Category: Book Report

I mentioned I was reading this book, and now I have completed it.

As I said last week:

I hate to get ahead of my book report here, but it tells stories of famous people from the 1920s to the 1950s and where they are now (in the case of this, the second book, it’s 1968). I mean, these are mostly B and C celebrities from the era, movie and theater stars and athletes who had a brief run at the top. By 2019, one would ask “Who were these people in the first place?”

I find it very interesting because it’s showing that there’s nothing new under the sun. Many of these people have story arcs that match modern celebrities, with multiple divorces and different attempts to come back into the spotlight. But we in the twenty-frst century think we invented all of this stuff, and so many of these people have done it before.

I could stand pretty much on that as my book report, honestly. But the book was more compelling than that: it told me of a world, particularly an entertainment world, that one only glimpses sometimes in Lileks’ work. I recognized very few of the actors and actresses listed, and I recognized almost none of the movies or television programs they starred in. And I fancy myself something of a fan of old black-and-white films. So I’ve resolved to watch at the very least the ones I have in my catalog.

I learned a little more about stars from television programs I barely remember from my childhood (The Bowery Boys’ Leo Gorcey, Our Gang‘s Darla Hood) and the circumstances under which the shows were filmed. (Hey, did you realize that the new The Little Rascals film is twenty-five years old this year? Where are they now?)

I also want to postulate that the old studio system made the rags-to-riches-to-modest living storyline that appears over and over in this book possible, but that would be a facile assertion easily disproven by the A Different World star works at Trader Joe’s thing. So I guess it’s more human nature than anything else; the real story is that stars of our yesterday had more money to blow in their heydey before they came back down to earth (although maybe not Geoffrey Owens).

I also want to postulate that cable television (and now streaming outlets), the Internet, and reality television shows have made it so that actors and celebrities who don’t want to fade away or return to obscurity instead can just keep plugging along at substinence level (both monetarily and in ego gratification) almost indefinitely, and plastic surgery can ensure that they continue to look young or plastic until they die. But that’s a lot of thesis to defend based on 102 brief celebrity profiles from fifty(!) years ago and my own curmudgeonly nature.

So I’ll spare you the postulates.

At any rate, I hope I can remember some of the trivia that I’ve learned in this book (Morton Downey, Sr., was a singer and radio personality; the only man to win two Oscars for the same role was Harold Russell for his role in The Best Years of Our Lives). At the very least, I’ll get a couple blog posts out of it.

Apparently, this book is part of a series that ran for over a decade and ten or more volumes in those days before the Internet. If I come across them in the wild, I’ll surely pick them up, although I wouldn’t be eager to read a whole bunch of them in a row.

This book has all the hallmarks of a tourist pickup book: It’s thin but it’s large, which makes it a good size for pictures, and it has a narrow scope.

This particular book tells the story of man born in the 1870s in Kentucky who goes west when he comes of age, does a little prospecting in Death Valley, but really makes a name and a spectacle of himself when he gets people with a little money back east to give him cash for partnership in a mine that doesn’t exist. He then goes back to California and spends the money profligately, claiming he’s spending his wealth from the gold mine. He gets someone to stake him the money to rent a train from California to Chicago to set the time record for it, claiming that he has rented the train on a whim, and when the train does set the record, he lives off of the celebrity for a while before returning to California.

The book, and the tourist site it promotes, comes from a wealthy Chicago man who starts out as one of Scotty’s marks but comes to realize what Scotty is. The wealthy man continues to fund Scotty for his own amusement and travels to Death Valley to hike and ride with the colorful Death Valley Scotty. The wealthy patron starts to build a place to store his equipment when he travels back to Chicago, and starts to build a home for Scotty, but it morphs into a large undertaking not unlike Hearst Castle. Although The Castle or Scotty’s Castle (which Scotty, of course, told everyone he was building, while the patron played the part of his Chicago banker) was not completed before the Depression stripped the patron of his fun-in-Death-Valley money evaporated, it did grow into a tourist attraction.

