Author: Brian J. Noggle

I thought this book was a novella originally based on its length, but it’s not. It is a short story printed in a hardback edition to capture the college required reading market or, nowadays, the copyright-has-expired-let’s-pour-it-in-a-hardback-and-see-who-buys-it print-on-demand market. But I got my copy for a buck, so I win.

The basic plot of the story is that a fun-loving cavalier is out on the town one night, a strange town where he’s violating a curfew, and he slips into an unlocked door to evade the night watch. But the unlocked door is really a one-way door designed to trap the paramour of the young maiden who lives in the house. The uncle of said maiden believes this fellow is the one who’s been passing her notes at church and opened the door (rimshot!) to scandal, so if the young man does not agree to marry the woman by dawn, he will be killed.

So, basically, it’s Sartre’s “The Wall” except with a comely woman from a good family as the fate worse than death.

It starts out with a very Lovecraftian feel as the town is described and you get the sense of the architecture and history looming over this stranger. But once he’s in the house, it becomes a meditation on honor and choices and what makes people compatible for life.

So it’s a nice little story, a quick read and a book to mark down on my annual list. Woo!

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is a 21st century New York play. It’s not Neil Simon, that’s for sure.

It deals with three characters who share a hallway on the third floor of a New York apartment building that might or might not be owned by their mutual acquaintance Larry. Theo is a composer stuck on his maximum opus and in love, sort of, with Babette, who is working on her maximum opus esoteric book and borrowing money. Frank is a former flame of Larry and is working on auctioneering. Throughout, you hear (and in the stage version partially see) from down the air shaft a couple breaking up. And there’s Mrs. Jorgenson, who sings, is a friend to them somewhat, and who dies.

So what’s the point of the play? The play’s the thing. What gets resolved at the end? Mrs Jorgenson is still dead. The main characters are all pathetic. SO IS LIFE! I guess.

I dunno. It ain’t my bag, baby. And, unless I miss my guess, those whose bags it is lie on the island of Manhattan.

Also, the play uses a special tick of the characters speaking without punctuation, with capitalization For Emphasis, and sometimes over each other in a way to capture How People Talk, except they don’t, not That Way, and to the extent they do it’s Hard to read.

Overall, not something I’d recommend. You all know the kinds of plays I recommend (The Courtship of Barbara Holt ::cough, cough::).

Books mentioned in this review:

This book report will dispell any illusions you might have had, gentle reader, that I have to actually read a book to count it as a book I’ve read over the course of a year (unless you remember Hand Shadows to be Thrown Against the Wall). This volume, unlike the hand shadows book, does have text. But it is in German. So I could pick through some of it, but not enough to get what the preface/introduction conveys. Probably something about the history of Innsbruck, Austria, which is what the book is: A collection of photographs, probably sold to tourists, of Innsbruck and its environments in the early 1960s.

So the images definitely have that going for it: Not only is it another place, but it is another time in that place. The photos include old cars and fashions, but in a foreign land. It’s like watching one of those post-World War II Americans Abroad films (such as Three Coins in the Fountain). Except with no Americans.

But the book does anticipate American or Britsh readers: Although the preface is in German, the captions for the photos are in German, French, Italian, and English. So I was able to learn what I was looking at, but not much of it was that helpful as I have not been to Innsbruck.

But, still, many old fascinating buildings in the 1960s. Mountain back drops. Actual cable cars.. How cool is that?

Someday, I might actually want to travel to Europe. I’ll have to build up some cardio-vascular super strength, though. Not because I’m afraid of the Alpine heights, but because some of these vistas are breathtaking, and too much of it, and I’ll be flopping on the ground like a fish out of water.

Oh, and check out the inscription. In German. Sentiments from Europe in 1967:

You’re welcome to translate that yourself; I can’t really make out the cursive German letters well enough to try to run it through the Google translator, but you’re welcome to try if you’ve got lots of time on your hands. Perhaps it’s a coded message from hidden Nazi remnants identifying where the war loot is hidden in the Alps. If so, be kind and give me a finder’s fee, okay?

This book started out pretty good. Well, I mean, it is one of Heinlein’s adult books, so it’s very talky, with action broken up by a lot of banter and philosophizing. It starts out with a bang: A former military officer, hiding out from something in his past as a writer on a space station, has someone invoke that Dreaded Secret to get his attention at a night club. Before the man can explain what he wants beyond that the main character must kill a fellow space station resident before noon tomorrow or they’ll all perish, the man demanding the hit is killed and the hit is covered up very neatly by the restaurant staff. Then, the owners of the space station are in some hurry to push the man out or off the station, so he decamps to the moon and a series of cities on the moon just one step ahead of disaster, attempts on his life, or bandits.

Then, about 250 pages into the book, he finds his new bride (the one with him at the nightclub and with whom he banters a bunch) recruits him into Time Corps, and I thought, Here’s where the real book begins.

