Author: Brian J. Noggle

I have no idea where I picked up this slender volume of poetry to check to see if I paid close to the cover price for it. I don’t know if you remember seeing these out and about around the turn of the century (that is, the end of the 1900s), but Dover Thrift Editions came out with a long line of classic (and out of copyright literature) printed on cheap (but not quite newsprint) paper and priced only a dollar. New. They cannot have been making a mint on it, but they were certainly doing the world a service up until the world, or at least the American public, couldn’t be arsed to spend a buck to read classic literature.

The book’s title does not overstate its case or selection criteria; it is not the best poems, and it does not include anything modern–we get to the middle of the 20th century with Auden, and we’re done–of course, the poems most likely had to be out of copyright in 1998 to make a dollar book possible. It’s got your Broadstreet (1 poem), it’s got your Longfellow (5 poems), it’s got your Poe (3 poems), it’s got a fair share of Whitman (7), one by Abraham Lincoln, 10 by Emily Dickinson, a couple by Stephen Crane, 3 by Paul Laurence Dunbar, 9 by Frost, and then we get into the 20th century hucksters including Carl Sandburg (3), William Carlos Williams (5), Wallace Stephens (4), and only two by Edna St. Vincent Millay. The book pays maybe oversized attention to the poets of the Harlem Renaissance with two by Langston Hughes and a couple by poets whose names I did not recognize.

A good smorgasbord, though; although I’ve read some Longfellow, Millay, and James Whitcomb Riley (not included in this book) recently (for MfBJN values of “recently”), I’ve been away from Frost for too long (over twenty years? Oh, my god).

I flagged a couple poems as being especially good, including:

• William Cullens Bryant’s “Thanatopsis“–or at least I flagged some lines in it, but I’m not really sure why.
• Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Sympathy” which I will read again when I get to his complete poems which I bought in 2020 and maybe in Lyrics of Lowly Life which I bought in 2023. The poem includes the line “I know why the caged bird sings, ah me” which is the source for the title of Maya Angelou’s autobiography. Shame that she eclipsed Dunbar, but she came into prominence when that was possible.
• Robert Frost’s “Acquainted with the Night“.
• Vachel Lindsay’s “The Leaden-Eyed“. Geez, is this a poem that the world grew into. I am not sure I’ve heard of this poet before; I’ll have to keep an eye out for his works.

By its nature, even with the lesser lights thrown in, still better than most of the poetry I tend to read. Which I shall now return to.

Wow, okay, I bought this book seven years ago. You know, I know that books languish on the shelves here at Nogglestead for decades, but sometimes it catches me by surprise. Perhaps I would have expected to pick it up before now. Especially since a while back, Facebook decided I liked Dorothy Parker and started showing me groups that posted quotes from her. That came and went, and likely once this post goes live, it will come again.

So: The intro, which I read because it was by Dorothy Parker, a bit she wrote for The New Yorker in 1927 called “The Short Story through a Couple of Ages” where she slags a bit on genre fiction and the kind of wholesome stories that one would have found in Grit or Good Housekeeping even into the waning days of the 20th century and a whole hecka lotta magazines and monthlys in 1927. Instead, she swore she would do something different. And…. Well, okay, she wrote a pile of “literary” stories featuring the doxies and their admirers in New York in the flapper era. And although she was lightly mocking them, they would come some seventy years later to be celebrated in Sex and the City and various other things which probably did not solely ruin women’s expectations in relationships, like Dorothy Parker probably did not herself ruin people’s reading of short stories for pleasure, but they’re part of the deluge that did.

So: Yeah, 21 stories. Slice of city life monologues, most about going out and partying and the results thereof, although a couple married couples living the stifling married life, which contrasts with…. the stifling doxy/party life, I guess. A couple, three, or more of the stories are monologues, whether an interior monologue or someone talking to another person for the whole story, sometimes a dozen pages, which does not ratchet up tension even as it reveals a story. But they’re certainly not like the genre or short stories for the plebes. They’re targeted to a certain class, dear (and not one who would say char instead), even as they satirize probably the same class.

It took me a while to read it at 386 pages–I thought I’d breeze through it because it was witty short stories, but I found myself reading a story or two a night and then reading video-game-based science fiction or watching movies for the remainder of the evening.

I did flag a couple of things:

• I did not flag the use of no truck with slang construction as I noted. This instance comes from, what, 1925? 1930? It appears periodically throughout the whole 20th century apparently, although I associated it with the mod squad era.
• I actually related to the story “The Little Hours” which is an interior monologue of an educated woman perhaps in the party scene anyway who awakens in the middle of the night, and it’s a stream of consciousness bit about how she thinks about French novels and whatnot as she tries to go back to sleep. Lately, I’ve been awakening and thinking about projects I’m on, projects I don’t have, where I’m getting firewood this winter, and other practical concerns. I thought I might reproduce a little of it here for you, gentle reader, but I’m not sure anyone gets anything out of the blockquotes. If you’re really interested, it looks like a PDF collection that includes the story is available at the Internet Archive. It looks to contain all the stories in this volume, actually.
• “The Little Hours” also contains, in a montage of poetical quotes near the end, I think I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree. I just bought and read Vigils by Aline Kilmer, Joyce Kilmer’s widow, and when I bought the book, I told the shopkeeper whom Joyce Kilmer was and that that poem was quoted in two movies. Two old movies now I guess. If only I had read this volume before, I could have added a ninety-year-old short story to the list along with a thirty-year-old movie and a forty-year-old movie. To show the kids how “hep” I am.
• A short story has a character say that New York show business is run by Jew bastards. In 1930, this was probably the equivalent of using the baddest word to highlight that the speaker is a, erm, flawed person (if not outright bad). In the 21st century, this might very well mark the opposite in New York Society–whatever is left of it.