An interesting story about a colorful, small-time con man who got into headlines. Too little to be found on a trivia night, but a nice quick read nevertheless.

I don’t really consider myself a martial artist, even though I have studied at a Satori martial arts school for five years and have considered trying out another martial art style “for fun.” I mean, some of the people who study with me are at the school three or four days a week, take teaching positions, and are really into it. I just show up from time to time and punch things.

The Satori school is based on tae kwon do (with additional focus on boxing and some elements from other martial arts styles like muy thai and hapkido), so I bought this book last month as part of my program of helping to reduce the difficulty of ABC Books’ annual inventory. As part of my “Man, The Count of Monte Cristo Is Long And Boring” program, I picked this book up pretty quickly as I expected it would be a pretty quick browse.

It was.

The book focuses on competitive tae kwon do sparring according to World Taekwondo Foundation rules, which I expect the Olympics uses as the book is written by an Olympian and has “Olympic” right in the subtitle. The book shows the strikes in tae kwon do, which is kick-focused, but it only identifies the strikes and does not give step-by-step directions that other guidebooks like the ones I checked out when I was a small, picked-upon kid in the 1980s, do.

It outlines a training program for the competitive sparrer, including basically bulleted lists of techniques and combinations to pracice, stretches and exercises to work on, and that sort of thing. The book talks a bit about strategy in sparring and includes the official procedures and rules for WTF (World Taekwondo Foundation, remember) tournaments, particularly international competitions.

It gave me a couple of ideas for combinations to try and the urge to work harder at home on my exercise, stretching, and practice. So it was certainly worth my time. And it makes it harder to deny some bit of being a martial artist in me if I insist upon reading books on martial arts (I’m not sure if Hagakure counts).

I just bought Greenlaw’s Seaworthy earlier this month, so I decided to pick up this, her first book, to get on with reading the complete canon.

I read her second book, The Lobster Chronicles, in 2009. I thought that book was a little disjointed, but that must have been something of a sophomore slump. The Hungry Ocean hangs pretty tightly together.

The book describes the events of a single swordfishing expedition, an approximately one month voyage from Gloucester, Massachussetts, to the fishing grounds east of Canada where the fishermen ply their trade. The book starts out with the captain, Greenlaw, taking on supplies and making lists, fretting about the return of her crew from their two days of shore leave, and then starting out, steaming, to the fishing area. There’s no great disaster to overcome (a la The Perfect Storm, the book and later film which have Greenlaw in them on the periphery). It’s just a normal fishing trip, but it goes into elaborate detail about the technology and techniques of commercial swordfishing as well as the captain’s considerations throughout the voyage.

It’s akin to Moby Dick in its technical descriptions, but is overall more readable. It’s got more detail than an Educators Classics edition of Captains Courageous. And it falls almost into the journals of George Plimpton, Dave Anderson, or Jerry Kramer in distilling the essence of a long, repeating sport or profession into a single block of that profession. Although Greenlaw is not a sport fisherman; she makes a living at it.

I’ve sometimes thought whether I could have done the work, ever since I was a young man regaled with the stories of that one friend of a friend who worked as a fisherman for a couple months a year and made enough for a whole year in a couple of trips (I actually did have a friend of my beautiful wife who did that for a couple of years before returning home for good). I don’t know. I’d like to think so, but the days were long, the conditions often poor, the work repetitive, and the reward uncertain and often underwhelming.

On the other hand, it makes for better stories than being a ronin software documentation and testing professional.

So I’m looking forward to the other two nonfiction books from Greenlaw and might someday delve into her recent mystery series as well, although I get the sense that I’ll have to order those books new. Or perhaps look over the fiction selection at the library book sales more closely.

I bought this book at ABC Books earlier this month; the author was in the store with a book signing, so I stopped by and picked up a copy of his book. ABC Books has signings on a lot of Saturday afternoons, but I haven’t had much luck slipping up there when an author was actually in house until then.

In this case, the book is more of a chapbook (for $6.50) that contains a single short story. It’s a a spooky sort of story, kind of a speculative bit of fiction dealing with life after death. Something handled better by The Twilight Zone.

