Author: Brian J. Noggle

When we last left the Ingalls family (Little House on the Prairie in September), the Ingalls family had to leave their home in Kansas. Instead of returning to Wisconsin, they headed to Minnesota. The book opens with Charles, the father, trading his horses and wagon for a sod house beside a creek with a Norwegian farmer looking to move west.

The book covers a couple of years, unlike the first ones in the series. Hopeful of a good crop of wheat, the Ingalls family builds a house on credit only to run into trouble when plagues of grasshoppers destroy the crop right before harvest. Charles has to walk a hundred miles to the east to find work through the harvest season to support the family. And although the first winter is very mild, the second is definitely more snowy than they’re used to–even in Wisconsin.

The book hints at some perhaps poor decision making by the father who had previously been omnicompetent. He buys a bunch on credit, and then cannot pay it off with the wheat crop. When he’s harvesting back east, he sends four dollars back to his family–and buys himself a new pair of boots for three dollars. One wonders how these stories appear in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s adult book Pioneer Girl.

Of course, I might just be reading more into this children’s book than I should. But I’m looking for a double-effect narrator that the author does not intend.

So I’ve got the next book, On the Shores of Silver Lake, so I will probably read it before the summer. I’ll also keep my eyes open for the others in the series and for Pioneer Girl, her more adult memoir, at the coming spring library book sales. Given how close we are to her home down in Marshfield, I should find them pretty easily. I hope. Because I really am enjoying the series and, apparently, my second childhood.

It took me two tries to make it through this book, a single full evening play that says it’s in three acts on the cover but is actually five acts. That’s not why it took me two attempts, though.

It’s a thematic play set in a dive bar in San Francisco on the eve of World War II (written in 1939, this edition came out in 1941). The cast is quite a few people: A guy who has a lot of money with no visible means of support; a simple man who does errands for him; a man who keeps trying to call a woman he loves on the payphone; a guy playing the marble game (a forerunner of pinball); an Arab who basically spouts two ‘profound’ lines over and over; a black guy who can play the piano; a guy who wants to be a comedian but is not funny; a woman of the night; a vice detective; the bartender; and a couple of others who have a couple of lines and disappear.

So you can tell it’s a very busy play with all of these people interacting with themselves and a full stage.

The text of the play is very patter-like interaction between these characters along with a whole lot of stage direction that identifies more than stage directions. They include treatises on the characters’ back stories and whatnot that really don’t belong in a play. The play itself follows a long introduction by the playwright which is a pre-war essay on the importance of art in a time of militarism or something. To be honest, I might have read it the first time I tried to read the play, but I bailed on it this time after I couldn’t understand what the playwright was trying to get at.

It reminded me a little of Picasso at Lapin Agile, which I saw staged by the Clayton Community Theatre almost twenty years ago, but with less of a point.

I have a new thesis: Twentieth (and the beginning of twenty-first) century art and literature is a triumph of theme over plot or characters. The rise of the university put the academics at the forefront of “art,” and, as they give outsize weight to theme over the other elements of art. Plots and characters are hard. Themes are easy and allow one a very easy, and unfortunately obvious way, to expound on a moral or political message without having to really engage the viewer/reader. This play would serve as evidence.

Apparently, it’s the middle of a trilogy, but I’m in no hurry to read the other four (let me explain the joke: It says it’s a play in three acts, but it’s actually five, so…. get it?)

I bought this book by a local author at ABC Books, but not while the author was in evidence. ABC Books has quite a good selection of books by local authors (present company excepted), and, as you know, I try to support both ABC Books and local authors whenever possible. And sometimes I read the books.

Like Stories of Suspense, I picked this book from my to-read floor after the recent bookshelf collapse. I figured the more books I read from the floor, the fewer I would eventually have to pick up.

This book is set in Springfield after World War II. After a woman’s body is found in the river, two men hire Max Black to find their sister, and he suspects it might have been her corpse found murdered. But Black discovers his employers are not the brothers of the woman they’re seeking, and the plot gets very tangled with the New York mob sending hitters to keep their operations in Springfield secret, and the operations include drugs and prostitution. It all becomes very tangled.

The book could have used a copy edit, and some elements of it seem a bit off–I’m not sure Springfield police in the 1940s would have responded to a body in the river since I don’t think a major river ran through Springfield until it later expanded. But perhaps I’m mistaken in it.

The prose is a bit clunky, but it fits in the pulp mold that the author is imitating (he’s a fan of Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins). The plot, too, convolutes in a way the old pulp ones did, albeit perhaps a little more than necessary.

But I enjoyed it enough to perhaps pick up something else by the author sometime when I’m up at ABC Books.

I chose this book because it was on my floor. It’s a Scholastic book from 1963, when my mother would have been starting high school. Not that the books was hers, of course–I picked it up somewhere later. But it’s interesting to think that this book was targeted to kids, well, kids my mother’s age, in the middle 1960s.

The book contains:

• “The Birds” by Daphne du Maurier. The concept is the same as the Hitchcock film that came out in the same year–the birds are murderous–but the story, set in Britain instead of California, is completely different.
• “Of Missing Persons” by Jack Finney, wherein a man is given an opportunity to travel to a far different place.
• “Midnight Blue” by John Collier. A woman dreams that her husband has murdered his partner, and she recounts her dream in uncanny detail.
• “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keys, which was made into the 1968 film Charly which I tried to watch recently.
• “Taste” by Roald Dahl, wherein a host at an elaborate dinner party wagers a gourmand that he cannot guess the vintage of the claret, with the stakes being his daughter.
• “Two Bottles of Relish” by Lord Dunsay, wherein a man suspected of killing his wife is watched but they cannot figure out how he would have disposed of the body.
• “Charles” by Shirley Jackson, wherein a child’s tales about the naughtiest boy in the kindergarton makes his parents want to meet Charles’ parents at the school open house.
• “The Contents of the Dead Man’s Pockets” by Jack Finney, wherein a man risks his life to retrieve a business paper that has blown onto the apartment building’s ledge and regrets his decision.
• “The Perfectionist” by Margaret St. Clair, wherein a man’s aunt helps him out financially, but her methods for preserving art subjects make him uneasy.

Overall, I liked the book. The stories were short and clever and made me want to write short stories like this. Kind of like the inspiration I felt reading The Twilight Zone Encyclopedia.

Unfortunately, it hasn’t yet inspired me yet to finish a short story like this. I am too busy reading these books to actually write anything.

This book calls itself “A Novella In Verse”, but although it’s kind of pitched as a series of poems, they are not as related as one would think. The publication history indicates that many of the 45 poems within appeared in numerous poetry journals independently, and one appeared in an anthology of poems about September 11, 2001. So they’re more related thematically than perhaps intentionally built to convey a single story.

That said, I enjoyed the book for the most part. As you might know, gentle reader, I’ve been reading the complete works of John Keats lately (and have just completed Endymion after a couple weeks), so this book came as a breath of fresh air with its more modern language and imagery.

The connective tissue of the poems, I guess, is growing older and looking back on a relationship that recently ended. It’s the sort of things poets are best at, or perhaps the ones I respond to (my best poetry days were in that swirl of uncertainty).

I rather enjoyed the first half of it for its evocative freshness (which I appreciated after reading the Keats and some of the other chapbooks I consume regularly), but towards the end of it, I got a little bored. An overarching conceit of having a movie made of one’s life didn’t work for me–the use of another art form as a metaphor and the narrative elements of it detracted from the poetry’s immediacy.

But I would read more by this poet and wonder if I would enjoy his earlier work more.