So with Dorothy Parker, you’re better off with the bon mots, I guess. Or maybe the poems. Which include one called “The Small Hours”, I learned whilst searching for “The Little Hours” on the Internet. I am sure I have run across her poems from time to time. Maybe I even have a volume of them around here. Or maybe I will someday. Maybe I’ll pick up a volume of her nonfiction. But Collected Stories Volume 2 (if it exists)? Well, probably that, too, because I am indiscriminate in my purchases, and seven years later I might read it.

Wow. I bought this little paperback eleven years ago. I don’t even remember the church where the garage sale was held–it’s probably turned over a couple times since then as it’s a large space on the end of a building with a Subway and fusion Chinese restaurant in it. I’m not sure if it’s a business or church these days–I will have to give it a passing glance when I’m passing by next time.

At any rate, this is a prequel to the XBox game Brute Force which is a squad shooter. Those days were before the Internet-connected games really took off, so it’s one player switching between the characters, and you don’t get to choose the characters. You get a tank, a sniper, a thief, and the other guy. I presume. I haven’t played it, and it does not look to have spawned a franchise like Halo did.

So the book starts off with two different special ops teams handling two different assignments on two different planets; Hawk and Flint are taking down some rebels on a planet, and Tank is inserted to take down some space pirates. Each is on a team of four, but I name the people who apparently make it into the game (again, this is a prequel about how they meet). Each finds evidence that high-ranking officials might be working with the space pirates and/or a religious cult, including high-ranking officials in the special operations heirarchy. So you get a lot of intrigue amongst those corrupt officials and then some set battles with a video game flavor. Game mechanics are nodded to, as the operatives can have a share of the “treasury” of the mission target and buy better armor. So part of the plotting is unraveled, the operatives go on a mission that is set up to eliminate them but emerge triumphant, and then they’re sent on another mission and the book ends unsatisfyingly as it sets the story up for the game. Maybe they were hoping to set up a franchise, but did not for some reason. Apparently, the game was very big in the day, but it never got a follow up.

I know, I know; I dinged Ben Wolf’s book The Ghost Mine for being too informed by video games (and I just bought the others in the series because I didn’t want to hurt the kid’s feelings). So this is a book based on a video game, but its writing is informed by other books–that is, the writing has a little more depth to it maybe than the Wolf books (although I have started on the second in the series immediately upon finishing this book, so I will better be able to speak to that in a week or so). Kind of like old movies were informed by stage plays and books, but modern movies are based on older movies and television shows, so we’re getting photocopies of photocopies now. Maybe I’m painting with too broad of a brush (sorry, Ben, if so).

But I’ve found that older books based on video games are just better than modern self-published books. Perhaps mine included, although I do laugh at John Donnelly’s Gold when I re-read it. Perhaps I should actually write something else to see how I would measure up. But I’m afraid I would find my writing informed by twee blog book reports and one line “ha, ha!”s at modern events.

I bought this book over the weekend in Davenport, and I asked “Which one will I read first? You know.” Of course it was the shorter book of poetry. I did not take a stack of books with me–I remember from my trip last year and similar trips that I don’t tend to read a bunch in hotel rooms, so I only brought two paperbacks that I did not touch and a couple of magazine which I did. And, of course, I started reading this collection of poetry. I’ll often jump on a new acquisition instead of what I brought (see also The Marriage of Bette and Boo which I bought in Leavenworth in 2017 and started in the hotel that night).

At any rate, this is a book report and not a Brian’s reading habits report (who am I kidding? Book reports on this blog are often just that), so let’s talk about this. Aline Kilmer, as the cover says, was Joyce Kilmer’s widow, and topically, many of the poems in the book actually deal with that lost (with a title like Vigils? Who would have guessed?). The verses are pretty light, with decent rhythm and some end rhymes. Nice, I guess. Nothing earth-shattering, but okay. To be honest, that’s what I remember of Joyce Kilmer, too. I thought I’d read a volume of his work, but I was probably thinking of the time when we covered the poem “The Trees” during our Coronavacation Homeschool Supplementing in 2020.

So, well, nice. The cover is wrapped in mylar, and I guess this book is over a hundred years old now. I see that one sold on Ebay without the dust jacket for $15 this month, so someone is interested in them. I won’t be ordering her other work online, although I might pick them up if I find them in the wild. A quick read to pump up the annual total (currently: 72).