Back when I was a publishing mogul, I would have run a story like this–as a matter of fact, I did, but I was desparate for prose. This story kind of falls into that category. It’s okay, but proably not worth $6.50 unless you particularly want to support local book stores and local authors. Which I do.

I must have bought Baldilocks‘ book when it was fresh and new, as it’s autographed and everything, but it’s been floating around my to-read shelves for a while. But, in my defense, such as it is, I have not actually had to move the book unread.

It’s a literary novel set in the early 1990s at a university in New Mexico. A black young woman who has gained some notoriety for past behavior has decided not to leave school and to stick it out meets the white quarterback of the football team, and they like each other and start dating.

That’s the plot in a nutshell; the execution of the book is a slightly talky exploration of how this affects the protagonists, their families, their friendships, and their standing within their communities. It’s a pretty frank set of musings and interactions, and they do have a conservative/classical Liberal bent, so I agreed with the sentiments for the most part, so I didn’t mind them much but I would expect readers with a different, more modern perspective would not be convinced.

It was a quick, pleasant read and worth my time regardless.

I bought this book for a buck earlier this month, and I had the opportunity over the last couple of weeks to browse it over a couple of football games that I watched parts of because I’ve been disappointed in the Packers’ play this year.

As I alluded to in the Good Book Hunting post, this book is part project book and part catalogue.

As it’s published by the parent company of Writers’ Digest, which also has a number of other art and crafts magazines in its stable, this book has a number of art project discussions of how to make the painted objects, including the colors on the palette and brush stroke techniques to mirror the project originally painted by the artist. I learned how you build up from the background with basic colors and shapes and then add lines, shading, and highlighting to give the actual depth. This is a lot different from the flat way I did painting when I was in school and trying to get extra credit in my art classes, but I wasn’t doing it like Bob Ross told me to even then.

Then we get into some items in the Decorative Arts Collection, which is a 25-year-old (then) club/consortium of decorative painters that got together to promote and to collect historical art of the stripe. Well, not stripe: It’s painting flowers and walking men on various practical articles to tart them up a bit. A lot of painting on tin, a little less kitchy than pure folk/country art, but along those lines.

Prettier to look at than, say, Matisse but with a little less depth than real Art. But still, pleasant to look at, and certainly not something I could do.

I’ve been haunting the antique malls the last couple of weeks, looking for gifts for different people, and I’d seen something I thought I would pick up last Sunday at Ozark Treasures, a cat-themed game, and I thought it would be good for a friend, but we’ve already taken care of that particular friend this year, so I let it go. But I thought of another friend it would be perfect for, so I returned Friday to look for it. But I didn’t find it. Instead, I picked up this book, which is also cat-themed and would be a good gift for either of the aforementioned friends. But in a stunning turn of events, I decided to keep it because I also like cats.

The book is a picture book of classic through the middle 1980s stars with cats, and there’s a caption telling you who it is. Most cats appear only once, although Morris the Cat and Orangey, who appeared in several movies, appear more than once. We’ve got the cover woman Carole Lombard, we’ve got Marlon Brando, we’ve got Sigourney Weaver with the cat from Alien.

It’s an interesting book to browse mostly if you’re in the intersection of old movies and cats like I am, and, in retrospect, only one of the friends to whom I thought to give this book. So perhaps it’s for the best that I kept it after all.

Although I could, I know, give it away now that I have read it. But that would be most unlike me of all.

I might have read this in another form before (I have read plenty of Millay before, which probably lead to my fondness for clunky language and line).

The preface gives the book’s history:

This powerful and deeply moving dramatic poem is as contemporary today [1972] as it was in 1942 when Edna St. Vincent Millay was commissioned by the Writers’ War Board to write a poem immortalizing the village of Lidice, Czechoslovakia. This verse-narrative, arranged as Reader’s Theatre Script, very eloquently voices the protest and horror of all peoples of the world at the wanton destruction of the small village during World War II by the Nazis who claimed that the citizens of Lidice were harboring the assassin of Reinhard Heydrich, a Nazi henchman. Opening on the peacefulness of the village and daily activities of a peasant family, the action soon draws us into its suspense and mounting tension as Nazi soldiers enter Lidice, destroy every structure, kill every man, drive the women into “concentration camps,” and her the children into “educational institutions.” Written in a white heat of outrage and fury after news of the cold-blooded mass murder, Miss Millay’s poem has become one of the great literary classics opposing all war atrocities.

