Author: Brian J. Noggle

As I accurately predicted on Sunday, I read this book first of the ones I picked up. I have so little time to read these days that monographs and twee little books are about all I can get read in a timely fashion.

This book is a 1983 reprint of the 1938 original, a sticker on the cover informs us, and it is an illustrated collection of what might have passed for nursery rhymes in the Ozarks around the turn of the twentieth century. The perface tells us about the author and the history of the rhymes in this collection which later appeared elsewhere (we’ll get to that in a minute). H. L. Mencken had nice words to say about it when it was published.

The little rhymes in it are a bit twee and facile, but I’m coming to them from a position where Mother Goose and the European nursery rhymes are wisdom received at a young age. Perhaps if I were exposed to these rhymes in my youth and Mother Goose as an adult, I’d have the completely opposite reaction. So, some were amusing, but most were just rhymes for children to recite because nobody had television or radios yet.

One thing that modern audiences would zot onto is the use of perjoratives for blacks. A couple of the rhymes involve accusing a black person of something or just denigraating a black person, but that loses a bit of context that a lot of people mentioned in these rhymes are not represented in the best light. The book also disparages Irish people and other individuals. Face it, if you’re in a nursery rhyme, you’re not doing to well. But modern scholars and readers have their own biases and focii, so that’s what they would see first. Not that I’m defending the viewpoint; only that I can read something like it and say, “That’s not right,” where modern arbiters might not let me read it at all because they don’t trust my judgment.

Some things sounded familiar, though, such as:

Chicken in th’ bread-pan
Pickin’ up th’ dough
Granny will your dog bite?
No, child, no.

Where have I heard that before?

Also, this one learned me the source of an expression that was a fabled book and then a major motion picture:

William tremble-toe is a good fisherman
Catches hens–puts them in pens
Some lay eggs–some lay none
Wire, briar, limberlock, three geese in a flock
One flew east, one flew west
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest.

The nursery rhyme listed as the source of the title in Wikipedia differs, though.

Another features a character asking for his jimmy-john. I wondered if he wanted a sandwich, but after a little research which was mainly trying to formulate a search query that would return me something other than information about the restaurant chain, I discovered this probably refers to a whiskey jug.

At any rate, a quick read. A little educational, as it taught me the things I mentioned above. But it would be doubleplus ungoodthink to many who would then not learn what else it might have to teach.

Ooops, I read it again. I first read this book in 2004, and in reviewing that particular review, I agree, fifteen years later with my earlier assessment.

The story: A young man, on the run from the mob, is found by a private detective working for the young man’s rich grandfather, who is dying and wants to see his progeny again. The grandfather sends his private nurse to retrieve the young man, and they fall in love as they drive from Texas to New England. The grandfather also invites the man’s brother, but the brother is in with the mob, and he comes with a plan to finger his brother for a hitman. Then a single violent night ends some lives and changes others.

I did flag this chapter beginning, though:

THE EXECUTIONER stood at the back of the bar of a roadhouse on Route 5 between Albany and Schendectady, nursing a bottle of ale.

What book am I reading here?

But given the turn of events at the end of the book, which sees a newly wealthy young man seeking violent revenge on the Mob, one wonders if this might be a precursor to the Don Pendleton series. Probably not, but you never know.

This is a collection of photographs from a mid- to late-twentieth-century photographer who focused (ba dum tiss) on close-ups of flowers and other flora who then moved into landscapes, male nudes, and still lifes during his career.

The introduction is one of the great artistic criticism sorts rather than the simple bio. Hal Fischer fits Don Worth into the great American tradition of nineteenth century landscape painters and Transcendentalists. So it is on that end of the spectrum of monograph intros, meaningful to serious students of photography but just blather to more casual appreciators of the art.

The photography itself is also a bit of a photography buff’s bag. It deals a lot with textures and shapes within the frame, where the content is important as photography more than telling a story or inviting the viewer to see something other than a photograph. So it’s a bit of modern art in that regard, and the introductory text writer favorably compares Worth to Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, so, yeah.

It doesn’t take you long to browse through it once you get through the introduction.

I know, with the blizzard of monography book reports, you’re wondering exactly how much football I watched this weekend. No more than nine hours. But I’m also watching some college football and playoff baseball. Which means I should make a real effort to get to the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale to pick up more this month.

This collection of drawings’ introduction describes the life and times of Adolf Dehn without getting into the Importance of the artist in the milieu. It talks mostly about how the artist approached his work, which is by sketching a bit and then later interpreting his sketch and memory in the finished sketch.

For Dehn’s work is mostly pen and ink drawings (including some caricature) but also includes some watercolors, although the images in the book are black and white, so I cannot speak to how they would look in color.

However, the line drawings do not appeal to me. I mean, it’s like 2D comic art blended with some Degas or the other bad Impressionist or post-Impressionist influences. I mean, he’s no Matt Hirschfeld, that’s for sure.

Still, worth a browse during a football game just so I can continue to explore what I like and don’t like among the art world and art monographs.