Ah, gentle reader, this is the best book with two peepees on the front cover that I have ever read. Hopefully, gentle reader, this is the only book with two peepees on it that I own, but given that I own a lot of classical Greek and Roman literature, one cannot be sure.

This book, which I bought earlier this year, contains poems praising the victors at assorted Greek game festivals circa 2600 BC, including the Olympic games but others of across (what would become) Greece. Many of them include some lineage of the victors, some tracing their past to gods, and in doing so, Pindar includes some bits of myths and stories as he name checks gods, heroes, and ancient leaders in the fashion of a rap track calling out or calling out to other rappers. The book itself has end notes in the, well, end, but without any markers for end notes in the poems themselves. It made for easier reading in the moment as one was not constantly dropping eyes to the footnotes or flipping to the back, which made things smooth for me as I just let the things roll over me, but they were there if I needed to look things up to make connections to other works or for a paper.

I’m not sure what liberties the translator might have taken with the text–probably not too much, as we’re not steeped in 2007-era slang (although someone does, indeed, have some truck or not with something), but the poems in addition to praise for athletes and gods, includes some insights into the human condition which I noted and will henceforth have quoted.

From “Olympian 2”:

But when some deed has been done, right or wrong,
not even Time the father of all things can undo its outcome;
yet with the help of good fortune men may forget it.
Grief dies when confronted with noble joys,
and its enduring bitterness is beaten down
when fortune sent from a god
lifts a man to prosperity’s heights.

From “Olympian 5”:

If a man waters healthy prosperity
and is content with a sufficiency of possessions,
and adds to his good repute,
he should not strive to become a god.

From “Olympian 6”:

Success without labour is not honoured among men,
either on land or in hollow ships;
but if noble deeds are accomplished through toil,
many people remember them.

From “Pythian 1”:

If you should speak in keeping with the occasion,
plaiting the threads of many matters into a brief whole,
men will find less fault with you;
for wearisome excess blunts the edge of keen expectancy,
and in their secret hearts men are especially oppressed
when they hear praise of other citizens.
Nevertheless, since it is better to be envied than pitied,
do not deviate from your noble course.
Steer your people with the rudder of justice,
and forge your tongue on the anvil of truth.

From “Pythian 3”:

If a man holds to the path of truth in his mind
he must be content with whatever the blessed gods send him.
Gusts of soaring winds blow now this way, now that;
lasting prosperity does not visit men for long,
even when it has attended them with all its weight.
I shall be small when times are small, and great when they are great.
Whatever fortune comes my way I shall respect it with my mind
and nurture it according to my powers.

From “Nemean 3”:

It is by inborn distinction that a man gains authority,
while he who has only been taught is a man of shadows;
he veers further and thither, and never enters the arena with a confident step,
trying out thousands of exploits in his futile mind.

From “Nemean 4”:

And yet, though the deep salt sea grips you by the waist,
hold out against its scheming; we shall enter the contest
in full daylight, far stronger than our adversaries,
while another man, with envy in his eyes,
pours out his empty opinions in darkness,
and they fall to the ground.

Honestly, it’s almost proto-stoic. I’d have to dig into my notes from the part of the first of the volumes of Copleston’s The History of Philosophy (being I only got a couple of chapters into the first paperback in the series, I only have notes on the early Greeks) to see who might have influenced Pindar.

Of course, were I that sort of fellow, I probably would have read the end notes. Or more of The History of Philosophy for that matter. Or even The Story of Philosophy by the Durants which I have around here somewhere.

Also, I want to share that I know what pankration means; it’s ancient Greek MMA. You can be sure that I am working this into conversations as often as possible. This behavior might explain why so few have conversations with me.

I read Yogi Berra’s It Ain’t Over last month, and when I came across this book, I picked it up.

Ted Williams is seven years older than Berra and played with the mostly unsuccessful Boston Red Sox for his career. This book delves into his life story, especially his early years, a little deeper than Berra’s book. His family life was a bit troubled when he was young, but Williams found an outlet in baseball and played pick-up games, and then some organized games at the neighborhood park, and then into high school and a minor league team before breaking into the majors very young–one of his nicknames was “The Kid.” He always had a good eye, and he worked at hitting, and he became very good at it (in case you needed me to say it, gentle reader). He talks about his troubles with the Boston press, and even in this, his own book, he comes across as a character who was a little prickly at best.

Like the Berra book, it’s almost an oral history more than an organized autobiography. It came out at a different time in his career as well: Williams played until 1960 and was mostly away from baseball for a decade until he got an opportunity to manage the Washington Senators. The book was written/told to at that moment: he’s about to embark on his role as manager. Berra’s book came out after he had over a decade of work as a coach and a manager and after he was a national celebrity for being Yogi Berra. So perhaps it’s not fair to compare them, but one cannot help it.

So, a good read with a ballplayer’s insight into the first half of the 20th century. Williams holds a bunch of records yet, and he lost several years of playing time as he was called up for both World War II and the Korean War. I probably have a bunch of other such books seeded amongst my stacks. I won’t dodge them now that baseball season is over.