You can read more about the actual event on Wikipedia. Note that this is what actual Nazis did, and that the literal Nazis did not stop their reprisal with this one village. Contrast with political figures compared to Hitler in the modern world.

At any rate, this version of the poem is broken into different narrators so that different sections are told in different voices and sometimes the individuals mentioned in the poem can have a distinctive voice to present the sections of the narrative. I kind of ignored that because in reading, there’s little difference between Woman 1 and Woman 2 or Woman 1 and Man 2. The poem itself delves into the lives of a family in the village, two parents whose oldest daughter is getting to marrying age and is getting courted by two local lads when the Nazis arrive. It’s 32 pages of verse, so a pretty quick read, and it’s pretty well executed.

But it’s more interesting as a snapshot of a time in history where a group of writers came together to promote national unity in a war effort. A sepia-toned and faded snapshot when compared to the behavior of “poets” in the 21st century.

The copy I have is in a library binding from a local high school whose theatre program I support through my business. The book itself stems from 1972, and the checkout form in the back cover shows 11 checkouts in the 1990s. People who went to school with my wife checked this book out. Whoa.

This book isn’t a complete waste of time, which was the wish I expressed in the report for Twisted Path. Mack Bolan doesn’t smoke a cigarette, for example.

The plot: Someone is killing off the Saudi royal family, and it looks like the Iranians and the Russians are working together to install a puppet monarch on the Saudi throne. Bolan goes to Saudi Arabia to uncover the plot, and it leads him and Grimaldi into an assault on a compound at Mecca.

It’s an odd duck of a book; I was first pretty satisfied with it, but then the set pieces in the plot were kind of clumsy. I don’t know how much to ascribe to the writer or to the people who prepared the plots. But the set pieces don’t really seem like they’d be a good idea to advance to the next, and then Bolan charges in with guns blazing. So the writing was okay, but the set pieces were faulty.

Although the book contained a couple of mistakes:

The men were Arabs, probably with the ayatollahs–Iranians in Western dress carrying compact Russian automatic weapons.

Iranians are not Arabic. As I was reading, I wondered if I could tell Arabs from Persians and Semites based on appearance. Maybe, maybe not. But in plain text and history, I can.

Also, at the very end, they crash land a plane that has run out of fuel, and it explodes. Which is one of the nice things about an airplane running out of fuel: The explosions are much lesser.

Still, not a bad entry, but it might be until next year until I get to another, especially as I realize I have not read a Christmas novel yet, and I will have to do so on an emergency basis.

Wow, how time flies. It’s been September since I read Little House in the Big Woods and Little House on the Prairie. I don’t know where that time has gone, but I guess I have read or finished 27(!) books since then. Which is weird because I don’t vividly remember a bunch of them. I mean, I see the titles and remember what the books were about, but I don’t remember them as having read them this year in particular. Some years, I remember a couple of books easily that I read, and I have to look again at the tally to remember the books. The Little House series are going to be the ones I remember easily from 2018. And probably 2019.

At any rate, this book deals with Almanzo Wilder as a nine-year-old boy and his experiences on his father’s farm in New York State. The Wilders are not vagabonds like the Ingalls family; they have a well-established farm with lots of livestock and acres under plow, and Mr. Wilder is a known and important man in his community. The book follows the pattern of the other books, starting in winter and following the seasons through planting, growing, and harvest. The book details how the farmers worked in those days and offers important life lessons in money management and growth. And it’s from a boy’s perspective; although the point-of-view in the books focused on Laura and her sisters doesn’t dwell too much on their being girls and this one does not completely toxically masculine, but there is a difference–and Almanzo has brothers and sisters, so the family dynamic is different.

