Musings from Brian J. Noggle

I got this book last May at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale, and it was shelved close to Up Close!, so when looking for something to read in between epistles in Pope’s “An Essay on Man”, I pulled it as well. As I have only read 35 books so far this year, I have to pump my numbers up.

This is a little gift book, not very long, which is bound at the top. Each page contains a truism or quip, advice that I suppose your mother might have given you. And by “each page,” I mean one per sheet of paper–the “top” page of the book/back of the “bottom” pages, are blank. The individual quips are things like “Tact is the ability to close your mouth before someone else wants to.” and “You can give without loving… but you can never love without giving.” In cursive, as though someone just wrote them down on a notepad.

So, yeah, it took me a couple of minutes to read it. But I am counting it as a book. Because I make the rules around here.

After thinking about Gary Coleman, I thought about this book. Which I had knocked akimbo on the to-read shelves whilst dusting on Monday, so its location was fresh in my mind.

As you might recall, gentle reader, I have picked up these elementary school book fair celebrity bio books before (see also TV Superstars ’81, TV Superstars ’82, TV Superstars ’83, TV Now: Stars and Shows, and any number of similar books about sports figures). The difference, though, it that the aforementioned book covers a period 40 years ago when I watched network television and new who the people in the books (like Gary Coleman) were.

This book, though, is from 13 years ago. So these child stars–and they’re all child stars–I guess some of them are in their 20s, but, c’mon, man, to someone who was down with the celebrities 40 years ago, anything under 35 looks like a child, ainna?–come from an era where I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to television. Especially Nickelodeon, where many of these stars matriculated. Some, of course, I’m familiar with because they’re still around. But some not.

The book includes brief bits with lots of exlamation points! about:

• Big Time Rush, a boy band from a Nickelodeon show
• Victoria Justice
• Rachel Chow
• Andrew Garfield
• Jennifer Lawrence
• Josh Hutchinson
• Chloë Moretz
• Lily Collins
• Cody Simpson
• Bella Thorne
• Zendaya Coleman
• Justin Bieber
• Selena Gomez
• Taylor Swift
• One Direction
• Willow and Jaden Smith

So, yeah. About half are still relevant? I’m not sure I’ve seen a film with any of them except the Spider-Man film which had Zendaya and Andrew Garfield in it. The one thing I’ll take from this book is Zendaya’s last name since she’s dropped it. And the book describes Taylor Swift as the Queen of Country, although in 2013 should would still have been princess-aged, and the last line, punctuated with an exclamation point! says she’ll be the Queen of Country forever. I am from the future, and I have some startling news for you.

At any rate, I’d say it’s good fodder for trivia nights, except:

1. At thirteen years old, this book is likely outside the range of the questions at trivia nights we’ve been to in recent years: Questions written by college kids who were too young to pay attention 14 years ago when this book was compiled or questions about very contemporary things. Also, when it comes to pop culture, Disney categories rule more than Nickelodeon television shows do.
2. I’m likely to forget everything except Zendaya’s last name after I schedule this blog post. It helps that she has the same last name as Gary Coleman, to be sure.

Still, the passage of time, neh? I am not sure where I got this particular volume, but I’m likely to dabble in others like it in the future.

Wow, it’s been eight years since I bought this book at the Friends of the Christian County Library book sale back when they only had it twice a year in Ozark. One would think I would have jumped on this book sooner. But one would also have thought I’d also jump on Chuck Norris’s autobiography, too, but yet it languishes here, somewhere, amid the stacks.

I’ve got to say: I’ve read my Shunryu Suzuki (Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind in 2017), and I have read my Joko Beck (Everyday Zen in 2020), and I have read other non-Zen Buddhists including Thich Naht Hanh (various), but this book is maybe the best book on mindfulness I’ve read. Not true Zen, but mindfulness.

The book is not a true biography, but it has enough biographical elements and anecdotes to be interesting. But its focus is on what we now call mindfulness which Norris was introduced to in his various dealings with the inscrutible Orientals in Korea where he learned tae kwon do and later in California where he had a chain of martial arts schools before he got into acting. He talks about emptying the mind, focus, breathing, et cetera, and, again, it’s leavened with the anecdotes and name drops. He mentions Bruce Lee, of course, and even includes a story/koan/sutra of the empty cup that was in Shannon Lee’s Be Water, My Friend. He mentions that Steve McQueen recommended he try acting when he was at a crossroads (being open to those pivotal points is a lesson taking a chapter).

So it’s a little like Joe Hyams’ Zen in the Martial Arts, but, to be honest, better. Because it’s Carlos Ray Norris, man. And I say this even though I’m only slightly afraid that if I posted a bad word about him that he would spin kick me from beyond.

And I’m kinda encouraged to find his autobiography. More inclined to do so than to watch The Jimmy Stewart Show based on reading the latter’s book of poetry.

