Author: Brian J. Noggle

If you like it when James Lileks takes screenshots of locations in old movies and looks up what they look like now, this book is for you. Especially if you browse picture books during sports on television, as I do.

It puts historical images from San Antonio’s past and puts the same location and/or building on the right page with a bit of history about them. Some of the sites you’ll recognize, and by some, I mean “The Alamo.” Some focus on Mexican sites (that is, locations from when San Antonio and Texas were part of Mexico), some on American sites from more recent times. They’ve got a picture of a building being moved back when the city widened one of its thoroughfares. The building, unlike its neighboring buildings, are intact.

So very cool. The images of San Antonio’s River Walk make me want to see it in person; unlike, say, Milwaukee’s River Walk, where they’ve thrown some concrete walkways beside the water and back doors on the restaurants, San Antonio’s River Walk looks to incorporate mature trees and other vegetation overhanging the water along with multi-level walkways and stairs. It looks cool.

So the book did what it is supposed to do: It made me want to visit San Antonio.

One thing about it, though: as a civic boosterism book, it features a number of then-and-nows of historic buildings turned into underpopulated (I assume) arts venues through the magic of tax credits and the like. Personally, I think this is a bad use of space, as it drains the public coffers for the good of a few people who like to go to the theatre once in a while and to be seen in the society pages of the newspaper at a fundraiser for the arts organization. But the book is not political, and it does show a number of commercial structures as well, so I’m only reading into it my own pecadilloes.

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According to my research, I haven’t read a Family Circus book in four years. According to my initial calculations, I thought 2009 was three years ago; however, damn, that is, in fact, four years. Where are they going? Slowly from the ever-expanding to-read shelves to the read shelves. And more, sometimes, but we’ll get to that.

This book was initially copyright in 1971, but this is a printing from 1984. In a third edition of sorts. Ponder that for a while: these books were popular enough to go through several editions. Do you see that in modern cartoons not named Dilbert? I dunno, I don’t even read the funny pages of the local paper.

This is early in the Family Circus life: you can tell because the father starts out without glasses, and there’s a gag when he gets his glasses. In all of my living memory–which is appropriate, since this book came out before I was alive–he’s had glasses. I didn’t notice until the glasses panel that the father was without, which is a comment to how closely I study the panels before reading the punchline, I suppose.

At any rate, amusing at best, but an exploration of domestic life with a family from the last bit of the middle of the last century. A worthwhile browse for me because it reminds me of my youth, when this stuff was fresh, and it filled time between plays in a series of sporting events, but I’m sure these things won’t get multiple reprintings in the future.

Although I see some of the syndicates are putting out presumably print-on-demand editions such as this and this to have one more crack at the fan base. Good on ’em.

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This book is almost 100 years old; I have the original edition, not the one available on Amazon these days. Which is some testament to its content or its continued resonance in college courses somewhere.

The lecture upon which this book was based was presented at King’s College in defense of the war effort and against those who would accept a premature peace with Germany in World War I. Allen counters arguments put forward from pacifists, but agrees that most people want the absence of war. However, he recognizes that a cessation of conflict without complete defeat will lead to war in the future.

At 37 pages, it’s a quick enough thought-provoking bit of reading. If you’re steeped in Downton Abbey and are rediscovering the period, it’s an insight into the real thoughts of the era. If you’re somewhat lacking in World War I history, as I am, it’s a reminder of whole epochs with lessons still applicable and to the universal truths of human nature they can reveal and that modern thought cannot conceal for long.

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I had seen plenty of copies of this book locally (or at least I saw this particular copy of this book often enough at Redeemed Books), so I assumed that the Colter’s Hell and Jackson’s Hole were local landmarks. Of course, gentle reader, you probably already know what I did not when I picked up this book: These are parts of Yellowstone National Park, and this book was a souvenir to visitors to that location. I guess it was really popular a generation ago when people went places on vacations. Do people still do this? I dunno.

At any rate, the book is a history of the region in its fur trapping days in the early part of the 19th century. Unfortunately, the material is presented as a kind of brain dump of source material. Although the author collects a lot of information from trappers’ diaries and other primary sources, the author presents it in a non-narrative fashion, skipping ahead and backwards in time as he follows a trapper or whatnot for a couple of paragraphs, and then suddenly we’re a year or so back in the past. And the copious material is dumped in without a particular readability. So it’s an academic-minded book offered to civilians, which might explain why so many are available used. But not my copy, of course.

It’s the second tourist pick-up book I’ve read recently (Hearst Castle the other), and it did make me want to visit Yellowstone (but not during a government shutdown, whose antics have made me less eager to visit the location).

And the strangest takeaway from this book: just the amount of time travel took in those days. You get people spending months bringing supplies up from St. Louis and annual meetings which are the only semblance of Western civilization the trappers encounter. How lonely it must have been out there, but how beautiful and, in the case of this region in particular with its hot springs, geysers, and whatnot, how fascinating.

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I got this book last weekend at the Friends of the Christian County Library book fair, and last night I discovered that listening to the ball game on the radio lends itself to reading text even less than watching a baseball (or football) game on television does because you have to listen and process the words instead of having the visual shortcut of the image to keep up with what’s going on. So I learned a bit about my cognitive processes and picked this collection of photographs up to flip through while listening to the game.

It’s a collection of images of, guess what? The ground–along with some vegetation and landscape features–in Texas. That’s a twist ending, ainna?

In the middle of the baseball game, while flipping through a book of photographs, I had an epiphany that I’d probably read somewhere else before: At some point, art stopped being about depicting something and all about being Art. Hear me out:

These images were taken and selected because of the different interpositions of the textures of, say, stones and tree bark or a mushroom amid dirt and grass. Okay, that’s a nice study, but what is it supposed to mean to the viewer? Nothing more than that: What might be good practice or technique studies becomes the art itself. Unlike, say, Bittersweet Ozarks at a Glance with its pictures of people and places, this book doesn’t really give anything for a layman to grip onto except the technique. It’s art for other photographers. Kind of like modern literature is jazz improvisation without a theme or motif or modern painting and sculpture is just technique for itself. The medium is the message, kinda.

Or maybe I just don’t like landscapes particularly. Take your pick.

At any rate, this particular volume was originally $20 at Hooked on Books because it was autographed by the author, but I got it for a buck from its sale room some time after that initial decision was made. So it feels like a particular deal.

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These books come from different sources: the first, Heathcliff: Round 3, collects cartoons from the newspaper panel. In previous reviews of Heathcliff collections, I’ve mentioned that this meant that a book hit a lot of common tropes that are better separated over the weeks of a cartoon’s run in the papers.

Heathcliff: Treasure Chest, on the other hand, collects Heathcliff stories from the Marvel comic books, so each runs a couple of pages as you would expect in a comic book. There are little adventures where Heathcliff is on television or wins the lottery, and they do expand upon the humor in the cartoons, but even so, two of the cartoons collected in the book repeat a plot (Iggy and Heathcliff get locked somewhere with burglars).

Both are amusing in their way, and worth flipping through if you can pick them up for a quarter. Also, children love them.

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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!

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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::).

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