pages along with the normal existential musings you get in MacDonald.

The plot and goings on might have been edgy and shocking in 1969, but you could set a similar story in a high school and play it out on a network television show (not even a cable or streaming show, although presumably if you did you’d get more skin and depicted violence). It has a few anachronisms, like presenting Mexico as a fairly safe destination for travelers and easy border crossings without a passport, but it’s still relatively timely to someone who lived in an era before cell phones and personal tracking devices became a thing. Access to these devices and their pings would have made a much simpler story indeed.

As you know, gentle reader, if you’ve been around long enough and remember previous MacDonald reviews, I like the man’s writing. He writes pulp with a depth of theme and depth of writing that was beginning to fall out of practice in the 1960s. I mean, Robert E. Howard’s work had depth to the writing (but not as much overt philosophizing thematics). Don Pendleton had a little philosophy, but his writing was not as thick and rich. Now, of course, you get length that has replaced depth. I wonder why the writing changed. The nature of the business? The difference between education in the eras? Something, for sure.

So I will continue to dabble in reading the MacDonald, although I have to think I have read most of the popular work, and it would take some doing on my part to figure out definitively what books I have read since I have started tracking my reading and books that I own (I have no way to be sure what I would have borrowed from the library when I was younger) and to seek out the ones I have not. And I have a bunch of projects ahead of me in the queue. So that’s a thing for another day. Meanwhile, I will probably continue to pick the books up when I see them and re-read them as I come across them in the stacks here at Nogglestead.

I picked up this little 1960s-era paperback almost 10 years ago at Pumpkin Daze. It’s the second of a brief series of four books featuring Hannibal Fortune and his alien symbiote protoplasmic partner as they try to protect the natural timeline from changes made by their enemies in a war where time itself is the battlefield.

In this volume, Fortune and Webley, his partner, go back to a continent that will be lost in the sea in the future to find out who Kronos is and why he was worshipped as a god there. They discover that Kronos has planted the seeds of a goddess-worshipping cult but whose queen/goddess figure might not want to share power when Kronos returns. Fortune and Webley foment a rebellion and look to restore the queen’s sister, the rightful heir to the throne.

It’s a short book–158 pages–and moves along pretty well. But I was amused to find myself, again, in prehistoric times on a continent/island that could be Atlantis. It fits in with the history books I’ve read recently (Ancient Mines of Kitchi-Gummi) as well as fiction (the Bucky and the Lukefahr ladies books Walking the Labyrinth and Songs of Three not to mention Robert E. Howard’s work such as The Cthulhu Stories of Robert E. Howard). I’m not even seeking out books that feature ancient Cypriot/Minoan/Celtic/Pictish books at this point, but I keep finding them anyway. Funny how that works.

As it happens, I picked up the third book in the series at the same time, and I’ll probably delve into it soon as well. Heaven knows with all the thick hardbacks in the Nogglestead to-read stacks that I will constantly pick up the small mass market paperbacks instead.

Facebook must be reading my blog as it seems to know that I’ve read a pile of Howard this year (Tigers of the Sea, Conan the Invincible, and The Hour of the Dragon). So it’s been showing me a hella lotta Dungeons and Dragons suggested/sponsored posts. And, in June, an ad for this book, which I proceeded to order from Amazon.

The stories certainly do not have the flavor of Lovecraft’s stories of the mythos (or other writers who followed him). Instead, they only share some thematic elements, specifically that alien races preceded man on the Earth, including Atlantis which sank beneath the waves.