So a fun book, a quick read, and it might very well be the first book that my boys and I have all read (not counting books that I read to them). They each read it in fifth grade leading up to a visit to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s home which is nearby (and, I have learned, I know people with firsthand knowledge of Mrs. Wilder and her life there). Hopefully, the boys and I will eventually read other books in common. Of course, now that I think of it, we might have all read a collection of cartoons or a joke book, since they raid my shelves for that sort of material from time to time. But that’s neither here nor there.

Now I need to find the rest of my collection so I can once again determine the gaps and fill them in so I can complete the series.

I bought this book at Library Con this year. As I mentioned, it’s the author’s account of being a single father for his eight-year-old daughter, chock full of incidents and considerations from dating to juggling work and childcare needs. I related to a lot of incidents in the book, and I related to the humble origin story.

The book kind of falters towards the end, where it moves from parenting topics to more general thoughts, but all in all, not a bad effort.

I’ve got the first in his fantasy series around here somewhere. I’ll have to see how he does at fiction.

I don’t know where I got this book; it has the markings of a Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale, but I don’t see it in the photos from this year. It also has a Barnes and Noble Autographed Copy sticker on the front, so it’s possible I paid full price for it at Barnes and Noble and didn’t take a photo of it. Weird. What is this blog for if not to remind me where I get all these books?

The plot: A showboat similar to the Branson Belle runs aground on Table Rock Lake, and as the local authorities are ferrying the survivors to shore, they discover a murder victim on board. The newly appointed sheriff has to deal with Branson business interests and a blizzard in his investigation.

It’s a standard midlist sort of book, something akin to the Jesse Stone novels from Robert B. Parker.

Except.

Boy, howdy, the author, who resides in California, gets a lot of details wrong. It starts when a deputy says that they’re getting some assistance for the boat rescue from the next county. It doesn’t identify which county, which made me wonder about how many details were going to be wrong. Well, not only does it mention that Table Rock Lake is close to freezing–heaven forbid, the lakes down here do not freeze, especially one of the big dam-created lakes like Table Rock. Then, it’s revealed that the sheriff is from Branson County. But Branson is in Taney County. The kids go to Branson Valley high school, which does not exist–in Branson, the kids go to Branson High School. The book refers to 76 as Seventy-six (this is a copy error, not a factual error). There’s a Latino woman saying there’s no Latino community and that people look at her strangely, but, come on, this is not true. When watching the airports for a fleeing suspect, the sheriff talks about the small airport south of town, the Branson airport, and then talks about friends watching the Kansas City and St. Louis airports, but nobody accounts for the Springfield National Airport here in Springfield. The sheriff waits at a convenience store on the corner of Glenstone and Battlefield across from the mall here in Springfield–and there’s no such convenience store. The Springfield Channel 12 reporter–there’s no such station. Oh, and the cold and snow–it’s not typical down here, so people are not that well-equipped for it and it doesn’t tend to last long.

The book has enough errata of this nature to draw one familiar with the area out of the book and perhaps even doubt if the person whodunit really done it.

Which is not to say that she gets all the details wrong–she mentions the twisty drive to Forsyth, and that’s true, especially if you roll through Rockaway Beach, and she talks captures the drive north out of town on 248 pretty well.

Which makes me wonder about how she got some things right, but so many things so wrong.

Apparently, this is the first of a series, so I’m a bit interested if later books correct some of the errors or whether they just let them slide. If I come across others inexpensively, I’ll pick one up to see. I thought about offering to read the manuscripts to flag things that don’t ring true, but I’m not sure I have the time for it.

I bought this book in February along with three other books at ABC Books, and I predicted I would read it first since I read The Tao of Pooh in 2016 and The Tao of Elvis in November of 2017. However, of the four books I bought that day in February, I have already read two others (The Virtue of Happiness and The Beauty of Gesture); the other, a history of the Celts, joins another history of the Celts that I bought in 1993 floating around in my backlog.

Well, that’s a lot of bookkeeping. What about this book?