Having run out of Readers Digest magazines on my recent Florida vacation, I delved into this book, which I bought in Daytona Beach during the trip. It took me less time to read it than a Readers Digest because it’s 31 pages long.

It features four (4) poems total plus an introduction telling about how he started writing poetry on a bit of a lark and an introductory couple of paragraphs about how he came to write each poem. We have a poem about a step in a hotel in Junín, Argentina, that trips guests; a poem about how cold it is in the Aberdares mountain range in Kenya; a poem from the point of view of a movie camera nipped by a hyena also in Kenya; and an eulogy for a not particularly well behaved dog.

It’s not high art; it’s a bit of doggerel, although it has decent rhythm and rhyme to it. But what’s most telling, and a bit sad, about it is that it reminds us that people, normal people and celebrity, tried their hands at poetry in the middle of the twentieth century before the practice was completely turned over to the priests of academia, and that people, normal people and celebrity, would read it. Would read at all might be the case, although a woman next to me on one of the flights had a book when the most of the rest of the people were left to their own devices. Also, it’s kind of bittersweet to find a hardback priced under ten dollars.

At any rate, it reminds me that I have a DVD version of The Jimmy Stewart Show around here somewhere. Maybe I’ll give it a watch sometime soon. But I often say that here on the blog, and then I do not.

I just got this book in January when spending a gift card at Hooked on Books. So I came across it while taking a break from “An Essay on Man” by Alexander Pope (itself a break from That Hideous Strength, which is a break in the complete works of Shakespeare…).

So: This comes from the middle part of Leary’s career, although I guess he’s continued to work since 2008. But it’s in the middle of Rescue Me which was his dramatic fireman series which ended in 2011, fifteen years ago. He’s been busy with other television shows, films, and voice-over work, but because I associate him mostly with the MTV ads in the 1980s, No Cure for Cancer which I listened to over and over in the middle 1990s driving to Milwaukee and back, and his roles in 1990s films like National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon I, The Ref, and Demolition Man, I think of anything past the turn of the century as part of his later work even though most of his career has happened after that arbitrary point.

So, what do we have? Well, Denis Leary schtick. He rants about the importance of hard work, families, and gores some sacred cows about our softening society (eventually having to walk back some bit about autism). Being it is 2008, he takes some shots at George W. Bush and lauds Obama; I wonder whether he feels any differently eighteen years on–and whether he could or would admit it if he does.

So I flagged a couple of bits:

• On page 25, he mentions Donald Trump making a vodka when he doesn’t drink.
• On page 90, he mentions Paris Hilton who was a thing back then before the onslaught of the Kardashians. I just watched Paris Hilton in National Lampoon’s Pledge This!.
• Here’s a long and slightly vulgar bit:
  

  I could update that bit [a bit from Lock’n’Load about coffee-flavored coffee] this very second with my thesis on how Starbucks may be responsible for the pussification of America–I reresearch the subject once or twice a week when I stand in line there and listen as some limp-wristed, yellow-Lance-Armstrong-bracelet-wearing, metrosexual-har-goo-sporting, Hillary-Clinton’s-tired-old-ass-worshipping puke spends twelve minutes trying to decide between the Orange Cranberry Vagina muffin or the Pumpkin Cream Tampon Cake while fingering a Save the Rainforest Compilation CD featuring Sting, Sheryl Crow, Joni Mitchell, Sting’s Abs, That Hot 19-Year-Old Blonde White English Chick Who Sounds Like Janis Joplin, and Sting’s Penis–who apparently pops out of his master’s yoga pants to sing his new single “How I Have Tantric Sex With Trude Styler For Seven Straight Hours.”

  He means Joss Stone. I was there in 2008. It was so long ago, but not that long ago.

• Donald Trump again on page 191. I mean, for late boomers coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s, he was quite a touchstone. Especially after his television show.
• Talking about memory in male/female relationships, he says “Unless we’re talking about sports or The Godfather Part One and Two or the Vanessa Williams issue of Playboy magazine.” ACKSHUALLY, the photos that toppled her reign as Miss America appeared in Penthouse. My brother had a copy back in the day.
• He says: “Here’s hoping that–two decades from now when perhaps another twenty-million Mexicans have settled in here and begun to legally prosper, vote, work, and play–racists will have at least five or six more slurs to shout at them during an altercation.” Well, here we are twenty years later (almost), and whole swaths of other populations have arrived on these shores, and Americans of all stripes have indeed updated their dictionary of derogatory ethnic terms. And, yet, somehow anti-semitism is the sentiment of the day.

So: It’s slightly a product of its time, with the political jabs at Bush and whatnot, but it’s also notable for how some of the things he identifies are still relatively timely–and that’s not just the parts about where he talks about the importance of family. The seeds for current sociopolitical concerns were already germinating in 2008. And were fertilized by the administration Leary welcomed.