The book includes:

• “The Shadow Kingdom”, a Kull the Conqueror novella wherein Picts help Kull to learn that an ancient shape-shifting snake people have infiltrated his palace.
• “The Skull Face”, a novella wherein an ancient magician has laid plans in the shadows to unite non-white races to overthrow the white men around the world and establish his own global empire. The magician ensnares an opium-eater in London as his thrall, but the man recovers himself to ally with the authorities to try to stop the plot.
• “The Children of the Night”, wherein a modern Englishman is hit in the head and regresses to a previous life where he was a barbarian hunting the Children of the Night, an ancient race of non-humans, and when he returns to the present day, discovers one of his cohort is a desendent of them. This story has elements of the mythos and refers to the Call of Chulhu and other texts shared across the mythos.
• “The Gods of Bal-Sogoth”, a novella similar to the Wulfhere/Cormac Mac Art stories from Tigers of the Sea blended with Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King”. Two enemies are cast ashore on a remote island where the savage population has been ruled by a white woman who was their goddess until unseated by the practitioners of the old religion. She hopes to use the two to regain her throne.
• “The Black Stone”, a story wherein a traveler in the back roads of Europe decides to visit a mysterious monolith and has a vision of an ancient race celebrating a black and eldritch ceremony in the distant past.
• “People of the Dark”, wherein a modern man goes to a cave in a plot to kill his rival in a love triangle, but a blow to the head regresses him to a past life wherein he was Conan and entered the caves to capture a woman but has to unite with a rival to fight off a subterranean race. Then the modern man un-, de-, or re-regresses to the present day, he saves his rival and love from the remnant of the ancient race.
• “Worms of the Earth”, a novella wherein Bran Mak Morn summons an ancient race to attack Romans who have crucified on of his citizens.
• “The Thing on the Roof”, wherein an adventurer who has stolen a temple gem asks for help from an antiquarian to discover the meaning of its power in an old book.
• “The Haunter of the Ring”, a story wherein a man’s newlywed bride seems to be trying to kill him, and it’s tied to a cursed ring given to her by a jilted lover.
• “The Challenge from Beyond”, a story written in the round by many authors. C.L. Moore starts off with a conceit about a man finding a strange cube in the wilderness and gazing in it; A. Merritt extends the story; H.P. Lovecraft sets his stamp on it by setting up how it’s a mind transfer probe from a distant and ancient worm-like race to seek habitable planets to plunder and populate; and then Robert E. Howard and Frank Belknap Long turn it into one of their stories by explaining how the human mind transferred to the worm body conquers the worm planet due to the violence only human consciousness brings but rules as a benevolent despot. It’s funny how Lovecraft turns the story one way and Howard and Long turn it into one of their style stories at the end.
• “The Fire of Asshurbanipal”, wherein two adventurers in the Middle East are pursued in the desert but seek refuge in an ancient city feared by the locals, and, in it, they discover a gem in an ancient idol. Before they can steal it, though, their pursuers find them, bind them, steal the gem for themselves, and deal with the deadly consequences.
• “Dig Me No Grave”, wherein a man asks another man to help with a ritual that an old, old man who recently died tasks the man to perform on his death. It turns out to be an eldritch ritual releasing the man’s soul to the evil it had been promised.

So some of the stories have a modern-day setting to them that more closely aligns with stories in the Cthulhu mythos, but others are more straight-forward Howard stories.

I thought the book was a cheapo collection of public domain stuff, but it’s actually more than that: It’s part of the MFA program at Western Colorado University where students put together and publish a book. So it’s not riddled with typos and stuff (I saw one), and I have a couple of design notes I’d add. The page headers have the author’s name on left pages, but on right pages, they have the name of the novella if it’s a novella or the book title if the heading is on a short story. I’d have made it consistent, probably with the book title and story/novella title (the book title has the author name right in it). Also, the last chapter of the novella “Skull-Face” appears in the table of contents as its own short story (and the heading of the right pages does not have the novella title but the book title). Still, I have an eye for that.

I guess the program/publishing house has published a couple of other books, but I’m not going to run out and get them–I got this one just because I have been so much on a Conan/Howard kick this year. But binge reading them (if three or four books over six months is “bingeing”–) really highlights the tropes and repeated motifs that make the material seem less fresh. So I’ll likely put them down for a bit now.