I hoped, as I mentioned, that it would be an insightful comparison of the parables of Christ and the teachings of Lao Tzu, identifying similar thematic elements in each as well as a contrast where appropriate. With a focus on how the Bible is better, of course, along with some little hope that people interested in the Tao might find their way to Christianity through this book (as opposed to Buddhism through Christian Eyes which warns Christians about the sweet seductive lure of heathen philosophy).

Oh, but no.

It’s more of a daily meditation structure. Each of the 48 lessons presents a teaching of the Tao, a parable or Gospel teaching, and then Keim’s own meditation, some of which seem to have nothing to do with the preceding. Many of them rely on an, erm, contemporary translation of the Tao Te Ching, such as:

When a country is in harmony with the Tao,
the factories make trucks and tractors.
When a country goes counter to the Tao,
warheads are stockpiled outside the cities.

There is no greater illusion than fear,
no greater wrong than preparing to defend yourself,
no greater misfortune than having an enemy.

Whoever can see through all fear
will always be safe.

Strangely enough, the original does not mention factories, tractors, or warheads. So I started comparing the translations of the Tao in this book with another translation that I have, and it has quite a bit of variation in it. I didn’t compare the translations of the parables, though, but the stories themselves were familiar and not updated to modern contrivances.

But Keim is not traditional in the Christian sense as he often refers to God as She; I thought perhaps it was only a translation thing as he refered to the Tao Te Ching Master as either he or she, but, no, he was probably equitably translating the same there as well.

So I was going to say that the best thing about this book was that it got me to reading the Tao Te Ching again and the parables, but now I’m even not sure I read them in honest translations.

So I’m going to have to say the best thing about reading this book is that I’m done.

I bought this book a couple of weeks ago and delved right into it. I hoped it would be a football browser, albeit something I could browse during night games to hopefully not expose the nude model photographed on the back to my children. But it turns out this book has a lot of text that includes not only biographical information about Matisse and a broad discussion of his artwork as it relates to trends in the art world and whatnot but also lush descriptions of the images that explain why the images are awesome.

Text like this:

In 1944 the Argentinian diplomat Enchorrena, who was resident in Paris, commissioned a door to connect his bedroom and bathroom. Initially Matisse opted to present an idyllic theme: a nymph sleeping, observed by a faun. But both subject and composition left the artist dissatisfied, and his work was a trial to him and stagnated. The diplomat persisted, and Matisse tried again. He chose a new subject, and this time succeeded. The mythological ‘Leda and the Swan’ (p. 82) has been stripped of all narrative content. Jupiter, who according to the myth came to Leda in the form of a swan, can be seen in the upper part of the picture, his arabesquely curved neck and head bending across a black space to Leda, who turns away. The monumental female nude has been fashioned sparingly and vastly. The empathetic, streamlined figure has something heroic, and restores the dignity to the myth. To right and left, red panels with a leaf design provied the triptych’s frame and give Matisse’s interpretation a revelatory flavor.

Which describes this:

The text contains a lot of art criticky words about the colors (the subtitle of this book is “Master of Colour”), flattening of the foreground, the additional complexity of the patterns when a table is turned in perspective in an otherwise flattened picture, and the wonderfulness of simple geographic patterns (sometimes repeated!).

But, come on. This stuff is insipid and stupid.

I have mentioned that that I don’t grok primitive art, and I really, really don’t care for the early 20th century’s descent into simplistic, unrefined brushstrokes as art. I mean, looking at a lot of this, I conclude that individual choices in the strokes, lines, and coloring doesn’t really matter. If that crescent had been an inch to the right, what difference would it make? My beautiful wife said she could probably not do better, but I don’t think she could do worse, and she and I are not fine artists with devotees and collectors and some influence (for some reason).

I’m starting to wonder if my beloved Impressionists, even the good ones (Renoir, Manet, Cassatt, and I suppose Monet) irretrievably broke art when they diminished the reliance on clean lines. The bad ones (Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, and so one) might have led to Cubism and whatever ism Matisse is. In celebration of the hundredth anniversary of World War I, a lot of commentators told us that the war broke Western civilization. Looking at Matisse, I expect the cracks were already there.