But it did not.

I guess I confused Heinlein with a thriller writer who amps it up and then ties it all together neatly.

Because after a hair’s-breadth escape on the moon from dark forces, he finds himself recuperating on Lazarus Long’s polyamory paradise from Time Enough For Love, and many of those characters make appearances, and then the Time Corps has to do something for some reason, and there’s a tribunal with gunslinging, and he undertakes the mission. The secret of his past? Glossed over. The stuff from the beginning of the book? The work of other forces. Are those other forces dealt with? The end.

Man, I have to stick with the old Heinlein stuff like Rocket Ship Galileo or even The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag. Or, I suppose, Job (when I get to it, John–which reading this has probably forestalled a bit).

I dunno. Maybe I’m just in a place these days where science fiction ultimately disappoints me or something.

Books mentioned in this review:

I read these books over the course of a couple of football games this month. You know, I’m not by default a particular fan of Blondie, but I’ve glanced over it when reading comics in the newspaper over the years. In the past, when I was young, they really didn’t speak to me because I was young. Now, I am older, but the cartoons themselves are old, too, so they don’t relate to my current situation. Of course, my current situation–independent computer contractor working from home–does not lend itself to workplace humor or getting to the workplace humor. I dunno.

But I can appreciate them as an artifact of a simpler time. The Blondie comic started out in the flapper era, so its fifty year run (to the time of these books’ publication) has seen some changes, but a bit of stability through the middle to late part of the last century. How stable life seemed then, in retrospect, and through the representation of cartoons. Father worked, mother stayed at home (later, took some work outside the home) but the dynamic of the family and the workplace seemed so stable. In cartoons and in cartoonists’ imaginations I guess.

At any rate, that’s what I took from them: a bit of nostalgia for a time I don’t remember and that probably did not exist. Kudos on the cartoonists, though, for keeping the strip going for 80 years.

Bits of trivia: according to the Wikipedia entry, the original author claimed the cartoon was set in the suburbs of Joplin, Missouri, which is just down the road from here. And in addition to Red Ryder, Blondie spurred a series of other media, including a string of movies, television series, and books. Not to mention a series of relatively recent Dagwood Sandwich Shoppes, which has a location here in Springfield.

Do you think we’ll ever see cartoons younger than Garfield get wide media play like this? I doubt it.

Ask me in seventy years and I’ll have a better answer than my half-informed prognostications.

When we went to San Francisco in May, there were two places I wanted to go: Yoshi’s jazz club and Hearst Castle. Of course, further investigation revealed that Hearst Castle is in San Simeon, which is half way between San Francisco and Los Angeles. So I read this book this autumn instead.

For those of you who don’t know what Hearst Castle is (how can you live with yourselves?), it is a palace built by newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst in the 1920s and 1930s. It is huge, it has many buildings (what modern newspapers call a compound if they don’t like the owner), and it has lavish architectural details, antiquities, and pretty much everything I dreamed about when I thought I’d earn fabulous amounts of wealth.

The book, written in partnership with the people who manage the current national park on the site, has a little bit of text about the life of Hearst but really focuses on the details of the construction of the buildings and his vision for it and how that changed over the years. Its text is very meticulous on this subject, and it straddles the boundary between a picture book and a historical treatise. Personally, I would have preferred more photos and a little less detail in the text, but your mileage may vary.

Unfortunately, it did not quench my desire to see this place in person.

You know, when faced with opulence of this nature, some people want to firebomb it and take it away from those who have it. Perhaps I was born in a different century, but I find this inspirational. Hearst came from a wealthier background, surely, but he built a publishing empire and earned the capital to build this place that he had half in mind to make a museum–which it is now, of course. Good on ‘im. Let the rich have theirs, and let us all have a system that allows us to get rich if we can.

Books mentioned in this review:

The name of the artist from this book probably isn’t on the tip of your tongue. It’s probably further from the tip of the your tongue than even Frederic Remington if you think of artists who painted the old West.

But you probably know something of Fred Harman’s work indirectly.

Fred Harman, before he took up painting seriously, was an illustrator and cartoonist who created the comic strip Bronc Peeler. Which did not get syndicated so well, but Harman moved back east and renamed it Red Ryder, and boy, howdy, it took off. The comic was carried in a pile of newspapers, and its popularity led to comic books, novels, dozens of movies, and a television show. It made its creator rich enough to retire to Arizona to paint.

Of course, in the next century, we only know the name because of the film A Christmas Story where Ralphie wants a Red Ryder licensed product.

At any rate, about the art: It’s vistas and broncos. Probably less adeptly administered than the images by Remington, but they’re okay. It ain’t my bag, baby, as far as art goes. One thing about this volume, though, is that Harman himself wrote the text about the images, so you get the voice of the artist instead of an academic, which makes the text a little less dry.

Worth a browse during a football game if you like picture books between plays.

Books mentioned in this review: