Author: Brian J. Noggle

This is a full evening play with four characters: a professor of Greek tragedies who tends to portray things in an Athens vs. Jerusalem template, which might just be an educated way to say “Anti-Semitism”; the Dean of his college, an old lover who doesn’t like the administrative life as much as she hoped; a Jewess student who decides on her own to write and stage a modernised version of Antigone instead of a paper for the aforementioned professor; and the girl’s boyfriend, a chemistry major uncommitted to chemistry but with a talent for the classics.

A lot’s going on in here. The girl takes on the arms race (its from the 1980s) with her Antigone, but becomes more stridently Jewish when the professor’s anti-Semitism is suggested to her. Additionally, she doesn’t want to settle any more for a Wall Street job. The professor discovers that he’s about to be retired as students stop signing up for his classes. Is it him or is it less appreciation of the concepts of tragedy in America in the latter part of the 20th century. So many things to ponder, but nothing really brought to the forefront or to a conclusion.

The play leaves the story kinda in media res. Some alliance shift, some changes happen, but in the end, the resolutions are temporary and illusory. I can’t tell if the professor’s point about the inability to appreciate tragedy is supposed to be shown through his story being tragic–or the opposite.

That said, how come so many plays are plays about plays or plays about colleges or screenwriters? Does this make plays less accessible and more insular or does it reinforce the fraternity of people who see plays through common languages and metaphors? Does the use of the word “Jewess” bespeak of my own anti-Semitism?

There’s a lot to think about in this one.

This is a crafting book for the DIY lifestyle. It says so on the cover. In the introduction, the editor talks about how doing it yourself is part about getting off the grid, man, and freeing yourself from the institutions. Or something. One of the contributors, before showing how to put patterns in moss on rocks, laments that he could go to prison for spray painting someone’s property, but that someone blasted and chiseled a natural treasure and made Mount Rushmore and they call that a national monument.

So this is a crafting book for loft-dwelling latte suckers in Janeane Garafolo glasses. Personally, I’ll take the dowdy old lady craft books for their no-nonsense, make something but not a statement style.

That said, the book breaks it down into categories of different media, such as metal, wood, fabrics, and so on, so it runs the gamut of different craft styles. You can probably find something to do in the book. I’m thinking about painting using the glass in frames. I remember a kid did that in the gifted program in seventh grade. Surely I could do something equivalent to that.

The book wasn’t a waste of time by any means, but that idea above and, frankly, the tone of it are about all I remember of it. So buy yours by clicking below!

I savaged the preceding book in the series, Forever Odd, when I read it in 2007. Why the gap? I didn’t like the predecessor so much, and I had a hard time finding this book at book fairs. I finally found one without a dustjacket and read it.

I liked this one better than Forever Odd. The voice didn’t great on me as much, but I think Koontz better interspersed the narrator voice with action and interaction with other characters this time around. I seem to recollect Odd spent a lot of time alone in Forever Odd.

In this book, Odd is living in a monastery in the Sierra Nevada mountains, trying to rest and trying to help the spirit of a brother who committed suicide to move on. As such, he has a special skeleton key that allows him all access to the grounds of the monestary and of the abbey and school for the disabled next door. Bodachs start appearing, which means bloodshed is imminent, so Odd and the brothers and sisters have to investigate why and to protect the children from a devilish creation of bones.

I enjoyed reading this book and looked forward to sitting down and reading it at night. I’ve spent a couple weeks where I haven’t looked forward to the nightly reading, which probably explains the recent dearth of book reports hereabouts. But when I get that way, I always end up reading a book that refreshes that hunger for the printed word within me. It’s probably as much biorhythms as Dean Koontz, but there you go.

Wow, it’s been over a year since I read Viets’ Urban Affairs, which is a good thing. It means I’m not obsessed with her. I am developing a little crush on her through these collections, though.

As with the previous collection, this book collects her columns from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In the introduction, she mentions that this collection is uncensored; as far as I could tell, the only impact I saw was one instance of a synonym for excrement that appeared on someone’s shirt.

I don’t know if the columns are timeless, but I lived in the era in which they were written near the city where they were written, so I like them. Sadly, I think I’ve run out of Viets’s collected columns and will have to start on her fiction when/if I find some.