So don’t expect to see Matisse prints at Nogglestead nor any other monographs of his work reported on in these pages. A Good Book Hunting post from 2015 indicates that I have another Matisse title around here somewhere, it might be akin to What Makes A Picasso A Picasso?–that is, a children’s book. So that might be the exception–I’ll certainly not buy another Matisse monograph.

Oh, and since this the Internet, I know you’re all jonesing for the back cover. I’ve put it below the fold.

Continue reading “Book Report: Matisse by Volkmar Essers (1989, 2002)” →

This book is a collection of 14 poems about living on a farm and then losing the farm. It comes out of the 1980s Farm Aid era of family farms lost to corporate interests, a genre that somehow was a big thing in the middle 1980s (a response to President Reagan, perhaps?) but has dwindled (although, apparently, Farm Aid is still going, so perhaps it’s just my awareness of it that has dwindled).

Apparently, the purchase of this book in 1984 included a raffle ticket to win the Hirst farm. The author and her husband, faced with debt and foreclosure, tried to sell 50,000 copies of the book to pay off their debts, but ultimately they cancelled the raffle. 50,000 is a pretty lofty target for a chapbook. Take it from a poet who thinks 100 copies is a stretch goal.

At any rate, the poems are lyrics, generally over 12 or 16 lines long and end rhymed. Opposite pages have photos of the family farm and the livestock, so it’s a quick enough book to read. Nothing that sticks out, really. A little more meat than Under the Sunday Tree but that’s mostly because the lyrics are lyrics and longer.

More interesting for the story behind it, though.

When I found this book at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale this spring, it must have been misclassified as Literature (that’s what the first page says) or maybe Art, but it’s actually a children’s book of art and poetry. I think it’s based on the art of the Bahaman artist Mr. Amos Ferguson with some verse by Eloise Greenfield added.

The verse is light and simple, which is not a bad thing in itself, but its depth is aimed at children, so it lacks real poetry meat to it. As does most of the poems I read in cheap chapbooks anyway.

The art, though, is primitive/folk art, and I really don’t know how to appreciate it. I mean, the paintings kind of look like the stuff I painted on the recovered white-coated cardboard tops of doughnut boxes that I used as my canvases when I lived in the trailer park and watched my first episodes of The Joy of Painting. I mean, I can look at Renaissance paintings and judge, knowing that it’s my opinion alone, good and bad, what moves me and what does not. I can do that with Impressionism. I can do that with a lot of European figurative painting. But with primitive and folk art styles, I really lack an aesthetic vocabulary to say whether one thing is good or better than another. So all I can say here is that it ain’t my bag, baby.

Which is weird, because most of the “art” I do in woodburning or etching is pretty primitive and folk-artish. Which explains why I have no idea whether I am any good at it or not. Which probably means “No.”

With a title like Ozark Mountain Humor and a subtitle of Jokes on Hunting, Religion, Marriage & Ozark Ways, you might think that this is a humor or joke book. As I did. But, ah, my foes, and, ah, my friends, it is an academic study of jokes as folklore.

Which means that half of the book is end notes describing where the joke was “collected” (via field work, where intense academic types transcribed jokes). Each joke is numbered for easy reference, and each joke is called a “text” when described in the end notes. Motifs, numbered academically according to one or more humor motif codexes, are cross-referenced, and some of the jokes are delineated from humor manuscripts in 15th century Renaissance Italy or old English joke books printed immediately after the Gutenberg Bible.

And one or two of the jokes are funny.

But reading an academic book about jokes that includes jokes adds a bit of remove from the actual jokes, so perhaps I was less prepared to laugh. Also, I don’t tend to laugh at many jokes in these books, and I’m infrequently actually amused.