This book is an ex-library book from some unstated library that I picked up this spring at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale. I called it a comic art monograph, but it might be more akin to a self-published sketch book that I tend to avoid buying at local cons.

So, about the artist. He’s local, as I determine by the inclusion of posters advertising music shows in downtown Springfield. The book include some completed comic art that has the fully realized 3D modeling that’s unlike more cartoon-centric art like Rook City or Duel! as well as some other art, some digitally generated, that looks like it could fit into video games. The book also includes some sketches to show the preliminary work before the finished product.

An interesting browse during a football game, to be sure.

This book is a short biographical sketch and literary history of the early science fiction author who wrote The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The War of the Worlds, and others.

He made his bank on those early science fiction works and then turned his attention to serious novels, often with autobiographical undertones, and his two volume The Outline of History which I have around here somewhere.

However, he is not known for those books except for The Outline of History, and the latter mostly because it was often the free books given away by book clubs to new members. His themes moved more to the political, and in the between war years and after World War II, that didn’t play well in Yorkshire much less Peoria.

Regardless, he was prolific and an active writer until his death in 1946, but you will be forgiven if you think him a contemporary of Jules Verne, who died in 1905. Most of H.G. Wells’ best known works come from the turn of the century, too.

You know, these little short books about various authors were quite a thing back in the middle part of the last century. I’ve got a bunch of short bio-and-literary-criticism ex-library books from various series tucked away in narrow gaps and in the back crannies of the Nogglestead library. I should consider blowing through a bunch of them to pad my annual reading numbers. However, since this is the 92nd book in my log for this year, I should probably save that gambit for another year where I bog myself down in heavy classical literature more than I have this year.

I guess a new animated film of The Addams Family is coming out. Now that I’m watching football, baseball, and hockey on the television, I see more advertisements these days. And, apparently, my youngest son saw an episode of the television show in school last week, for some reason, and he asked me if I’d seen it. I had, but The Munsters played more in syndication in Milwaukee, so I’ve seen more of them.

This book is a novelization of the 1991 (!) film adaptation that starred Raul Julia, Anjelica Huston, Christopher Lloyd, and Christina Ricci. You know, I’ve seen both this film and its 1993 sequel, and although I remember the basics of the plots, I don’t remember the movies that clearly. So I can’t compare the book to its cinema execution.

But the plot is that the wacky macabre Addams family still yearns for missing Uncle Fester, who disappeared a long time ago. When the Addams family attorney falls behind on payments to a loan shark and con artist and her son, they hatch a plan to insert the son into the family as the long-lost uncle until such time as he can steal the family’s wealth from their hidden vault. Only it turns out that the son fits in too well with the family and might be the real Fester.

This, too, is a kid’s book (as was Lassie Come-Home published by Scholastic, so clearly, I am really trying to pad my annual book reading total.

Actually, what happened was I was looking for a particular book on one particular shelf, and I found a couple of quick reads while I continue my search for this particular book. And, as I mentioned, my son brought up The Addams Family recently, which made it seem a timely choice.

Also, I’m trying to pad my annual total.

I don’t know if I should count this as a “classic” or high literature in my annual self-accounting, as it is simply a story about a boy and his dog. Sort of. But it’s a classic, sort of, and it certainly spawned a number of movies and television shows so much that you can still say “What’s that girl? Timmy’s fallen in the well?” and people will get the allusion even though the television show has been off the air for, what, forty years?

At any rate, no Timmy in the well in this book. Here, a proud Yorkshire family raises a good dog, Lassie, that makes them proud, and the people in hard times are proud of their dogs. But times get harder, and the father sells the dog to the local aristrocrat. The dog escapes and meets the boy at the schoolhouse just like every day, and the family takes her in, but the local kennel master thinks the whole thing is a con akin to Jerry Reed’s “The Bird”. So the aristocrat takes to dog to his estate in the Scottish Highlands, and the dog bides its time until it can escape and travel south to meet with its family again.

The bulk of the book is in the journey and the adventures, such as they are, that Lassie has on the way. No children are actually imperiled by wells, but the dog gets into fights and meets a nice old couple that takes care of her for a time, but she is driven to return.

It’s a kids book, I guess, and a relatively quick read. And, just maybe, a classic. Borderline.

As I mentioned when I read Gahr and Seth Wolfhorndl’s Rook City comic, I hoped I would like Gahr’s fiction as well–as I bought a couple of his fiction collections at LibraryCon this year.

Well, I liked the book.

It’s a collection of science fiction short stories. Some of them are very short indeed–a couple of pages, which means they’re coming it at under 1000 words. So flash fiction. The plots are imaginative, but the execution is a little unsophisticated at times. The prose lacks any flourish, even the flourish of austerity. But, you know what? Who cares? Did I mention the plots are imaginative? And the stories are not woke parables, which I understand is a problem in some modern sci fi.

So I’ll pick up his other collection, Random Fantasies by and by. I see I actually bought a couple of other books from him, so I’ll probably jump into them before long as well. Because simple with good plots beats complex, character-driven pieces with poor plots or pacing.