Here are the notes that I flagged in the book as I was reading:

• One joke deals with a young girl saying her prayers prior to moving to St. Louis, and she says at the end of her prayer, “This is goodbye, God. We’re moving to St. Louis.” (Text 117.) Even though I was a longtime resident of the St. Louis area, it was a bit reluctantly, so I can empathize.
• One joke (Text 126) deals with a barber whose shop is visited by a notorious outlaw; this reminded me of a shorter version of “Lather and Nothing Else” albeit with a punchline instead of a moral lesson.
• Texts 202b and 204a/204b look to be the source material for the Ray Stevens song “Sitting Up with the Dead”:

I didn’t flag the footnote that jokes about black people were removed at the publisher’s request. The jokes about nuns enjoying being raped, however, remained in the book. In 1989, our official sensibilities were only starting to be refined. Although one of the nuns being raped jokes relied on the inclusion of a black nun who speaks with a hyperbolic accent and who already knows a thing or two about sex. One wonders if this text was excised in later editions of the book.

Also, the author refers numerous times to Asimov’s Treasury of Humor (which I don’t think I own, but I will be on the lookout for), but never refers to Lecherous Limericks. Limericks are not part of the native Ozarks oral tradition, apparently.

At any rate: I read it, and it counts as my 75th book of the year. I even read the End Notes, or skimmed them, anyway, as some of them detailed the local people who told the joke, including many people who were born in the 19th century and saw the early 20th century changes to their corner of America.

The title of this book might fit onto one of the men’s adventure paperbacks I favor or perhaps one of the series Westerns I infrequently indulge in, but instead it is a collection of reminisciences published in the 1940s or 1950s from a man born in 1875 and a graduate of the Washington University School of Dentistry in 1904. So maybe the book is from the 1960s or 1970s, but most of the stories within it come from the late part of the ninteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries.

The book doesn’t move in chronological order, so we get stories of his growing up on a farm following stories of him working for the streetcar line while going to dentistry school. In addition to the memoirs, we get some natural science musings as he talks about different animals he’s seen and killed as well as health musings, including a chapter on constipation that leads to some, erm, novel remedies (and, after bladder trouble, he mentions that he doesn’t drink much water, so 100 years later, we can probably give him a better solution than the ones he recommends).

It’s a bit like listening to an older relative tell stories. I enjoyed it because I like these sorts of books, as you know, where real people put together their recollections and diaries and describe their world more plainly and accurately than historians or historical filmmakers can. What’s most striking about his life is not so much the hunting and fishing stories, but the times he talks about casual brawling with his associates and friends. They’d just start fighting for fun, and Dr. Traw had a long memory for men who whopped him, and he’d just sometimes get them back by starting to throw punches. As an adult. Maybe radio killed this pastime for rural America for the most part.

One thing I’d like to note is that this book ostensibly takes place 40 years or so before E.M. Bray’s Growing Up In The Bend, but how remarkably similar the lives were in the use of farm machinery, wagons, and rural life. It really illustrates how disruptive and changing the 20th century was. So far into the 21st century, we’re nowhere near that on technology. On politics and the future of the country, maybe more so, because that doesn’t require math.

I read the original (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) earlier this year, and I told someone (probably the precocious kid at my martial arts school who likes to read philosophical works, or perhaps my beautiful wife) that I wanted to read that volume so I could read this sequel to it, as this volume was on the outer rank of my to-read books in the hall and was hence present any time that I went looking for a new book to read and did not have something I’d bought that week that I wanted to jump right into. As you can tell, gentle reader, my Web host offered me a good deal on italics this week, so watch this space for their overuse.

It’s not a sequel, of course; it’s one of the books that play upon the title of the Pirsig work and call themselves Zen and the Art of something.

In this case, it’s knitting. The author does play up some of the mindfulness and “in the zone” elements you can get into when you’re sort of focusing on your knitting, but when the habits of the hands leave the mind free to wander or not.

However, this is not a particularly compelling book.

It really doesn’t have much to say aside from the description above; each chapter doesn’t really build upon a theme. Instead, it’s a series of interviews that the author has with creative professionals, educators, or her aunt the nun about what knitting means to each. Which is generally that they can express themselves and become mindful when knitting.

So I had to gut my way through the book, and in the end, it made me want to take up knitting less than Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance made me want to tackle small engine repair.